Manipur is descending back into its accustomed lawlessness. Curiously, this time it is not the insurgent challengers of the state, or habitual street-fighting bandh and blockade callers who are at the heart of the turmoil, but an ultra-sensitive and touchy establishment keen on snooping around for every adverse comment about it made on social media—and then cracking down on those who made them.
The latest victim is a TV anchor, Kishorchandra Wangkhem, booked under the NSA on November 27 for posting a video on Facebook calling the BJP chief minister of the state, N Biren Singh, a puppet of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, for celebrating the birth anniversary of Jhansi Rani allegedly neglecting the freedom fighters of the state. He also dared the government to arrest him.
Kishorchandra had been booked earlier for the same post on sedition charges but was set free on November 25 after a chief judicial magistrate’s court ruled that the post was just an expression of private opinion in street language, and there was no seditious content in it. In what was seen as vengeful overkill, the government rearrested him immediately overruling the court’s verdict, this time under the NSA. How the man’s criticism of the government and his foul language are a threat to national security has not been explained.
This is however not the first time this journalist invited the ire of the government. In August, he had been detained by the police, again for a post on Facebook in which he translated BJP as Budhu Joker Party, high on animal urine. On that occasion, the editor of the cable TV network he worked for apologised personally on his behalf to the chief minister and negotiated his release.
He is just of the many to be targeted. In October, Popilal Ningthoujam, an activist of a new political party, People’s Resurgence and Justice Alliance, PRJA, to which the iconic hunger-striker Irom Sharmila once belonged, was arrested for a similar show of disrespect for the BJP government. Following an outrageous midnight police raid inside the Manipur University campus to break a paralysing strike by teachers and students, which ended in the arrest of six teachers and 21 students, Popilal and others staged a protest in which they threw eggs on the photographs of BJP leaders including the CM and PM, and then uploaded a video of it on Facebook. Popilal, in defiance, did not avail bail for a month, but finally took wiser counsel and was released.
What is even more disturbing in these developments is the manner in which the judiciary is being progressively dwarfed by the executive, which has been showing a wont for the additional role of adjudicating. Under the circumstances, Manipur today is coming to resemble Alice’s Wonderland where the Queen of Hearts makes laws on the spot and pronounces every now and then at her whim: “Off with his head!”
Alongside this, another development points to a similar erosion of yet another pillar of democracy. The Manipur Legislative Assembly is increasingly being made irrelevant. There are eight defector MLAs, one of whom has been made a minister, who left their original party, the Congress, to join the BJP and give the latter a majority at the time of the formation of the government in March 2017. In that election, in the House of 60, the Congress got 28 seats, the BJP 21 and smaller parties together accounted for the rest. Almost two years later, the Congress defectors continue to sit on the Opposition benches and vote with the Treasury, making a farce of the Anti-Defection Law.
The diminishing importance of the Manipur Legislative Assembly was again evident when its Winter Session this year lasted just two days, December 20 and 21. On the last day, three important bills were rushed through, including one that pertained to prohibition of mob violence, the penalty for which can be as severe as life imprisonment. The idea of public policies forged on the hot anvil of Assembly debates is now becoming a receding memory.
The controversy over Kishorchandra’s arrest also mauled, or exposed, the state of the media in Manipur, in particular the two important journalist bodies, All Manipur Working Journalists Union (AMWJU) and Editors Guild, Manipur (EGM). For an entire month after the controversy broke out, leaders of the two organisations showed little or no concern at the development, saying the arrested journalist is a serial offender. One of them even officially disowned him as a journalist. Forgotten in the process is that the issue is not so much about Kishorchandra, but of vindictive and vengeful misuse of power by those in power.
Probably all these have a lot to do with desensitisation by years of living in a conflict situation, but also co-option by the establishment if public opinion on social media is any indication. The casualty expectedly has been a general confusion, if not a decay of faith, amongst its practitioners in the mandate of the journalistic profession as an interrogator and adversary of power. Somewhere down the line, the media leadership in Manipur seems to have lost the plot, crippling further the already ailing democracy in the state. Rebuilding it will not be easy, but an emergency general body meeting of the AMWJU on Tuesday showed willingness to begin the process.