Two years since the breakdown of one of the most violent ethnic clashes in Independent India, we are yet to realize our ways towards normalcy. In this light discuss the ethical issues pertaining in an ethnic conflict. What should be the role of the state in ensuring peace and harmony in such cases?
Two years since the ethnic conflict began, Manipur has been buried in silence. The events of May 2023, have long vanished from the nation’s front pages. Yet the fires that consumed lives, homes, churches, temples and the fragile illusion of coexistence continue to smoulder, sometimes in fresh assaults, more often in the quieter brutality of neglect.
Ethical issues during such ethnic conflicts:
- Ethical issues in ethnic conflict arise from the violation of fundamental human rights, the potential for genocide and crimes against humanity, and the disruption of social order and economic stability.
- Human Rights violations:
- Ethical Dilemmas for Civil Servants:
- Dual loyalty: Civil servants from different ethnic backgrounds may face a dilemma between their professional obligations and their loyalty to their ethnic group, potentially affecting their impartiality.
- Safety concerns vs. duty: Officers in conflict zones may face safety threats due to their ethnicity, leading to psychological stress and hindering their ability to perform their duties.
- Maintaining impartiality: It is crucial for civil servants to maintain impartiality and neutrality, particularly in conflict situations, ensuring that their actions do not exacerbate tensions or favor one ethnic group over another.
- Civil servants face dilemmas balancing their duties with loyalty to their ethnic group, and the need for impartiality in conflict zones.
- These issues also include the impact on mental health and well-being of officers, and the need for transparency and accountability in decision-making.
- Impact on Social Order and Economic Stability:
- Displacement and refugee flows: Ethnic conflicts often lead to large-scale displacement and refugee flows, creating humanitarian crises and strain on resources in host countries.
- Economic decline and state failure: Conflicts can disrupt economic activities, lead to the collapse of state institutions, and undermine long-term development.
- This may lead to a society of low ethical and moral values, where survival is primary and everything else shall wait!
- Extreme actions completely lacking empathy, compassion, moral conscience, etc.
- Violations of fundamental rights: Ethnic conflicts often lead to the violation of basic human rights, including the right to life, security, and freedom from discrimination.
- Genocide and crimes against humanity: In extreme cases, ethnic conflicts can escalate into genocide and other crimes against humanity, such as mass murder, rape, and torture.
An underperformance on the side of the state?
- State has been given the authority for upholding moral, legal, political and social order. But the prevailing circumstances even till today convey only an underperformance from the state’s side.
- With over 60,000 people remaining displaced, more than 200 killed, vast swathes of land lying abandoned, people continuing to live in camps, an entire generation now risks growing up in the wreckage of promises long broken.
- There is no discernible roadmap for reconciliation. No public articulation of what a political solution might entail, no institutional architecture for truth-telling, reparations, or justice. Commissions of inquiry function as a delaying tactic rather than a mechanism of redress.
- The judiciary has moved very slowly and the political executive has mostly resorted to silence than solution.
- In this sense, Manipur is not just a site of suffering. It is a mirror that reflects, with cruel clarity, the deepening asymmetries: Between centre and periphery, spectacle and substance, citizenship as legal fiction and citizenship as lived experience.
- There has been no national mourning. No ceremonial acknowledgement of collective failure. The constitutional morality that Ambedkar once insisted must animate our institutions has been replaced by bureaucratic minimalism, a state that does the least it must and rarely what it ought.
But is it only the State that has failed?
- There are no mass protests in metropolitan cities across India. No sustained media attention that treats the crisis with the gravity it deserves.
- Manipur bleeds silently because we have constructed a moral geography of the nation where some lives are proximate and others disposable, where grief is a privilege and empathy a rationed commodity.
- Perhaps this is the most dangerous development of all: The normalisation of abandonment. When suffering is localised and containment becomes a strategy, the state begins to forget that legitimacy is not enforced; it is earned.
- This would only lead to a world where order is prized above justice and optics above truth.
Way towards a peaceful harmonious society:
- Yet, to focus only on administrative failure would be to miss a deeper malaise: The erosion of the moral. The Republic is not merely a structure of governance. It is a promise, a commitment to mutual recognition, equality of dignity, and the idea that no citizen shall be invisible to the state.
- Withdrawal of violent means by the protestors; Pursue a way of constitutional means of struggle.
- The state should advocate deweaponization of the masses, encouraging them into alternate peaceful means of struggle by establishing strong and neutral problem specific institutions.
- Citizens all over the country should realize their responsibility and channelize the enormous voice of the so far silent nation in democratic ways forcing the state and the perpetrators of violence.
“Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.” – Albert Einstein
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