Negotiated Existence: Politics of the Denial of Life
HOMEN THANGJAM & PRAEM HIDAM
Life has become ‘unpredictable’ in Manipur. Unpredictability is becoming more of a sense of essentialising a denial of life as a rule than a denial of death in our contemporary experience. The notion of the denial of life is increasingly ingrained in the loss of human lives, not on account of biological odds, but ensuing from violent contrivances of killing. It has become an accepted norm where death becomes an event of both celebration to cordon off ‘disagreement’ and a conduct to challenge the ways in which the very notion of ‘existence’ is being negotiated.
The denial of life thus represents two main forms of power currently in operation in our society. First, a cluster of understandings, institutions and practices. They control any attempt to uncover the ‘truth’ and carry the potential of ‘unbalancing’ an already existing chaotic forms of social and political relations. Thus, many an ‘official’ and ‘unofficial inquiries’ ends up with more deaths – the erased witnesses to the other side of truth. This may be called a power of seizure, a seizure by the official discourses of the state including that of the non-state forces as well.
Second form of power pertains to the idea of ‘endeavors or movements’ as a response or rather a critique of the former, though being a part of the denial of life. This can be taken as a critique to the first form of power necessitated by the very rationale entailed in its own evolution. However, the seemingly ‘democratic’ voice other than putting a momentary binding spell on the people in the form of crippling normal flow of human traffic or halting supply of daily essentials ultimately wanes like the romantic moon. The nature in which the first form of power has consolidated easily unhinges such sporadic movements. Thus, ‘truths’ gets bartered with the ‘power to be’ and like the fabled Sirens, the reckoning power of the perpetrators of the violence lulls the agitating masses into a peaceful slumber. We may call this as power of redressal.
The interplay of these two forms of power forms the very axis around which a negotiated existence of the beings of our society revolves. As a consequence, we have an increasing population of parentless children, families without bread earners, a number of youths uncared for, scaring experiences of women who have lost husbands and cries of mothers who have lost children have now been gradually shaping a society of which we are only being progenitors.
What is that which is being negotiated in the piles of the dead bodies is unquestioned and unpalatably swallowed. Yet, the issue still remains. The denial of death is being negotiated. The ontological presence of the death that is being violently drawn on the body signifies the importance of the biological life of our body not as a message board but as the one which has been transformed into the space of political violence, the meeting point of the two forms of power. The body becoming a political institution in itself has been put into a greater pronouncement of its own relevancy within the technologies of the two currents of power in our society. What is followed is the rise of the power of a death-centered politics.
Recent most killing of three staff of the Office of the Sub-Divisional Officer, Kasom Khullen, Ukhrul District, must be taken as an opportunity to end the politics of power of seizure and raise the level of the politics of the power of redressal in order to enable us to overcome the denial of life. The critique presented by the second form of power can be more meaningful only when it has been able to acquire a transformative capacity in order to evolve a resistance movement to the first form of power that is the power of seizure. To illustrate the point further, let us examine the manner in which the state machinery has grappled the incident. It has already spelled out its tasks viz. the government in a single stroke has decided to initiate a CBI inquiry, grant ex-gratia, and employ the next kin of the deceased and so on. These are pretentious ploy to appease the aggrieved family and the mass in general. The moves of the government should be understood within the context of the first form of power. Quelling public discontent in the form of awarding monetary compensation is a Machiavellian craft to project its beneficial side while perpetuating its original form and the nexus. The present JAC in particular should be able to imbibe a firm stand on its capacity to evoke a powerful resistance to the above form of power and its articulations. The power of redressal to be a greater force of a democratic movement and address the question of change in the power politics of the land should firmly deny and resist the official understanding of the killing.
A concern with the histories of people’s movement against political killings and the invocation of the denial of death would demand an interrogation of any possible link between the government and the killers. Resistance to this kind of nexus as we have seen in many past instances will have to be another focus of the movement against the recent and the past killings. It will certainly lay a step towards tackling the political question of the vital and the necro of the land.
