Aheli Moitra There is little joy in writing about Manipur anymore unless you are writing about the delicate Shirui Lily. But even writing on the latter could border on the bizarre these days. The Shirui Lily blooms between May and June each year, bringing spring with it. Custodians of the land, the people of Shirui village, who have seen this flower bloom each year, host the Shirui Lily week every year to promote preservation of the ecosystem in which the flower thrives. This slight pink Lily was “discovered” by a botanist in 1948 and declared the ‘state flower’ of Manipur state in 1989—the flower is endemic, or native, to the hills north east of Imphal valley. Not very far from the hills that host the Shirui Lily, lie the hills that host its cousin, the Dzukou Lily. Each lives undisturbed by the other, sharing geographical lineage. In these hills, it is hard to demarcate where Manipur ends and where Nagaland begins. Borders in this part of the world are seldom marked by what the centre of each of these states believes but by how the people residing in these areas do. As a result, the elected head of government of the state into which the Shirui Lily was co-opted is denied entry into the lands while the elected head of government of another state that finds itself sharing nativity of the Dzukou Lily is welcomed time and again. This is an intentional choice made by the people living in Manipur State, not just north of the valley but also south of it. Manipur’s elected representatives have long been unwelcome in Lamka, or Churachandpur, for instance. For 400 days, nine people who were shot and killed by the Manipur police have been left unburied by their families, pending justice to them and the communities they belong to. Despite being known for seeking human rights accountability, neither state nor non state actors of Imphal have approached the issue. This has led to a natural, and inevitable, coalition of peoples under the geographical banner of ‘Outer Manipur’ where justice has been pending for much longer than 400 days. The reservation (wrongful allocation) issue at Manipur University has only fed the angst and heightened tension. Local and national press coverage of ‘Outer Manipur’ related issues have almost died down over the 400 days after its initial violent attraction has subsided. Non violent forms of protest are just not good enough for attracting readership. Thus, with elections in Manipur approaching in 2017, it is time for politicians to warm themselves by the fire they have fueled. This has been the approach of the ruling dispensation in Manipur for more than a decade now. It has encouraged inter communal disharmony by fueling injustice and used one peoples against the other. On the other hand, it has quelled all pockets of friendship and solidarity that has been expressed through peoples’ initiatives of both ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ Manipur thereby creating renewed terms of division. Entrapped in each of their combs that make up the honeycomb called Manipur, people now look to use their votes to bring a new government to power. But a few more imaginative steps may be necessary to transform the situation in a way that Manipur may proceed from its borderlines driven approach of mutual suspicion to a peoples centric approach of mutual coexistence to transform the stagnant status quo of political thought—learning more from its lilies than its lines.
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