Journalistic Orphans

The headlines making race in Imphal’s newspaper is an interesting observe. There is a growing feeling that many a times it left behind deserving news and issues of the hill districts, which is unexplained. It doesn’t need any explanation for that matter. However, it is always compelled to accommodate as news when it is overblown. But when it could reach Imphal, though lately, which is due to compelled “inaccessibility”, the stale news is contested and questioned. The popular game always takes the front seat while the voiceless and helpless victims are cornered in the backseat. I realized that we have been acculturating the game of contesting and questioning of our own people’s sufferings. There are strong unwanted reasons for the adopted culture. One, the truth is too inconvenient. Second, the absence of convenient accessibility and connectivity makes it difficult for the news to reach Imphal, which is the place that matters, if the sufferings of the helpless lot are to be converted into news or issue. Thirdly, the inability for any local reporter to track news or issues and reach the affected areas in the hills. That’s almost unimaginable in most of the situations. Unfortunately, if the late arrival of the news cannot be strengthened by some sort of popular ex-pression in the form of protest, dharna, bandh or strike, the gravity of the situation is ignored if not negated. On the other hand, the local newspaper in several dialects/languages that are available in the hill districts failed to deliver anything to the larger population.

There are many questions attached to our adopted culture. Are we doing what we are doing because we have communalised issues? Or ethnicised issues? This could be reason where we have practically stopped seeing the collective representation of issues and sufferings of the voiceless people from the fringe areas. If there is something called the clash of civilizations in the global village outside Manipur, the evidence of the clash of understanding the gap created by our own imposing geography, diverse culture and social realities is written large in our adopted culture. These are reasons that carve our embedded identities, where we live with another layers of unreason mentality. Unquestionable at times. This is when we allow two sides to grow and pitted them as if to watch the game of survival of the fittest. But such adversarial system has flaws that show no mercy to any miseries. In the process of the contest that actually get systematised, corruption creeps in where power of all sorts is exercised, leaving no space for truth or justice. It seems that adversarialism has become the predominant strand in Manipur. As a result, competitive contestation and questioning practices have become institutionalized norms in any public sphere. This always dimmed the prospect of identifying any constructive alternatives and options in this age of demanding interdependence, where we severely lacked. What we have failed to do is our inability to question the practice of adversarialism. We desperately try to play the winning game, if there is any, than see the real situations affecting the grass roots, which blinded us altogether.

Manipur is pregnant with different tribes and community who vary in their way of presenting plights and issues. The potentialities as well as the access to that are also one stark gap, which we must care to understand. This is when our situation demands a relook, not only into our realities but also in our human nature as well as social structure. For instance it is easy for anyone to bring anything to everyone’s attention in any constituency in the valley than in the hill constituencies for the simple reason of easy accessibilities and connectivity. For those constituencies in the hills where there is no road connectivity, newspaper or telephone, the village runner or crier still serves the means of inter-village communications even today. There is a tendency for the brilliant contesters to situate such realities to some African lives, but we should be reminded about such relevant practice in many hill districts of Manipur. The science of telephone, now that it has popularly become mobile, and its usage or the privilege of doorstep newspaper delivery is a thing of strange if not absent or new to these people who still barter many of their daily needs. Imagine a situation where the pulpit serves closest to something collective. Imagine a place where their elected representative come seeking for merciful votes once in five years on helicopter. They are people who still did not know that they are living with big news and issues. They did not know the importance of news or issue even. Many of them did not even know that they are living in Manipur or India. The village is a world to them.
Everything outside that remains as outsiders. They indulged in the absence of everything, if it could be. In that context, the resort to conventional evidences in the form of FIR or medical report in any situation that affects such people lives, dignity and rights reveals more of our ignorance than our intelligence in dealing with issues and matters that affects them. It is a scathe. The demand for such documents when many of the affected people have not even seen a police station or hospital is a big disgrace to their untold miseries. The approach is a deliberate exercise of shielding them from receiving the desired trust, understanding, sympathy, empathy or justice. They are at big loss. There is no winning for them. Even if they could, we created no room for it.

As a result news or issues, in the fringe hills and mountains of Manipur, about the loss of lives from landmines, displacement, sexual molestation and rape, malarial death, the horror of bamboo flowering, famine, unemployment, absence of law and order and governance, absence of welfare and development, primitive agricultural practise, and the absence of things that enhance degeneration remains unaddressed. Unaccomodated. Unrepresented. They just remain. Similarly, the serious issues of drug abuse, wildfire like spreading of HIV, gun culture, which is rampant in the more urban areas of Manipur also remains untouched. The issues as well as the affected people-journalistic orphans.