As Manipur burns, Modi is America's toast

No amount of prime ministerial yoga is going to fix Manipur….What seemed to be the last best hope has turned out to be the worst nightmare for Manipur.

Indian prime ministerial visits to the United States never make it to page one in The New York Times or The Washington Post. But Prime Minister Narendra Modi has better chances of making it there than say, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, surrounded by his female bodyguards visiting the United Nations.

This could happen if the world sees Modi doing the super-relaxed yoga pose called shavasana (the corpse pose) in New York for the International Yoga Day, which is today (June 21). The shavasana, where the yogi lies prone and limp on the ground, arms by the side, the relaxed back supported by the firm but welcoming New York soil, eyes closed, and the lips playing a vague, beatific smile is, of course, the studied response, both policy-wise and metaphorically, to the ever-unfolding horrors in Manipur.

This spectacle is likely to capture the American imagination, beyond the front page of, say, San Jose Mercury News. Back home, we are going to be swamped by wall-to-wall coverage in news channels and are going to be awash with frothy champagne State visit detritus, five pages deep in our national newspapers which might sweep Manipur out of the pages altogether.

Ironically, in September 2021, timed for the Indian Prime Minister’s annual pilgrimage to the UN in New York, there floated a mysterious picture, attributed to the New York Times with the headline ‘The Last Best Hope of Earth’, and the sub head ‘The Worlds Most Loved and Most Powerful Leader is Here to Bless Us.’ Below it was the fetching picture of Modi in his sagacious long-haired sadhu avatar, and long, brushed beard, wearing a white kurta with a gold embroidered shawl draping his wide shoulder, signing what appears to be a visitor’s book. The New York Times masthead held the arresting frame together. The NYT denounced the entire tableau as fake. Yet, the truth is this: shavasana is more of this fakery.

No amount of prime ministerial yoga is going to fix Manipur; and there doesn’t seem to be much else going on in response from Modi’s side. What seemed to be the last best hope has turned out to be the worst nightmare for Manipur.

Consider the fakery going on. There are reports that Article 355 is in effect. Article 355, just shy of Article 356 which is President’s Rule, is when the Union government takes control of the State apparatus in terms of security to protect lives and ensure peace and stability, and pave the way to governance. What we see in Manipur is the benefit of the much touted ‘double engine’ thing, driven both by New Delhi and the local engine driver, Chief Minister N Biren Singh. Both seem to be on holiday mode.

There is a ‘foreign’ connection here as well. After the Imphal home of the Minister of State for External Affairs, Rajkumar Ranjan Singh, was razed by mobs to the ground on June 15, he was able to clearly see the law and order situation, which he was moved enough to pronounce as a “total failure”. He was understating it, of course, and understandably. This was the same phraseology, taken one notch higher, used by Chief of Defence Staff Anil Chauhan when he said that in Manipur it was a “law and order kind of situation”.

The violence began on May 3, nearly two months ago. The level of rising ethnic animus and ferocity of bloodletting is matched only by the official apathy and the massive if ineffectual deployment of security forces in the area, numbering 40,000 by most accounts. Thousands of weapons, assault rifles, grenades, mortars, and rounds of ammunition have been looted from the state police stations and elsewhere. An unforgivable lapse. If even a dozen weapons were to be looted from say, Jammu and Kashmir, by now the proverbial faecal matter would have met the thermantidote in the most spectacular way.

The National Investigative Agency (NIA) would be crawling all over J&K, maybe covertly halfway to Islamabad. There would be lockdown of biblical proportions. Accountability would have been fixed and hundreds of uniformed heads would have rolled, those of superintendents, DSPs, and sundry police officers. KPS Gill would have been summoned from beyond the grave.

Yet, in Manipur things are carrying on, blithely, like in a Hindi film, with routine transfers and promotions; ah well, another sunny day in paradise. Whereas, in reality, the State has collapsed. Completely. It is each to their own. There is a security adviser in Manipur, on a post-retirement sinecure, Kuldeip Singh, who headed the CRPF and briefly held additional charge of the NIA. If he is doing something useful, beyond calming updates on curfews, it remains a well-guarded secret.

Consider this dichotomy: whereas the High Court of Manipur at Imphal gave the Chief Minister of Manipur four weeks to petition New Delhi for an altered status to the Meitis, the commission to probe Manipur violence has been given a leisurely six months “from the first day of its sitting” to submit its report. Since the violence is unending, the commission must be sitting pretty. The consequences of dereliction and worse is going to be unimaginable: ghettoisation is going to spread like coronavirus. There will be consolidation of increasing ethnic polarisation, further and wider, in Nagaland, Mizoram, and beyond. There will be an exodus to far cities elsewhere.

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief JP Nadda while on a campaign in Karnataka, where it looked briefly that Modi might change his postal address for the purposes of the Karnataka electoral campaign, declared in Udupi on February 20: “No other Prime Minister in the history of India has been as great as Modiji. He stopped the Russia-Ukraine war to evacuate 22,500 students from there back to India.” Alas, Modi’s influence extends more outside our borders, in Ukraine, than within, in Manipur.

(V Sudarshan, a senior journalist who writes on foreign policy, is author of Tuticorin: Adventures in Tamil Nadu’s Crime Capital.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.