The cries of Manipuri women can be ignored due to the ‘insignificance’ of Manipur in the ‘national’ scene. Even before it held its own first elections, the Indian Union had managed to dismiss the elected government of Manipur led by the PrajaShanti party. The Congress had fought those elections of Manipur and lost. Manipur, with an elected government and at that point not an integral part of the Union, was annexed by the Union of India, which was still not a Republic. Original sins often create particularly bad ulcers. Excision is not an option for a ‘modern nation state’. ‘Insignificant’ ulcers bleed on as the rest of the body is on painkillers, reading history and civics dutifully from official textbooks.

The focus on the US presidential election also focused on the elections to the US Congress and the Senate. The US Congress is analogous to the Lok Sabha. But the USA is a nation constituted by a real respect to states rather than a semantic charade in the name of federalism. Hence its upper house, the Senate is different from the Rajya Sabha. In the lower house of countries, the numbers of seats are meant to be proportional to the population. This represents that conception of the country state that gives precedence to the territorial whole. This whole is an arbitrary and ahistorical legal instrument, though much time and money is spent in the Indian Union to create its fictional past. The upper house in the USA represents that strand where differing trajectories and identities are represented in the form of states. The states form the ‘United’ States of America – hence in the Senate, the unit is the state, not the individual citizen. Hence in the US Senate, each state, irrespective of population, has 2 members. This respects diversity of states and acts as a protection against the domination of more populous states and ensures that every state is an equal stakeholder. In the Indian Union, the so-called ‘Rajya Sabha’ is largely a copy of the Lok Sabha, with multiple temporally staggered offsets. At its core, the Rajya Sabha does not represent a different kind of stakeholding than the Lok Sabha. Rajyas are not the unit in the Sabha of Rajyas, making a mockery of the name itself. Manipur has one representative in a Rajya Sabha of 245 members. No people think of themselves as ‘lesser’ for being fewer in number. A federal democratic union is not only for the children of Bharatmata, for no one’s mata is less important than someone else’s mata.

The regions of the Indian Union have diverse pasts, some of which have hardly ever been intertwined with the ‘centre’, however defined. This also means that concerns, aspirations and visions of the future also differ based on a region’s perceived attitude towards a monolithic ‘whole’. A federal democratic union is one that does not discriminate between aspirations and is rather flexible enough to accommodate differing aspirations. Rather than using ‘unity in diversity’ as an anxious mantra of a paranoid monolith, one might want to creatively forge a unity whose first step is the honest assessment of diversity by admitting that the Indian Union is really a multi-national nation-state.

Sharmila’s struggle is failing partly because in this fight for dignity of the Manipuri people, the constitution drowns the voice of the victim in the crowd of the apathetic and the indifferent, inside and outside the legislative chambers of Delhi. Violence then becomes for some a way to be heard above the high decibel ritual chants of the ‘idea of India’. Ideologically vitiated ‘national’ school syllabi and impunity of military forces do not produce unity - it produces a polarization between unity and diverse dignities. There is no unity without the constitutive parts’ dignity. A creative re-conceptualization of the distribution of representation and power in the Indian Union may show that one does not necessarily need to choose between the unity and diversity. (IPA Service)