Surviving from day to day A look at the reality

Manipur continues to survive from day to day and it has been like this for over 500 days on the trot now. The guns have fallen silent for the time being, but as repeatedly said, the absence of gun shots and direct confrontations between the two warring ethnic groups should not be understood as peace and normalcy having returned. It was on the premise of this wrong assumption that Delhi has been addressing the issue in Manipur and if it was Prime Minister Narendra Modi who said that normalcy has slowly started returning to Manipur in his address in the Rajya Sabha some time back, Union Home Minister Amit Shah has taken this forward by proclaiming that save for the first three days of September there has been no incidence of major violence in Manipur. And Imphal seems to be happily lapping this up, never mind the fact that curfew continues to be imposed in the night and the road leading to the Raj Bhavan from Tiddim road side remains cut off with all the barricades plum in the middle of the road, forcing many who may fall in the category of the exempted section, such as those working in the newspaper houses to take a detour. So any journalist returning home, at Khoyathong or Thangmeiband late in the night from Tiddim road, has to take the Nagamapal road and everyone knows the condition of this road and navigating on this road late in the night comes very close to the understanding of a nightmare. Prices of all essential commodities have sky rocketed and there is no indication that things will take a turn for the better and making the job of surviving day to day harder is the utter failure of the Power Department to ensure regular power supply to the people. Even as this commentary is being penned down, the office of The Sangai Express has to rely on the power from the generator. It was not so long back that the sky had opened up and if the past is any indication, then it wouldn’t be long before the people start reeling under acute water shortage. An annual affair this is, and that this should be happening in a place where there is plenty of rainfall in a year should tell the story of how abysmally the Government has failed in ensuring basic necessities to the people. Remember it was back in the run up to the 2017 Assembly elections here that the saffron party had promise piped water supply to each household. Fast forward to 2024 and the only thing that has changed is the fact that no Meitei would dare take the Imphal-Dimapur route by road and no Kuki would dare return to their place they once called home at Imphal. Making things worse is the double talk of Delhi while seemingly addressing the issues besieging Manipur since the evening of May 3, 2023.
If Manipur had pinned hopes on the first 100 days of the Modi 3.0 Government in office, then the only thing that has become a reality is the state of confusion. The Sangai Express has already commented on this, but a repeat should not harm. It was on September 18 that News18 carried the news of the border fencing work being halted at Kuki dominated areas while the focus had shifted to the Naga dominated areas. The very next day the said news item was found to have been pulled down, for reasons which have not been spelt out but this has only added to the state of confusion amongst the people and hence the line, ‘surviving Manipur day to day.’ It should be more than obvious that far from approaching the issues with the intention to resolve the stand off, Delhi has only been adding to the confusion by saying something and doing something else at the ground. The very fact that the NSCN (IM) has come out guns blazing against the KNA (B) of targeting the Nagas with assistance from the Indian security forces should say so many significant things, for the KNA (B) is an outfit which originated in Myanmar. That this has come at a time when Manipur has been repeatedly pointing at illegal immigration from across the border as the prime reason for the ethnic clash should say so many things. And as if to give a push to this line of thought, Union Home Minister Amit Shah had himself openly stated that ‘infiltration is the root cause of the problem’ here. That he was quiet on the call to update the NRC here again goes along the line of keeping the people confused and making the ongoing clash more complex and if one may add more ‘devilish’.