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| Diary |
Magazine | 08 Jun 2009 |
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| Imphal Diary by Sevanti Ninan |
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A sojourn to one of the states lumped together as the Northeast during elections is to realise the media and government have no use for those parts of the country which do not count in Parliament. Unless it is Jammu and Kashmir. Single parliamentary seat wonders like Nagaland and Sikkim, and two-seat ones like Manipur, Meghalaya and Arunachal Pradesh, are lucky if they even rate a passing mention in the election sweepstakes. To know how people in Imphal feel about being on the fringe of national imagination, all you have to do is watch exit polls on TV. Over one hour you are taken through UP, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal and Karnataka, with much numbercrunching. Eventually Assam rates a mention—it does, after all, have 14 seats. And the rest? Well, they have a category on the TV graphic called Other States.
Rants and Raves
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Imphal qualifies as the violence capital of India. You would never guess, for it does not make it to the ‘national’ newspapers. For just three days of this month, researcher Ahanthem Chitra has the following tally: four Kuki militants and one Assam Rifles soldier are killed in an encounter, a "suspected KCP cadre" is killed in encounter with Imphal West Police commandos, seven UGs (for underground) are nabbed, a non-local barber and one UG are killed, and eight UGs are killed in twin encounters with the combined forces of the Imphal West Police commandos, Assam Rifles and Twelve Maratha Light Infantry. A bomb is found at the residence of an engineer, there is a bomb blast, a militant group issues a statement condemning the indiscriminate firing by another group, and the NSCN(IM) "jails" the killer of a Manipur state civil service official in February. Two cops are arrested for abducting a civilian without an arrest memo and handing him over to the Assam Rifles. But no one in Delhi or Mumbai would know it’s a war zone out here.
The CBI arrived while I was there to investigate the murder of a trainee journalist at the Imphal Free Press in November last year. Another journalist, editor Ratan Luwang of Huieyen Lanpao, who was fired at by militants but lived to tell the tale, says the group involved issued an apology after one year.
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Manipur has low hills and thick forests; Sagolsem Hemant, a local journalist, has written a vivid account of trekking through them to interview the United National Liberation Front (UNLF) chairman in 2006. The tragedy is that the more scenic parts of our country wallow in violence and neglect. The Centre allocates special funds for development of the Northeast, but you wouldn’t guess. Electricity is available for just three hours a day. The editor of a group which publishes three newspapers said their biggest generator consumed 30 litres of diesel an hour. Obviously, it affects the fragile viability of the press here. Children study on verandahs on summer afternoons. And women who might have been able to earn some money from traditional embroidery and weaving at night after their chores, cannot. Still, Manipur gave its two seats to the Congress!
If there’s a state government at work here, it’s really hard to tell. Certainly people don’t rely on it to protect them from insurgents. The streets empty out in summer by 7 pm and cyber cafes shut shop. In tooling around the city on the back of fellow journalist Anjulika Thingom’s Kinetic Honda, I did not see an eatery that qualified as something more than a hangout for the young. But then you can’t run a restaurant in a city which has an unofficial curfew all year round.
Those who run businesses fend for themselves in dealing with extortion from insurgents. One day it was pharmacists who had to decide whether they would pay up or shut shop, the next day it was wholesalers for fermented fish, a daily staple in the Manipuri diet. Asked to pay up Rs 8 lakh each, they held a press conference to say they were closing down.
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What with scurrying back to the hotel every evening at nightfall, there was no time to shop. So I figured there would be some shops at the airport selling local products, as in airports all over the country, including Guwahati. But Imphal airport is strictly a no-frills facility—it has no shop, no restaurant, nothing on offer except Nescafe. You begin to be grateful that it has a loo. The attitude of the State is contagious. On the four-hour flight back to Delhi via Guwahati, Kingfisher Airlines serves the same snacks twice over with water, and the airhostess apologises prettily for the the airline has dispensed with coffee and tea on this route.
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