As the Hills erupt with chants of the Sixth Schedule mantra and the valley ceases work in its
craving for the Sixth Pay Commission’s benevolence, the Sixth May police firing at Mao gate which resulted in the loss of two precious lives seem to complete the portentous number 666. Followers of omens and presages would have prognosticated that the state has come under some kind of a curse, which they would have probably named as the sixth curse.

Rife with strife and strike, the socio-political situation in the state, for weeks on end now, has been crippling the lives of the ordinary citizenry whose primary concern is to ensure adequate food on the family dining table for twice a day. Schools, barely limping back to normalcy after the prolonged disruption last year with the call for their closure by one of the innumerable JACs in the state are again facing disruption of academic schedules, this time due to the economic blockade and consequent shortage of fuel disabling students and teachers alike to reach their schools.

Amidst the unceasing protests denouncing the ADC elections under the non-empowering MHAADC Act’s third amendment, the rising clamor to implement the 6th schedule in the tribal hill districts and the sulking demand for payment of salaries as per the 6th Central Pay Commission’s recommendations, the government is unflinchingly declaring its resolve to go all the way with the elections and threatening to sack employees who fail to turn up for work. As the state Cabinet appears to float on thin air with their work force having deserted the work place and the government is madly grappling to find their lost foothold over the uncanny resolve to barricade a rebel leader off at the border habitat of Mao Gate, governance in the state has gone to the dogs and the near future doesn’t seem to hold much promise for the common man.

As poets and humanists would like to put it, it is perhaps necessary to rise above the madding crowd
and notice the ignobility of strife. But equally important is to identify the cleavages and fault lines in the
polity that generate so much fume and dust each time the social plate gets rocked, and to try and find workable means to smoothen the grind. One gets a chance to literally take a bird’s eye view of the state as one descends for the Tulihar Airport from any one of the assorted flights into the state capital Imphal. From that height, the once green but fast balding mountains surrounding a hazy plain predominated by paddy-fields is clearly perceptible.

Nature itself wouldn’t have drawn any demarcating lines between peoples, but the topographical distinction between the Hills and the Plains is abundantly conspicuous, almost suggestive of an inherent dissociation between the peoples inhabiting the two topographical zones. Perhaps nature provides us a cue of letting the hills and its people be, and so also the plains and its people?

Now, it does no longer require a social scientist to figure out that Manipur is a multi-ethnic state, with a
mixed population comprising the meitei, Kuki and Naga ethnic groups. Neither does it take an anthropologist to state that the Meitei people inhabit the plains and the Kuki and Naga tribes, the hills. From these two premises, it should not take much political logic to conclude that the hill peoples should be allowed to govern their own affairs as the plains people do in the valley. But strife invariably gets generated once this logic is brushed aside.

Mutual co-existence is a delicate construct that needs to be nurtured by mutual respect and sensitive non-encroachment into other’s physical and political space. It also presumes a mutually beneficial   relationship. The very foundation of nature and the creations within the ecosystem is premised on such a relationship. It is when men try to act smart and begin to interfere with this balance that the differences begin to drift from a mutual-benefit relationship to one of mutual agony.

Genocide to forcibly appropriate the cleansed land for one’s own community, denial to let other communities exercise autonomy over their land and people by sheer strength of “democratic” nays and depriving the less privileged neighbors by taking advantage of their disadvantages are some of the “smart” human interventions into the equilibrium set by nature’s blind folded lady. Until the smart actors realize nature’s designs and learn to refashion their politics of coveting and bullying into one of mutual respect and mutual benefit, the heat and grind we see today may just be a sneak preview of a horrid tale of mutual destruction.