Thangkhanlal Ngaihte
As I log onto the Manipur news website Kanglaonline.com on August 29, I came face to face with the following headline stories: ‘Suspended BSEM Jt Secy Nandakumar shot in the leg’ by the proscribed KYKL; ‘Petroleum products run out of stock’ in the state; ‘NH 53 transporters threaten to stop service’, and ‘6 state NGOs come together to form a task group on drugs scarcity in the state’.
fOn Nandakumar, the KYKL had, as is their wont, called a press meet in which the accused official ‘confessed’ to his crimes, after which he was shot and left for police to pick up. Much of the long list of crimes he had allegedly committed seemed verifiable. The KYKL had actually given us the list of people who were fraudulently given jobs at the instance of Nandakumar. He ought to be punished if he is guilty-as should be anyone else-but not in this manner and definitely not by an outlawed body. But, will he ever be found out and punished, had the KYKL not come in?
As for the scarcity of petroleum products, especially petrol and LPG, it is a familiar story. Extortions on the transporters and agents have always been there, and quite a few trucks have already been burnt and drivers harassed. They have long sought security from the state, but that was one other commodity as rare as petroleum products in our state today. In the face of excessive extortion by not just one, but many militant groups, the transporters could not resume service and hence the scarcity.
Well, extortion on petroleum traders may be considered par for the course in Manipur, but life saving drugs? But there it was. The NGO forum, comprising of six organizations, was trying to find a way to get essential drugs into the state–somehow. Pharmaceutical companies had not dared come into the state due to extortions for sometime now. Can we blame them? And what did the state government do? I was told that CM Ibobi Singh is doing all he can, which is to repeatedly appeal to the companies to come in anyway!!
And oh, there was also NH 53, the state’s second lifeline which is about to be shut down again. But here, Ibobi Singh and his cohorts can breathe perhaps a little easier. Because , according to the news report, this was not just due to extortion-even though it is the major reason- but also ‘bad road conditions’. By Manipur’s standards, we can’t blame the government for bad road conditions in the same measure we can blame it for extortions, can we?
But, if there is one thing these news headlines–and there were many others in smaller print–on a single day tells us, it is this: the state law and order apparatus has collapsed. Completely.
And there is one more. Remember August 17 when the Police conducted raids on the Ministerial bungalows at Babupara? In this chaos, many of us may have forgotten it already. Well, on that day, 12 underground militant cadres were arrested from inside the Ministerial quarters of three sitting MLAs and one former MLA. All the MLAs were from the ruling Congress party. Incriminating documents, extortion notes and disassembled parts of a M-16 Rifle and live bullets were also recovered from the same premises.
What these MLAs said in their defence subsequently makes for a good leisure reading. One reportedly denied, point blank, that he harbored militants, notwithstanding the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Another said that he was just trying in his own way to bring back the bailed-out militants into the national mainstream. Doesn’t someone in higher authority earlier call them ‘misguided youths’ and not militants, he queried. As for the weapon, one MLA reportedly clarified that since the police had recovered it from a septic tank he shared with some other MLAs, it would be totally unfair to attribute the same only to him!!
But it was the CM Ibobi Singh who wins hands down, as always. When the Imphal Free Press asked him on August 23 what he will do about it, the honorable chief minister who has just returned from Delhi replied that there is an ‘investigation’ on, and that it is unfair for him to comment. He did mumbled something to the effect that they, the people’s representatives, should not ‘repeat’ such practices (of giving residence to outlawed militants) in the future!! As far as I know, no action whatsoever has been taken against the MLAs till date.
Where do the blame for the mess rest? On February 4, just before assembly elections, I made an impassioned plea in these columns to the people to vote the Ibobi government out. On February 18, I wrote again that we just cannot afford another five years with the present government (The articles are still available at zogam.com). This government had been around since 2002 and we all know what its record was. So, there is no use pretending that we don’t know they will be like this when we re-elect them to power.
So, when we did vote in February, we did so with our eyes open. And we voted the Congress government back to power. We elected Ibobi Singh, not from one, from two constituencies– one of which he set aside later for his wife. So, my simple question today is: Why Grumble? What else do we expect from this government when we voted them back in the first place? Who else is there to blame? And to think that there is more than four years still to go.......
As I log onto the Manipur news website Kanglaonline.com on August 29, I came face to face with the following headline stories: ‘Suspended BSEM Jt Secy Nandakumar shot in the leg’ by the proscribed KYKL; ‘Petroleum products run out of stock’ in the state; ‘NH 53 transporters threaten to stop service’, and ‘6 state NGOs come together to form a task group on drugs scarcity in the state’.
fOn Nandakumar, the KYKL had, as is their wont, called a press meet in which the accused official ‘confessed’ to his crimes, after which he was shot and left for police to pick up. Much of the long list of crimes he had allegedly committed seemed verifiable. The KYKL had actually given us the list of people who were fraudulently given jobs at the instance of Nandakumar. He ought to be punished if he is guilty-as should be anyone else-but not in this manner and definitely not by an outlawed body. But, will he ever be found out and punished, had the KYKL not come in?
As for the scarcity of petroleum products, especially petrol and LPG, it is a familiar story. Extortions on the transporters and agents have always been there, and quite a few trucks have already been burnt and drivers harassed. They have long sought security from the state, but that was one other commodity as rare as petroleum products in our state today. In the face of excessive extortion by not just one, but many militant groups, the transporters could not resume service and hence the scarcity.
Well, extortion on petroleum traders may be considered par for the course in Manipur, but life saving drugs? But there it was. The NGO forum, comprising of six organizations, was trying to find a way to get essential drugs into the state–somehow. Pharmaceutical companies had not dared come into the state due to extortions for sometime now. Can we blame them? And what did the state government do? I was told that CM Ibobi Singh is doing all he can, which is to repeatedly appeal to the companies to come in anyway!!
And oh, there was also NH 53, the state’s second lifeline which is about to be shut down again. But here, Ibobi Singh and his cohorts can breathe perhaps a little easier. Because , according to the news report, this was not just due to extortion-even though it is the major reason- but also ‘bad road conditions’. By Manipur’s standards, we can’t blame the government for bad road conditions in the same measure we can blame it for extortions, can we?
But, if there is one thing these news headlines–and there were many others in smaller print–on a single day tells us, it is this: the state law and order apparatus has collapsed. Completely.
And there is one more. Remember August 17 when the Police conducted raids on the Ministerial bungalows at Babupara? In this chaos, many of us may have forgotten it already. Well, on that day, 12 underground militant cadres were arrested from inside the Ministerial quarters of three sitting MLAs and one former MLA. All the MLAs were from the ruling Congress party. Incriminating documents, extortion notes and disassembled parts of a M-16 Rifle and live bullets were also recovered from the same premises.
What these MLAs said in their defence subsequently makes for a good leisure reading. One reportedly denied, point blank, that he harbored militants, notwithstanding the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Another said that he was just trying in his own way to bring back the bailed-out militants into the national mainstream. Doesn’t someone in higher authority earlier call them ‘misguided youths’ and not militants, he queried. As for the weapon, one MLA reportedly clarified that since the police had recovered it from a septic tank he shared with some other MLAs, it would be totally unfair to attribute the same only to him!!
But it was the CM Ibobi Singh who wins hands down, as always. When the Imphal Free Press asked him on August 23 what he will do about it, the honorable chief minister who has just returned from Delhi replied that there is an ‘investigation’ on, and that it is unfair for him to comment. He did mumbled something to the effect that they, the people’s representatives, should not ‘repeat’ such practices (of giving residence to outlawed militants) in the future!! As far as I know, no action whatsoever has been taken against the MLAs till date.
Where do the blame for the mess rest? On February 4, just before assembly elections, I made an impassioned plea in these columns to the people to vote the Ibobi government out. On February 18, I wrote again that we just cannot afford another five years with the present government (The articles are still available at zogam.com). This government had been around since 2002 and we all know what its record was. So, there is no use pretending that we don’t know they will be like this when we re-elect them to power.
So, when we did vote in February, we did so with our eyes open. And we voted the Congress government back to power. We elected Ibobi Singh, not from one, from two constituencies– one of which he set aside later for his wife. So, my simple question today is: Why Grumble? What else do we expect from this government when we voted them back in the first place? Who else is there to blame? And to think that there is more than four years still to go.......
