By Amar Yumnam
Manipur is a land of potential and it ends here. This character seems to characterise every functioning, every execution of programmes and every leadership. Every moment in social history is a historical moment. The opportunities provided by history fluctuate from routine to high. But the challenge is that any historical opportunity is to be exploited at that historical moment when the opportunity appears. This makes social transformations easier with justice and participation ensured at rewarding development paces. This is what both history of civilisation and the more recent experiences of development have taught the world. However Manipur seems to doggedly refuse to absorb this lesson both by design and by leadership.
Manipur right now is passing through that historical phase when the rewards from the unfolding opportunities would be high, just, participatory and lasting if the society attends to the accompanying challenges, and the leadership behaves and provides committed leadership. This is exactly here that the historical question arises if our contemporary leadership in every sphere – political, education and social – is oriented, committed and capable of rising to the occasion. The portends to the possible answer seem to be all negative.
Manipur still suffers from the long drawn incapability to address the issues of rural transformation as a foundation for urban and regional development. Instead of surplus production from the rural areas forming the foundation for urbanisation and development, our experiences in degradation of forests and non-inclusive development have been very costly economically, socially and politically. While the State is already seized with these issues being unattended, the implication of the unfolding scenario is one where increasingly more people would be attracted and be living in the urban areas within the next three decades. In other words, Manipur would be joining the international trend of more and more people living in the urban areas at an increasing pace. The world has come a long way from the days of Plato who visualised 5,040 citizens as the optimal population size of a city. Plato, however, did not include women, children, slaves and foreigners.
Here I am reminded of a Survey of Cities in The Economist in 1997. Let me quote directly: “Whether you think the human story begins in a garden in Mesopotamia known as Eden, or more prosaically on the savannahs of present-day east Africa, it is clear that Homo sapiens did not start life as an urban creature. Man`s habitat at the outset was dominated by the need to find food, and hunting and foraging were rural pursuits……. Wisely or not, Homo sapiens has become Homo urbanus. In terms of human history this may seem a welcome development. It would be contentious to say that nothing of consequence has ever come out of the countryside. The wheel was presumably a rural invention. Even city-dwellers need bread as well as circuses. And if Dr Johnson and Shelley were right to say that poets are the true legislators of mankind, then all those hills and lakes and other rural delights must be given credit for inspiring them……..But the rural contribution to human progress seems slight compared with the urban one. Cities` development is synonymous with human development. The first villages came with the emergence of agriculture and the domestication of animals: people no longer had to wander as they hunted and gathered but could instead draw together in settlements, allowing some to develop particular skills and all to live in greater safety from predators. After a while the farmers could produce surpluses, at least in good times, and the various products of the villagers—grain, meat, cloth, pots—could be exchanged. Around 2000BC metal tokens, the forerunners of coins, were produced as receipts for quantities of grain placed in granaries. Not coincidentally, cities began to take shape at about the same time…..They did so, first, in the Fertile Crescent, the sweep of productive land that ran through Iraq, Syria, Jordan and Palestine, from which Jericho, Ur, Nineveh and Babylon (pictured above) would emerge. In time came other cities in other places: Harappa and Mohenjodaro in the Indus valley, Memphis and Thebes in Egypt, Yin and Shang cities in China, Mycenae in Greece, Knossos in Crete, Ugarit in Syria and, most spectacularly, Rome, the first great metropolis, which boasted, at its zenith in the third century AD, a population of more than 1m people…Living together meant security. But people also drew together for the practical advantages of being in a particular place: by a river or spring, on a defensible hill or peninsula, next to an estuary or other source of food. Also important, argue historians, was a settlement`s capacity to draw people to it as a meeting-place, often for sacred or spiritual purposes. Graves, groves, even caves might become shrines or places for ceremonies and rituals, to which people would make a pilgrimage. Man did not live by bread alone…..But bread, in the broadest sense, was important. People came to cities not just to worship but to trade—the shrine was often the market, too—and the goods they bought and sold were not just farm products but the manufactures of urban artisans and skilled workers. The city became a centre of exchange, both of goods and of ideas, and so it also became a centre of learning, innovation and sophistication.”
This is exactly here the significance of Imphal arises today. Whether anybody likes it or not, it is going to be the unavoidable reality that Manipur would be the link between South Asia and South East Asia and East Asia. With Myanmar opening up with every possibility to join the growth trajectory of South East Asia sooner than later, the world now pays attention to Manipur as well. In this connection, Imphal is bound to emerge as a very important city; it would replace Guwahati as the most significant city in the region within next two to three decades. While cities in this country generally have played the roles as centres of innovation, origin of ideas and space for learning not very significantly and successfully, Imphal cannot afford to be the same. For reasons of location, culture and the emerging interactions and exchange, it has to be the vibrant centre for ideas, innovation and learning for regions extending beyond India. We should not view the unfolding dynamics as something to be limited to presenting some of our cultural programmes like we are going to do in the forthcoming Asian Car Rally; we should rather be seeing the Rally as an opportunity to articulate our vision and collectively apply our mind.
Besides the imperative to understand the emerging pivotal role of Imphal, we must also appreciate the compulsion for thinking leadership to emerge. The challenges being thrown up by the historical opportunities would necessitate thinking centres supplying the ideas for social response and policy behaviour. The political leadership does not seem to realise the emerging significance of Imphal while the educational leadership seems devoid of academic orientation for building thinking centres. The knowledge input so radically needed for any development process today does not come out of a vacuum. It invariably requires devoted centres for thinking for policy; even science and technology serves the purpose of development within the framework of a thinking policy. We do not as yet have any academic institute oriented and ready to provide the Leadership in Thinking. If this continues it would be a repeat of history with Manipur being a potential region and ending with that. It is the moment for the political, social and academic leadership of Manipur to decide how they wish history to judge them.
(The auther is Dean of School of Social Sciences, Director of Center for Manipur Studies and Professor of Economics at Manipur University, Manipur, India).