Skip to main content

Manipur is a Portend

From India Today
Knights in Shining Armour

Narendra Modi visited the Northeast of his kingdom more than 60 times after he crowned himself as the emperor of India-to-be-renamed-as-Hindustan. Travel is one of his countless passions and hence the number 60 need not bother us. The only place left on the earth for him to visit is Timbuctoo. It is rumoured that he wanted to go to the moon on the latest edition of Chandrayan but the scientists were not quite sure of whether their thing would land in Pakistan mistaking it for the moon. The scientists who made that rocket went to the Tirupati temple to ask Venkateswara (Modi may not know that Hindu God yet!) to direct the rocket scientifically to the moon instead of Pakistan.

At that time Modi was in France preaching peace to the world. Om shanti. Let there be peace, said Modi to France. And Manipur burnt.

Manipur has to burn for the sake of world peace. Narendra Modi is the name of the last incarnation of God, according to the latest Hindu mythology. He has a solution for all problems because he is God. Manipur is his way of solving India’s problem of diversity.

Diversity is difficult to control. If everything is the same, life would be very easy. Just imagine all human beings being like Narendra Modi. Such lovely people. All Narendra Modis. One nation One beard.

One nation One religion is what Manipur portends, thanks to Modi ji.

Manipur has an interesting history. It was never a Hindu state. The people there were all tribals. One day, a king in one part of what became Manipur later decided to become Hindu for political reasons. Kings belong to a species called politicians. Their DNA is quite different from that of ordinary mortals and entirely different from that of intelligent human beings. They decide to become Hindu or whatever just like that. Like a snap of your finger.

I’m digressing. Let’s get back to the story.

This guy, a Meitei king, became a Hindu. He must have been forced to do so by the sheer politics of the time. Or maybe he was enlightened. Who knows? Let Modi’s historians make up a narrative. Anyway, as far as we know, this guy became a Hindu and forced all his tribe to become Hindus. Hardly anyone has the spine to stand up to say No to a king. So the Meiteis became Hindus. But the other tribes like Kukis and Nagas of the region retained their religions.

Now 53% of Manipur’s population are Meiteis. 40% are Kukis and Nagas. These Kukis and Nagas chose Christianity just as the Meiteis chose Hinduism. Convenience. Survival. Moving on.

How do you move on in a world of Ambanis and Adanis and Modis and Amit Shahs?

If they use god as a tool, you bring your god or any powerful god into the arena. What else? Prove whose god is more powerful.

300 plus churches of Christians were burnt down in Manipur. It means that the Christian god is impotent in front of Modi’s politics. That’s just what Modi wants to prove. He is the next god. The only god. The only saviour of the world. Viswaguru. Viswanath. Hats off to him, guys and gaals!

It’s good to have Modi as our god. He has no demands other than that we all should worship him. You can do whatever you like after that. Just donate some of your profits to Modiji’s funds. That’s all. Donations can be in the form of GST also. Once you do that, you can do whatever you want. Whatever! You can even kill.

India’s Home Minister Amit Shah spent three days in Manipur and the killings started after that. Kill. That’s the legacy of the ancient Indian civilisation. Have you read the last statement of Mahatma Gandhi’s killer? If you haven’t, don’t worry; it’s coming in the school syllabus next year. You can read it. But the rising prices of food items may mean that you won’t survive to the next year. Even tomatoes can kill!

People with vegetarian causes are the best killers.

They go around preaching peace to the world.

In the latest of his umpteen visits to America, Modi ji said that India is the Mother of Democracy. Manipur was burning then. In Australia, Modi ji demanded protection for Hindu temples. Christian churches were burning in Manipur at that time. He demanded peace from the world in Paris last week when his own country was killing and killing and killing.

Killing in Manipur.

Manipur is a portend.

They were tribal people with their own gods and rituals. One king became Hindu and his people became Hindus. The others became Christians later for similar reasons – survival, in simple terms. If you have the freedom to become a Hindu, why not give someone else the freedom to become whatever $*1t he or she wants to become?

Manipur is the answer to that question. You can’t become anything in today’s India other than what Modi ji and Amit Shaji want you to become. Become their puppets.  And nothing more.

Nothing more than puppets.

That’s what Manipur teaches us.

 

Labels:

Comments

  1. magiceyeJuly 16, 2023 at 7:16 PM

    Brilliant thought scary assessment of the situation. Well done!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 16, 2023 at 9:02 PM

      There's reason for optimism: the worst is yet to come.

      Delete
  2. Rajeev MoothedathJuly 19, 2023 at 11:52 AM

    This was quite informative for me. Thanks.

    ReplyDelete
  3. जितेन्द्र माथुरJuly 21, 2023 at 9:27 AM

    Your satire has hit the nail right on its head. Modi has no demands other than that we all should worship him (other demands have already been met by his holding on to the political power in India which brings all the luxuries and mortal joys to him). The heart of every sensitive person bleeds for Manipur. Modi and his trusted lieutenant Shah are not among the sensitive ones. May God (if He exists) save Manipur and the innocents suffering there.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 21, 2023 at 11:11 AM

      Now when the situation has become irreparable, Modi has started making some noise like pointing out some violence happening in Congress-ruled states. His only solution : compare and contrast & justify himself.

      Delete
    2. जितेन्द्र माथुरJuly 22, 2023 at 4:52 PM

      Observing his record, nothing else could be expected from him. Expecting even an iota of sensitivity from the Pradhaan Sewak of India will be just like asking for the moon. That the supreme court has taken cognizance of the state of things in Manipur is the only positive emerged from an ocean of negativity. Let's hope, the apex court will compel the government machinery to do the right things lying pending for months.

      Delete
  4. CareenaAugust 3, 2023 at 12:57 PM

    Loved this piece. It was emphatic, as the hour needs it to be.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more

Mother Mary Comes to Me

Book Review In one of the first pages of this book, the author cautions us to “read this book as you would a novel.” No one can remember the events of their lives accurately. Roy says that “most of us are a living, breathing soup of memory and imagination … and we may not be the best arbiters of which is which.” What you remember may not be what happened exactly. As we get on with the painful process called life, we keep rewriting our own narratives. The book does read like a novel. Not because Roy has fictionalised her and her mother’s lives. The characters of these two women are extremely complex, that’s why. Then there is Roy’s style which transmutes everything including anger and despair into lyrical poetry. There’s a lot of pain and sadness in this book. The way Roy narrates all that makes it quite a classic in the genre of memoirs. The book is not so much about Roy’s mother Mary as about that mother’s impact on the daughter’s very being. Arundhati was born in the undivided ...
14 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more

Insecurity and Exclusivism

“ Hindu khatare mein hai.” This was one of the first slogans that accompanied the emergence of Narendra Modi on the national scene. It means Hindus are in Danger . It reveals a deep-rooted feeling of insecurity. Hindus constitute an overwhelming majority in India – 80%. All the high positions in governance, judiciary, academics, any significant place, are occupied by Hindus. Yet the slogan was born. Strange? It will be facile to argue that Modi used this slogan and its concomitant hatred of Muslims and Christians as a political weapon for winning votes. True, he was successful in that; he rose to the highest political post in the country using minority-bashing. But the hatred did not end with that achievement; rather it spread outward and became more exclusive. Muslim and European rulers of India were booted out from the country’s history books and wherever else possible like the names of roads and institutions. With vengeance. Now there is a concerted effort going on to place In...
10 comments
Read more