Northeast Clemency

Manipur is so piteously invisible to the rest of India that it takes a procession of naked women protesting the brutality of security forces to draw the national gaze, momentarily, to its plight.

A few months back, 27-year-old Chongkham Sanjit, a former militant, was shot dead by Manipur police commandos in the middle of Imphal, and the killing recorded frame by frame by an observing camera. Rabina Devi, a pregnant woman who happened to be in the vicinity, was collateral damage.

The killing is only one of many in Manipur’s cruel history of insurgency and clampdown, but the ground has not stopped shaking in the state since.

The government ordered a feeble departmental inquiry, but protesting groups rose up in anger and 4190 schools were forced to close their gates, and several were damaged in the “class boycott” that began on September 9.

Now, finally, the state government and Apunba Lup, an umbrella body of 23 organisations, have hammered out a deal. The agitation is off, and normal life is set to resume as children pick up their satchels and head back to school.

Educational institutions have announced special coaching to make the annual exams and the Boards. Other issues are more fraught, like schools’ refusal to waive fees for the period they were locked and barred.

But who can make up for the four months of tense, empty time for these Manipuri families, wondering what was to become of their children, their precious school year and their larger future?

It was parental agitation and civil society indignation that finally forced an end to the face-off. But they know that this hard-won truce is fragile, and likely to come undone in the next incidence of violence.

Anyone who can scrape the money together sends their children to schools outside Manipur — anywhere between 50,000 and 100,000 students leave every year.

How can the state justify itself in Manipur in a situation like this, when everyday living is plunged in crisis?

If nothing else, to maintain its own authority, it needs to turn the searchlight on incidents like this.

After all, a child measures her life in the comforting swing between school and home — to abruptly suspend that rhythm is to make sure that another generation in Manipur grows up fearful, and resentful.

via Indian Express Editorial Jan 19, 2010