The failures on the performance front have made the government focus on enforcement rather than applying Rationality to think over the why of poverty in performance. The Go To Hills was an approach without a framework and a process for shared transformation. Naturally, it has turned out to be nothing more than a hegemonic exercise. Then came the Liquor decision and the wastage of visits of diplomats for emphasising Liquor decision.
By Amar Yumnam
We need to recall at this socio-political time of Manipur at least the Age of Enlightenment with its accompanying qualities of secularism and emphasis of methodologies of science to understand things laid the foundation for the Industrial Revolution in England and France. In other words, Reason became the foundation for deciding on things rather than anything else during the period of the Enlightenment and the qualitative causality for modern civilisation to emerge first in Europe. As John Pollock wrote (1974) in his book Knowledge and Justification (p.340): “It is only the characterisation of a priori truth in terms of our logical intuitions that succeeds in clarifying this concept to such an extent that we can begin to assess some of the traditional views regarding it.” This is what is called Rationality.
This Rationality has been the foundation of the continuance of humans on this planet. This is very strongly re-emphasised in Steven Pinker’s just published book (2021) Rationality: What It is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters: “Homo sapiens means wise hominin, and in many ways, we have earned the specific epithet of our Linnaean binomial. Our species has dated the origin of the universe, plumbed the nature of matter and energy, decoded the secrets of life, unravelled the circuitry of consciousness, and chronicled our history and diversity. We have applied this knowledge to enhance our own flourishment, blunting the scourges that immiserated our ancestors for most of our existence… Even when the ancient bane of pestilence rose up anew in the twenty-first century, we identified the cause within days, sequenced its genome within weeks, and administered vaccines within a year, keeping its death toll to a fraction of those of historic pandemics.” Now Pinker also admits that the “cognitive wherewithal to understand the world and bend it to our advantage is not a trophy of Western civilisation; it’s the patrimony of our species.”
The heritage of rationality has been very wonderfully established by the studies of the San of the Kalahari Desert by Louis Liebenberg; Liebenberg’s works – The Art of Tracking and The Origin of Science (1990) and The Origin of Science: The Evolutionary Roots of Scientific Reasoning and Its Implications for Tracking Science (2013/2021) – are now necessary reads for any educated person. He follows the rationality principle in his tracking studies and found it to have been followed by the San as well. The principle is: “According to a popular misconception, ‘nature is like an open book’ to the expert tracker and such an expert needs only enough skill to ‘read everything that is written in the sand’. A more appropriate analogy would be that the expert tracker must be able to ‘read between the lines’. Trackers themselves cannot read everything in the sand. Rather, they must be able to read into the sand. To interpret tracks and signs trackers must project themselves into the position of the animal in order to create a hypothetical explanation of what the animal was doing. Tracking is not strictly empirical, since it also involves the tracker’s imagination. Generally speaking, one may argue that science is not only a product of objective observation of the world through sense perception. It is also a product of the human imagination. A creative hypothesis is not found or discovered in the outside world; it comes from within the human mind.”
The survival of the San is to be attributed to their “scientific mindset. They reason their way from fragmentary data to remote conclusions with an intuitive grasp of logic, critical thinking, statistical reasoning, causal inference, and game theory.”
Looking at the world as a whole, a reference to the Silk Road may appeal to the people of Manipur; the old Silk Road. But the Silk Road today is of a different kind of fibre. Jonathan Hillman’s recent book titled The Digital Silk Road: China’s Quest to Wire the World and Win the Future (2021) is a very good exposition of the present trend of competition the world is in: “China has become not only the biggest of big brothers but also the world’s largest provider of communications technology. Huawei has operations in more than 170 countries, but it is hardly China’s only digital giant. Two Chinese companies, Hikvision and Dahua, churn out nearly 40 per cent of the world’s surveillance cameras. Hengtong Group supplies 15 percent of the world’s fibre optics and is one of the world’s four suppliers of submarine cables, which carry 95 percent of international data. China’s global navigation satellite system, Beidou, provides more extensive coverage over 165 of the world’s capital cities than does America’s GPS.”
I have a reason for mentioning the instances of Rationality and Contemporary Global Race for Future Dominance in two recent happenings in Manipur. One is the recent governance craze for Liquor, and the other is the recent visit by a Team of Mission Heads of Indian Embassies. The Government of the State should have occupied herself to articulate a rationale for the Liquor decision; the pronouncement that income from alcohol would be the foundation for development trajectories for Manipur is ridiculous of the highest order. We understand that diplomats create war, work for peace and things like that. The very fact that they came in a group is not something which can happen often. Given the present global race for assuring the future and the very fact that India’s South East Asian connection can best be done through the prism of the North East and Manipur, the only rational thing would have been to deliberate and work on a framework for transforming the historical relationships info a foundation for shared development by working on social-sector relationships; this social sector perspective is important given the demographic, cultural and historical linkages.
While the liquor decision has made the people of Manipur feel pessimistic about the government, it has now been coupled by the negativity of the Government. In the beginning, the Government seemed oriented towards Positivity – Go to the Hills -, but now it is oriented towards Negativity – Limiting the Number of Children to Four (without any rational foundation). The failures on the performance front have made the government focus on enforcement rather than applying Rationality to think over the why of poverty in performance. The Go To Hills was an approach without a framework and a process for shared transformation. Naturally, it has turned out to be nothing more than a hegemonic exercise. Then came the Liquor decision and the wastage of visits of diplomats for emphasising Liquor decision.
Well, it is no time for Liquoring for Manipur. It is time for deliberating, articulating and evolving a Public Policy with clear Social Objectives founded on Rationality and alive to the prevailing global scenario.
(Amar Yumnam is Visiting Professor at CESS: Hyderabad)