Manipur book curb another story of tyrant and jester
The Manipur government’s September 15 decision to have publishers seek prior approval from a committee the former has set up—for any book on Manipur they wish to publish—should come as a matter of grave concern for everybody, especially those in the state. Sadly, the local intelligentsia met the move rather tamely, and the ripples of aftershock the diktat sent was seemingly felt more strongly in the rest of the country than at its epicentre. Such is the benumbing of sensibilities in recent times in Manipur.
It is true that there were provocations that many in Manipur, not just the government, felt strongly. And the last straw was a book that seriously undermined Manipur, giving ammunition to its detractors to rally against its interest. But surely there are more civilised ways of dealing with such affronts. The publisher and the author of the book could have been taken to court for the falsehood they generated knowingly or otherwise. They could also have been made to publicly withdraw the objectionable claims in the book.
It is not certain if the government order in question can stand legal scrutiny. It probably would not, although Article 19 of the Constitution which guarantees freedom of thought, belief and expression among others, also has a caveat that reasonable restrictions can be placed on these freedoms if the authorities are of the opinion that any of these freedoms have the potential to cause public disorder in a given situation. But can this move by the government be classified as a reasonable restriction?
This growing tendency to launch attacks on intellectual freedom in Manipur, however, is not new. It has been in the making for a long time and is indeed something which has made the Bharatiya Janata Party government in the state distinct from all previous governments. A BJP government assumed power in the state through a coalition for the first time in March 2017 and then retained it for another term in March 2022. In its first term itself, the government made its intent to silence all critical voices clear.
The cases of social activist Erendro Leichombam and TV anchor Kishorechandra Wangkhem should suffice to sketch this disturbing picture. They were arrested and imprisoned several times for being critical, not so much of the government, but the BJP and its leaders. Initially, some of these arrests invoked sedition charges, but whenever the courts found no sedition in these cases, they were rearrested under the National Security Act. In the span of a few years, the extent of normalisation of what is abnormal was demonstrated in the fact that even a section of the All Manipur Working Journalists Union (AMWJU) openly disowned their compatriot Kishorechandra in his time of distress.
There were several other similar but less publicised cases. Indeed, police visits to individuals for not just articles in newspapers but also social media posts are now common. These overreactions of the government, to an extent, were understandable in the BJP’s first term. For it was, as a minority government, hanging by a thread, pushed to the edge of collapse even by the slightest tremor—caused by disenchanted partners or its own MLAs—and saved only by the blessings of an openly partisan governor. Unlike the first term, the current term comfortably belongs to the BJP, yet little has changed in its attitude towards critics.
Condemnable as the order may be, it must be said that much of the blame would have to be shared by the Manipur academia for their failure at intellectual gatekeeping. It is because they were slack in this responsibility that the government felt justified to intervene.
A consideration of the provocation that caused the government to resort to this draconian means should make this clear. The rumbles began when a PhD thesis by a brigadier who served in Manipur was published as a book, The Complexity Called Manipur: Roots, Perceptions & Reality. Whatever else the thesis said of Manipur, it also claims that the territory which Maharaja Bodhchandra agreed to merge with the Union of India on October 15, 1949, constituted only 700 sq miles of the Imphal Valley.
Several scholars have now come out with documentary evidence that the claim is baseless. The question is, how did this false information get past the PhD supervisory gatekeeping? The alibi forwarded is that the writer cited the information from another published book. This cited book, in turn, apparently got its inspiration from a press statement by an ethnic nationalist group inimical to the idea of Manipur.
This should open another Pandora’s box. It is common knowledge that there are too many books today passing off as academic work from publishers who care little for peer reviews or establishing the authenticity of arguments in the works they publish, so long as the authors pay the publishing cost. In the hunt for an Academic Performance Indicator (API), a nexus between some publishers and a section of academia is only to be expected.
A spurious argument with no evidentiary support, given a doctoral clearance or published as an academic book, acquires another life of its own. They get cited in other careless research works to authenticate more spurious arguments. An incestuous ecosystem is the result, where spurious offspring of spurious arguments give life support to each other.
This grotesque nexus is strongly reminiscent of the world inside the castle in Franz Kafka’s book, The Castle, in which the castle keeps everybody within it engaged. However, this life has meaning and relevance only within the castle, and is completely alienated from the reality outside the castle. Periodically, however, the castle has to seek authentication from the real world outside for its own sustenance. It is on these occasions that things can begin to fall apart.
This, very briefly, is what the current outrage over the curb on intellectual freedom in Manipur is about. It is the typical clash between a despotic regime determined to flatten all dissenting voices, and a degenerate Kafkaesque world of self-ordained intellectuals ensconced inside their ivory towers.
Pradip Phanjoubam
Editor of Imphal Review of Arts and Politics