Source: IMPHAL FREE PRESS
Posted: 2009-11-24

The news and picture of a farmer savagely killed by armed militants yesterday should have awoken everybody to the sterility of soul Manipur is increasingly condemned to after exposure to violence and lawlessness for so many decades together. As if the beastly murder was not enough, the assailants returned to set fire to the ripe paddy fields which the farmer must have laboriously nurtured through the seasons, braving not just the physical hardships of endless toil on the fields but also unusually severe vagaries of monsoon this year. It is unthinkable all the ghastly cruelty were on account of a ransom demand not obliged. The killing was beastly, but it was the burning of the paddy which indicated an extremely disturbing cynicism which can only be the hallmark of a completely barren and infertile ethical landscape. The violence perpetrated seems to be not for any tangible motive than the sheer addiction to violence. Can the spiritual sterility of any place be any worse? It is time for all who have allowed this to happen to reflect, and accept moral responsibility. We are not so much talking about the government when we talk of moral responsibility in this case, but more of the state’s challengers who too are putative governments.
The established insurgent organisations are morally responsible for this incremental moral decadence on account of many considerations, some subjective and others objective. Without going into all the tedious arguments on ethics and rectitude, suffices it to simply recount an old debate on why the state needs to be a repository of all powers for any sense of law and order to prevail. The emergence of the modern state has always been accompanied by two parallel anxieties – one informed why there is a need for the state to hold monopoly over all legitimate violence in order that a polity does not sink into total anarchy, and the other is apprehensive and suspicious of power concentrating into any single institution, not the least, the state. The genesis of these two anxieties and their documentation can best be represented by a cerebral contest between two English philosophers, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, both responding to the prolonged turmoil of the English civil war in the mid 17th Century, often also referred to as the Glorious Revolution. In many ways, modern democracy is a way of not only negotiating but also sublimating these parallel anxieties – ensure the state keeps all vital powers, most importantly that of what Max Weber later called “legitimate violence�, but at the same time build checks and balances within the state institution itself to ensure this power does not corrupt its wielders.
In Manipur’s case this is where the state has failed. However, this is also where the non-state challengers to the state have failed miserably. If the state has not succeeded in making “legitimate violenceâ€� its sole monopoly, so have the non-state challengers to state power – not even within the non-state space. The result is what we are witnessing. The conflict is not a straight fight between the state and non-state, but a multi-cornered contest between the state and an uncontrollably proliferating number of non-state players. In this proliferation of armed groups claiming a share of “legitimate violenceâ€�, the established insurgent organisations are more morally accountable than even the state. It is their sheer inability to claim monopoly over power in the non-state space which are resulted in the degeneration of the whatever moral claim the “revolutionâ€� had as a fight for liberation or against oppression. The murder yesterday of the farmer and the burning of his crop is the latest visage of this monstrous mutation. Not only is the conflict getting mindless, but any hope for an honourable resolution to it is also receding. What is called for now is for the insurgent organisations with established ideological credentials to come together even if only as a federation, and declare a moratorium on any further proliferation or splintering of armed organisations. Within the non-state space, they must together declare they are the repository of all powers of violent dissent. They must also together ban or absorb all splinters. If they succeed, Manipur’s madness should begin to show signs of recovery. If they fail in this consolidation of power project, they must admit they have failed in their self proclaimed mission of protecting the interest of the people.  

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