Matamgi Manipur

By: Lt. Col. H. Bhuban Singh (Text courtesy: Imphal Free Press 7 June 2015) The following is an article by Lt. Col. H. Bhuban, author of the book “Merger of Manipur”. We are reproducing this article published in the IFP 15 years ago as a homage to the respected ex-Army officer, who was also minister under the Wahengbam Nipamacha Singh MSCP ministry, a state party which is now defunct. The maverick who is also known for his scholarly researches into the history of Manipur of the colonial period,breathed his last recently. There has been a strong notion of recent origin in Manipur that the State became independent from midnight of 15 August 1947, when the suzerainty of His Majesty (of the United Kingdom) over Indian states lapsed and further that this independent status was lost from the noon of 15 October 1949, when Manipur got merged into the erstwhile Dominion of India. There is no denying that Maharaja Bodhchandra Singh was coerced into signing the Merger Agreement after long and ...

by Pradip Phanjoubam (This article was first published in the Economic and Political Weekly and republished on the Imphal Free Press on 14 June.) Delhi's chest thumping journalists have become mere stenographers of power, forgetting to ask questions and interrogate official narratives. A journalist from Manipur recounts the events leading up to and around the 9 June 2015 “surgical strikes” by the Indian Army against insurgents and explains the event in its contexts. There is something very strange about the ongoing operations against the National Socialist Council of Nagaland, (Khaplang), NSCN-K, and other Northeast militants in the wake of the June 4 devastating ambush on a convoy of the 6-Dogra Regiment which left 18 soldiers dead and 14 more injured. All news of these operations, including the surgical commando strikes deep into Myanmar territory on June 9, emanate from New Delhi and are loudly relayed through the many 24-hour TV channels and columns by Northeast experts based...

This news story and interview was first published by the Imphal Free Press on 14 May 2015 Imphal: Padmashree Heisnam Kanhailal is the founder of the Kalakshetra Manipur, an institute that started the tradition for an alternative theatre and that distinguished the maestro from his peer. He is often described as the man who broke the new trend of theatrical expression in contemporary Indian theatre. Since the inception of Kalakshetra in 1969, he has been continuing experiment with tradition for an alternate theatre. In the process his alternative theatre could be indentified with the live theatre that he ultimately conceived as the ‘theatre of the earth’. Some of his remarkable experiments that redefine the conventional theatrical expression were the Nupilan (women's war against British) in 1978, Sanjennaha (cowherd) in 1979 with villagers at Umathel, a remote village in South Manipur. He also worked with the Paite community in Churachandpur district and produced Thanghou Le...

By Amar Yumnam , Source: Imphal Free Press The North East has come to engage the Indian psyche for sure. This is a very positive fall-out of the Prime Minister’s twin approach emphasising the need for enhancing the relationships with South-East and East Asia and the imperative for evolving a growth momentum for the region. This naturally has had both global and national implications. The neighbouring countries in South East and East Asia are already taking keen interest on the issues, potential and challenges facing the North East. Such an interest by a significant group of countries has naturally to have wider spill-overs. Now the European nations and the countries in North America have started taking more extensive interests in the region than ever before. The national implication is that the administration is hard-pressed to attend to the urgency.

By Pradip Phanjoubam, Imphal Free Press, 16 Dec 2014 That the huge expanse of the non state sector generally termed as the civil society is not always civil is axiomatic. In Manipur this ought to be obvious. The blockades, bandhs, strikes and many other disruptive activities, often for very sectarian causes emanate from organizations assuming the mantle of civil society vigilantes. The truth is, it is not just in Manipur, but the civil society in the entire northeast is badly fractured and ethnically riven and may not be quite what the term is generally understood to be. The term civil society itself presupposed certain shared democratic values and qualities regardless of religious and community affiliations and these values are what have been relegated into the background in our context. Hence when we talk of students’ community or youth or women, in more ideal situations, there ought not to be any need for prefixing these understandings with community and religion specific qualific...

by Kishalay Bhattarcharjee and Ashish Ranjan Originally published by the Imphal Free Press on 7 Dec 2014 With frequent reports of alleged racist attacks in Delhi and the National Capital Region, Reachout Foundation perceived a lack of comprehensive data on the nature of alleged discrimination against people from Northeastern India in cities like Delhi. Our emphasis thus has been to generate comprehensive and defensible empirical data on the extent and variation of racist attitudes and experiences, in order that they could inspire or guide anti-discrimination policies. The main objective of the present survey is to understand the extent and scope of ethnic/racial discrimination perceived by people from India’s Northeast living in Delhi-NCR. The targeted population for the survey were people from all the eight north-eastern states of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura who are currently living in Delhi and the NCR (Ghaziabad, Noida and...

A collection of five editorial columns written by Pradip Phanjoubam for the Imphal Free Press in the last two months of 2014 Enterprise or Sloth It will come as no surprise that there is an exodus of young aspiring professionals away from the state. In a way this is good, for if and when they return, they will bring back new skills and outlooks. But there is also a fairly good chance that a majority of them will not return, for at this moment, job prospects befitting their skills and aspiration are virtually nil. Nor is there a climate for them to want to return and build enterprises from scratch. It is in this sense a very critical period for the state. Push matters a little farther and things can reach a point of no return, where the best talents leave permanently to find their fortunes elsewhere. If however the state does not allow the situation to drift beyond the critical point, who knows, in the years ahead, it may be time for a new renaissance, when the prodigals begin h...

This article by Amar Yumnam was originally published by the Imphal Free Press on 6 Oct 2014 India’s policy (read as the Central Government’s policy) towards the North Eastern Region (NER) of the country has undergone three phases. First, there was the period from the start of the Planning Era to the end of the 1980s. This was the period when the principle of not doing anything except militaristic-perspective-based interventions was honoured. The second period starts from the beginning of the 1990s when the Look East Policy (LEP) became a coin for international political announcements and the so-called border trade agreement was also signed between India and Myanmar. This second period has been the most pretentious one so far as the policies towards the NER are concerned. This period gave an overt picture of being concerned with the development concerns of the region. But this was nothing more than a bluff as the underlying principle of the first phase was adopted with no content of bo...

This article by Amar Yumnam was originally published in 1 Sep 2014 issue of the Imphal Free Press Any loss of life due to actions by any agency, whether state or non-state, is painful. No effort should be spared to avoid such kind of an outcome. Death is never a reversible event and so should never be externally imposed on any soul. This principle should be respected by both the state and the non-state entities. Otherwise, the state or the non-state agency would emerge as the Enemy of the people. Something like this keeps on happening in Manipur. In other words, Manipur has been in a cycle of fragility for the last half a century. There would be moments when things seem improving but would be back to the same turmoil situation sooner than later.

This article by Pradip Phanjoubam was originally published as an editorial in the Imphal Free Press, 21 Aug 2014 The extremely haughty manner in which the NDA government dismissed the finding of the Justice Hegde Commission which was mandated by the Supreme Court of India to look into the very serious allegations of fake encounters in Manipur is to say the least, alarming. It seems to confirm the widely held apprehension that under the new government headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, there is a real danger of the executive assuming too much asymmetrical power for itself, even those which should rightly belong to the judiciary and legislature. It may be recalled the Justice Santosh Hegde Commission had come out with the startling report that of the random cases of alleged fake encounters he picked up for examination during his enquiry, he discovered to his consternation all of the allegations had convincing evidences. To this the Centre simply said the procedures adopted by the J...

BY AMAR YUMNAM This article was originally published by the Imphal Free Press on 21 April 2014 The ongoing elections for the Indian Parliament have just been completed, except for the counting and announcement of results thereof, in so far as Manipur is concerned. It has been almost like a province-wide randomised experiment to observe and test the connectivity of the Indian democratic process with the behaviour of the populace of the land. It gave us an opportunity to see the identification of the people of Manipur with the Indian polity. It is an event for testing the connectivity, similarities and differentiations with the larger Indian perception of the event. It is also an event for observing the sensitivity of people of the province as to the level of significance they attach to the parliamentary elections as an important component of Indian democracy. Further, it is an event for assessing the engagement degree of the provincial population with the issues supposedly importan...

Robin S Ngangom takes a closer look at some of the poetry written in English language This article was originally published by the Imphal Free Press on 19 April 2014 It would be pointless to ask the new generation of poets from the Northeast who writes in English why they have chosen the colonizer’s language. The politics of language no longer concerns them; linguistic quarrels for them might well have been consigned to the archives of literary history. On the contrary, the new generation writes with a confidence which would be the envy of their older fellow poets.

A two-article series by Pradip Phanjoubam on the order of the day in Manipur. Imphal Free Press had published Insane Manipur on 16 March 2014 and How societies decay and revolutions are born on 23 March 2014 Insane Manipur No adjective at this moment can describe the Manipur scenario more accurately than the word “insane”. Violence and bloodshed is becoming not just a norm but reducing to a delirious and mindless mass hysteria. Lost in this maddening orgy of blood and gore are all clear cut demarcation between victim and perpetrator. A scan of the number of protests on the streets of Imphal on any given day should be revealing for anybody sensitive enough to notice this emerging frightening confusion. If there are a group of people staging a “sit in protest” on the side of an Imphal street against the growing menace of kidnapping government officials for (astronomical) ransoms, in another corner of the city there would another group protesting against an equally frightening and...

This article by Amar Yumnam was originally published by the Imphal Free Press on 28 Oct 2013 Free for all is very different from freedom from all. While freedom for all is a social objective around the globe for it ensures opportunities for advancement and existence of a justice system to remedy violations of the rules of societal existence with dignity for all. But free for all is altogether a different game. Free for all implies absolute absence of rule of law. It also implies absence of governance. Consequent upon these conditions, there would prevail ungoverned crime, uncontrolled murders and thriving of the criminals. The only competition existing in such a context would be among the criminals and their groups for greater capability to commit crimes. Killing would be a very common method and easily resorted to for it would be a means for enforcing ready compliance by the common folk with the dictums of the criminals.

By Pradip Phanjoubam (Originally published by the Imphal Free Press on 20 Oct 2013) In many ways, the media in Manipur today is in a pitiable state. On the one hand there it is constantly faced with danger of rubbing the establishment in the wrong way, including forsaking their registration with the Registrar of Newspapers in India, RNI, and with it, accreditation with Central and state government advertisement distributing departments, the Directorate of Advertising and Visual Publicity, DAVP, in the case of the Union government and the Directorate of Information and Public Relations, DIPR, in the case of the state, for publishing underground propaganda literature without vetting them adequately and in conformity with universally accepted norms that make any particular event or statement newsworthy.

Soibam Haripriya wrote this article for the Imphal Free Press on 8 March 2013 The year had started on a wrong note. The month of January saw a newspaper based in Imphal, Manipur reporting on a disastrous marriage between a meitei woman and a non-meitei man which ended with the man deserting the woman. Apart from the extremely insensitive coverage, the title “Mayang Nupigi Phijetta Ngaoduna Lamchat kangba Mayangda mayum palluba meitei nupi awaba tare” literally translated as– “Fascinated with the dress of mayang women a meitei woman marries an immoral mayang man and has to face trouble” With as mild a translation as possible, what the title evokes along with the content is anyone’s guess. Reams and reams of any written narrative and stereotypical view of what people broadly call northeast India, speaks about the freedom that the women from these societies are used to. That cannot be farther from the truth. Most khunai kanba movements (the movements to save the community, preserve an ...

This press release from a group of concerned Naga citizens (names listed below) was first published by the Imphal Free Press on 8 Jan 2013 Manipur has become of great concern in recent times to all of us in the light of recent incidents and the paper war still going on. Naga Meitei relationship seems to be reaching a new low. We are saddened and disturbed by this. The immediate compulsions and reasons behind the ongoing conflicts/current developments must not be underestimated. They are realities demanding our serious attention so that from them will emerge solutions that will give hope for all. They need not be allowed to sabotage the future we need to achieve together to succeed together in the fast changing world.

By Yambem Laba This article was originally published by the Imphal Free Pres on 16 Dec 2012 The credit for raising the demand for a Kukiland or a Kuki state to be carved out of Manipur, does not belong to the Kukiland State Demand Committee or its armed wing, the Kuki National Organisation. It belongs to an almost unknown Kuki by the name of Hengkhulen Sithlou who had held the nondescript post of headmaster of Motbung High School in the Sadar Hills area of Senapati district. In 1970, he was said to have received the blessings of then Lieutenant-Governor of Manipur D R Kohli.

by M C Arun  This article was originally published by the Imphal Free Press on 26 Aug 2012 History writings of the 20th century Manipur were full of contradictions, full of controversies and full of conflicting views. It was the first half of the century when the British colonial rule (princely state) gave birth to a new breed of ideas that contradict with the age-old feudal ideology. It was a time when the kings – once called Lainingthou – became powerless in their own State. The Maichous and Mainous of the then political system were replaced by new class of intellectuals who got higher education outside the State. Some of them were the native vanguards of the British colonial rule; some were influenced by Indian Freedom Struggle in a way or another. Still some of them were much more concerned with Manipur’s identity in a situation of powerlessness. They started looking for every possible way to find a difference from India and westernization.  In search of a new identit...

A Brief History of Press Freedom in Manipur by Seram Neken This article was originally published by the Imphal Free Press on 15 Aug 2012 By being a good friend of the poor, the deprived, the downtrodden and the neglected, media has become the notorious enemy of the corrupt and the anti-socials. In trying to maintain its ideal features of fairness, authenticity and social responsibility, media has always been offended by many individuals and groups. Still people in the media tolerate the attacks on its freedom for social good. Its mission is rather to counter the evils in the society. Pen alone is the available weapon of the media.