It is strange but true. The ripples of globalisation can even shake up the budget of an impoverished state like Manipur which practically has no direct trade or commercial links anywhere outside of the boundary of India. Even within India, the reach of the state’s commercial activities do not extend too far beyond the state’s own boundaries. Yet, the finance minister in charge, the chief minister Okram Ibobi yesterday in his speech in the Assembly presenting a tentative budget estimate for 2009-2010, had to make a specific mention of how the current recession in the global economy is likely to adversely affect Manipur’s own annual budget. So it does seem you can run but you cannot hide from the relentless onslaught of globalisation, regardless of whether you belong to the most forgotten corner of the earth.
But the effect of globalisation that the chief minister admittedly is apprehensive of is interesting for more reasons than merely the fact that the ripples of globalisation today are omnipresent. He spelled out in the most unambiguous terms how Manipur is a surrogate economy of the larger Indian economy with little control over its own fate. In this sense, this surrogate economy would also be a surrogate victim of the global financial crisis when it hits the Indian economy, which has in many ways come to be married to the global economy like all other major economies of the world.
Perhaps the chief minister was sending out a harsh but nonetheless unavoidable message. This is the reality of Manipur’s economy. This is the Manipur of the real world, stripped of all the illusions and myths. However much we may dislike it, this reality has to be the building block from which the future of Manipur has to be raised, and not from the conflations fashioned to inflate self ego, and with it, a false sense of well being. The hard fact is, nearly 90 percent of Manipur’s annual revenue receipts consist of transfers from the Centre. A percentage of this fund of course would be the real entitlement of Manipur for it too contributes to this Central pool of revenue by way of taxes, some direct but most of it indirect.
This is to say, if Manipur’s economy were to be delinked from the larger Indian economy, its annual revenue receipt would be a little over 10 percent of what has come to be the general size of its annual budget. That is, the 10 percent that it is able to raise as of now, plus the direct and indirect Central taxes which go to the Central pool currently. It is for this reason that there is no real pride in the state government’s vaunt that the state economy has grown by over 9 percent in the last year. It literally means there has been a raise in the Central dole to the state by 9 percent and not the state’s gross domestic product, SGDP, has improved by as much percentage.
This is the reality the state and its people have to come to grip with, not by way of surrendering to an overwhelming sense of helplessness and hopelessness, but by a refreshed determination to overcome this predicament and thereby become self reliant. This process has to begin with and acknowledgement of what the chief minster’s interim budget speech pointed out yesterday. The state is poor, and as of now it stands on Central prop. It has to also acknowledge there is no dignity in poverty as much as there is no real dignity in living on charity. The latter is the lesser evil, but it is nonetheless an evil that we have to overcome somehow someday. In writing of social trauma and its therapy, social psychologists make a distinction between what they call “working through” and “working over” a traumatic chapter in a society’s or community’s history (Dominick La Capra: Writing History, Writing Trauma). In “working through” a traumatic chapter, you identify with the problem and grapple with it in order to put it in perspective and then get along with life. In “working over” you find means to escape from confronting the problem and believe falsely this is a solution. Sadly, you also end up perpetuating the problem.
“Working over” is often associated with “mourning” whereby you identify and get into the soul of a traumatic event but at the same time maintain a distance so that you can move on (I was there and I will not betray that memory but I have to live on). Likewise, “working over” is associated with a condition they call “melancholia” – a narcissistic engagement in which the trauma itself becomes the source of a perverted pleasure, and in the process make yourself a perpetual victim. Quite uneasily, Manipur is far too often inclined towards the latter condition.