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Bartering the Dead: 9 Bodies Awaiting Burial for 365 days

kishalay bhattacharjee manipur
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First Published Aug 30, 2016, 11:40 AM IST

India has been a land of a “million mutinies” that meander through the nation from the lanes of Jantar Mantar in Delhi to a hospital jail ward in Imphal. Every corner of this country is bristling with awareness and anarchy.

 

People are constantly fighting for “their rights” and in most cases, basic rights. Like most things here, protests too are long drawn and often violent.

 

One group pitted against another and in that vicious cycle of hatred as Naipaul would say, “Every group thought itself unique in its awakening; and every group sought to separate its rage from the rage of other groups.”

 

In the long list of protests, one of the most macabre is in the town of Churachandpur in Manipur where nine bodies in boxes kept in the morgue await burial for the last one year, caught in a deadly politics of identity and assertion.

 

Every day, for the past year, prayers have been held outside the morgue. They were killed protesting against three bills that were brought by the state government to calm down another protest in the Imphal valley for Inner Line Permit.

 

The protests had turned violent and the police opened fire. In some videos circulated then, shots were fired without provocation as well. The protestors now want a separate state.

 

Protests in Manipur have always been intense and epic in their proportions. Irom Sharmila has just ended a 16-year-long fast and in the past the state has been paralysed with various demonstrations for months together.

 

The highway connecting Imphal to Kohima and one of the lifelines of the state has witnessed annual shutdown for months even causing hospital ICUs to suspend operations.

 

Rows and rows of women in mourning in makeshift protest camps dot the landscape of the state; for abduction, for killing or a disappearance. Conflict has very deep dysfunctional impact in the society and it becomes virtually impossible to shake the collective consciousness out of it.

 

But this is unprecedented when the dead are being used for the demands of the living.

 

The Inner Line Permit, a Colonial era system that requires visitors including Indians to acquire a special permit to enter the state. To calm tempers the state government in 2015 had passed Protection of Manipur People’s Bill, the Manipur Land Revenue and Land Reform (7th Amendment) Bill, and the Manipur Shops and Establishments (Second Amendment) Bill.

 

These Bills gave the government power to determine who a Manipuri is, based on when a person entered the state, with 1952 as the cutoff year (Manipur became a state in 1972).

 

The tribals vehemently opposed to the Valley imposition fearing that the Bills passed to apparently protect their interests, in real terms would take their land and property away.

 

The Bills were not ratified but the hills wouldn’t bury their dead. Now all they want is to break away. Meanwhile this summer, Imphal Valley has renewed their demand.

 

Manipur has far too many issues that the state government has been sitting on and the central government has been indifferent to. Everything cannot be buried under the alibi of insurgency and poor governance.

 

If 16 years of non-violent protest by a woman in fast failed to move the corridors of power, it is unlikely that the anniversary of the so called ‘tribal unity day’ will find any takers in the government.

 

The civil society must find new methods that are effective in shaking the conscience of powerbrokers without holding everyday lives of the citizen to ransom.  

 

Kishalay Bhattacharjee is a senior journalist and author. His most recent book is Blood on my Hands: Confessions of Staged Encounters (Harper Collins 2015). The views expressed here are his own.

 

 

 

 

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