Modi Govt Runs Out of Ideas in Our Most Ungovernable State

Shekhar Gupta

For more than two months now, nobody’s writ has run in the border state of Manipur except that of the rival mobs, or armed bands, currently at war with each other. The ruling party at the Centre, the BJP, is also the party in power in the state. It’s also a high command-run party as much as the Congress was at its Indira-era peak. Does the writ of this omnipotent high command run in Manipur? Evidence suggests it doesn’t.

Take a close look at the tamasha playing out in Imphal this Friday, as this column is being written. The failed chief minister, N. Biren Singh, who has seen the state burn under his watch and who wouldn’t dare visit his tribal, hill districts even to accompany his party stalwart and Union Home Minister Amit Shah, finally let word spread that he was resigning. After letting the world know of his ‘intention’, he walked to the Raj Bhavan, resignation in hand.

By which time, a large and noisy mob of women from his Meitei community had gathered there, beseeching him not to resign. In what has been packaged as high drama, one of the women snatched the resignation from his staff member and tore it. Pictures of the torn resignation were widely circulated on social media after it had been ritually trampled under the protesting women’s feet.

Biren Singh followed this up by tweeting that he wasn’t resigning. How could he, when his people loved him so much? The act of the snatching, tearing, trampling and withdrawal of his non-resignation was as much of a fake, a choreographed act, as his supposed “offer” to resign and the march to Raj Bhavan. At the end of the day, the BJP chief minister remained in his job. Never mind that his writ hasn’t run in his state for two months. What does it say for the BJP high command’s authority? If indeed it was the party high command that wanted him to resign, he has conjured up the power of the mob to defy it.

If it wasn’t, then did he threaten to resign in defiance of the party bosses and then collect the mob to show how powerful he is? Either way, it makes his party high command look powerless, and short of ideas.

Manipur remains where it has been these bloodied weeks: burning, violent, broken and angry. Singh was not drawn from any ideological upbringing or training. He was a footballer, and good enough as a defender to be recruited by the BSF, where he served and played for 14 years.

He co-founded the so-called Democratic Revolutionary People’s Party, was one of the two MLAs elected on its ticket in 2002, and merged his party with the Congress soon afterwards. Later, with the Congress losing power at the Centre and the BJP’s ‘human resources’ department out on the hunt for talent, he had no compunctions about walking across.

Not for him any ideological commitments or hesitations. Now, however, he has bared another side of his leadership: ethnic loyalty in a violently divided state. In the process, he has posed two important questions for his party. One, is it at peace having just the loyalty and affection of the Meiteis on the grounds of them being predominantly Hindu, and leaving the Christian tribals angry? That’s the conspiracy theory the tribals believe in.

That it is no more than a ploy to polarise the state on Hindu-Christian lines. The second question, for how long are they willing to carry around their necks the albatross of this governance failure in one of their own states? Especially when they take such pride in claiming their rise in the northeast to be a great success story.

The politics of identity, or more specifically Hindu-Muslim polarisation, enabled the BJP to sweep Assam and Tripura twice in a row. The other states were ‘acquired’, either through the political equivalent of a leveraged buy-out of former Congress people in Arunachal Pradesh and Manipur, or through the old fashioned big powersmall power alliances, as in Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Sikkim.

Local/regional autonomy may be a strong urge in the smaller, tribal northeastern states, but each is too small to be at odds with the Centre. This arrangement had worked quite neatly so far, and the party was enjoying the fulfilment of the dream of governing the northeast it had specially cherished.

The underlying idea was also that the region had been locked in a perpetual cycle of instability because of ‘cynical and corrupt’ Congress politics. The BJP’s political success in the northeast was a remarkable shift in Indian politics and we had noted it in a National Interest piece.

That success is now deeply threatened in Manipur. While the BJP blamed the chronic crises of the northeast on two ‘Cs’ — the Congress’s ‘cynicism’ and ‘corruption’ —