The recent one-day cease work strike by the media fraternity in the state over intimidation served to a journalist in Churachandpur by an underground organisation was a welcome show of solidarity of a profession which is so prone to similar attacks in this conflict ridden state. Needless to say the show of fraternity by this tribe was effective causing the particular underground organisation to tender an apology, thereby ending the standoff after a single day of newspapers going off the stands. This is all very well, but there is a larger issue involved. Nobody would be so naive to actually believe the vex issue of various armed groups coercing the media would have been resolved conclusively, and that the media in Manipur can actually begin calling itself independent, able to exercising freedom to assess and chronicle events in the way that it thinks are closest to the truth. Let there be no doubt whatsoever, although we wish we are wrong, that the media will no sooner be left again with no other option than to decide to resort to total silence in the face of similar situation. It is quite an irony that an institution which is precisely meant to be empowered by its voice is left to articulate its anguish on an incremental basis by silence.
The tragedy of the media and so many other liberal institutions, in places such as Manipur, torn by bitter and deadly conflict is precisely that they are liberal institutions meant to function in a liberal paradigm. When these liberal institutions are pitted against an illiberal environment, trouble can only be expected. One is reminded of the witty and yet incisive remark Sir Vidia S Naipaul, literature Nobel laureate made of Salman Rushdie’s unhappy predicament after Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, calling upon the faithful of Islam to kill him. Even as Rushdie was in hiding, Sir Vidia had said in an interview to Outlook magazine that the fatwa was a severe form of literary criticism. When he gave the interview, he had been nominated several times for the Novel, but had still not received it. There was also a sense at the time that he was not humoured by the general mood that Rushdie may be on way to dethrone him as an Indian expatriate literary achiever. The dark humour of the remark and his undisguised distaste for Rushdie’s works notwithstanding, the commentary on the psychology of an illiberal and authoritarian society was nothing short of remarkable.

Apart from everything else, the liberal civilisation must also be about sublimating conflicting ideas into rational debates. Victory in these debates must also rest with the consensuses that evolve out of them on what the rational answers to the issues contested are. Indeed, democracy has often been described to as rule by debate. It is true that rationality has not always been the winning criteria of political debates in a “democratic polity”, and often issues are simply pushed through by brute force of majority, demonstrating in the process another of what has often been referred to as “democracy deficit”. But this too is an indicator that liberalism has not fully internalised in those democracies where such recourses are common. Democracy and liberalism, it cannot also be forgotten, demand a respect for dissent. This respect entails the recognition that dissenting voices are not bogus, and could have won the democratic debates had they the right and adequate fuel to convince more on the rationality of their views.

We are however not talking about mere democracy deficits here. When the media (as also so many other essentially liberal institutions) are intimidated on the pain of loss of life and limb, to publish or not publish certain material, we are not talking about a deficit but of a total and blatant disregard of democracy. We are talking about an unarguably illiberal environment in which only the use of force is the effective language. When the understanding of civilised conduct and communication is stripped from any given situation, notions such as civilised debate also expectedly perish. In such a circumstance, the pen can no longer be mightier than the sword (gun), and would cease even to be a fair foil for the latter. Literary criticism, as Sir Vidia so insightfully and irreverently said, will no longer be by the pen, but by the gun. But this murder of liberal ethos is not just about those who wield the gun. Remember Manipur is also a land where boycotts are not exercises of individual volition to stay away from activities that he or she is repulsed by. Instead they are diktats, enforced on the pain of losing life and property. In the liberal transformation then, the responsibility must rest with everybody, and no doubt the intellectual community must be the torch bearers.