Manipur CM Says ‘Will Walk The Extra Mile’

Imphal, Jun 6 : Its Manipur's longest highway blockade in recent memory and with the food and supply situation going from bad to worse the CM has agreed to walk the extra mile to break the deadlock.

"We are discussing not just financial powers even including delegation more admin power," said Ibobi Singh, Manipur Chief Minister.

When asked as to whether he is ready to concede to all the demands, he said, "No, there should be some limits but let them give us suggestions we have no hesitation to give any further amendment."

The fact that he is ready to walk that extra mile could be seen as the first indication of a possible breakthrough to the economic blockade imposed by Naga pressure groups in the hills of Manipur demanding greater autonomy.

Meanwhile the CM has passed on the responsibility to the Centre for hammering out a solution with these groups and the militant outfit NSCN(IM) supporting the blockade.

"I've repeatedly told the Centre that because of their talks we can't suffer. The Centre should be more serious, " the CM added.

The longest eco blockade in Manipur in recent memory was in 2005 a 52 day blockade, that record has now been broken but one of the most critical areas of concern for people is cooking gas which has run out. Whatever was available in the black-market for about Rs 1200 too has run out and so people have resorted to cooking with firewood or husk.

However, everyone doesn't have provision of cooking with firewood. 

Kavita, a Khumbong resident, says she needs to refill cooking gas urgently. " I have to manage a family of seven members, I need to cook for them. I am really worried," she said.

A convoy of six hundred trucks with essential commodities will be escorted over the weekend but for a state crippled under one of the longest economic embargo more political will be required to clear the blockades.

Watch Topless Bipasha Basu (NSFW)

It's an uncanny coincidence that just as Bipasha Basu announced her plans to join Twitter, an ad film featuring the bombshell sans clothes has surfaced on YouTube. The ad also features actor Vivek Oberoi.

The ad film was shot long time back as a part of an international assignment in 1999 when both the actors were working as models. It was a television commercial for the New York Lotto but was shot in India. The ad is directed by Ken Nahoum. The video is posted online by Tommy Kane, who was the art illustrator for this ad.

Mumbai Mirror quotes Bipasha's manager saying: "Bipasha had done this ad in 1999 when she was modelling for Ford Modelling Agency in New York. It was done as an international assignment and was meant for the international market. I don't know why such an old ad has surfaced now.

Everything said and done, Bipasha Basu and Vivek Oberoi share a wonderful chemistry in this ad.

Baichung Bhutia Calls For Peace in Manipur

Imphal, Jun 6 : India's football icon Baichung Bhutia speaks out on the tension in Manipur which is blockaded by the NSCN supporters for almost two months even as the state government deployed forces to keep Thuingaleng Muivah out.

"I hope there is peace in Manipur and Nagaland, because at the end of the day it's the common people who are suffering. I hope peace prevails and the people are not into trouble. Common person is suffering," Bhutia said.

Meanwhile, the state government has deployed state forces at Liyai Khunou and Jessami near the Nagaland border in Ukhrul district to prevent entry of NSCN-IM General Secretary Thuingaleng Muivah.

Official sources said today that about 200 police personnel and border security forces have been deployed at both the villages.

Muivah, who attempted to enter Manipur along the Imphal-Dimapur National Highway 39 last month by camping at Viswema in Nagaland, had moved to Pfutsero in that state in an attempt to cross into Ukhrul district via Jessami and Liyai Khunou.

The senior Naga rebel leader, who hails from Somdal in Manipur's Ukhrul district, left his village about 40 years ago to wage an armed struggle.

The state government and many civil organisations here were of the view that Muivah's attempt to enter Manipur would create communal disharmony as the main demand of the NSCN-IM now was to form a greaterNagaland by taking Naga-settled areas of Manipur with the present Nagaland state, official sources said.

Muivah on Friday wound up his camp at Visema village on the Nagaland-Manipur border where he had been camping since May 5 and went to Pfutsero, Nagaland's highest altitude town, 70 km away by road on a 'peace mission'.

Kids in The Pits

By Sanjib Kr Baruah

Shillong, Jun 6 : At 13, Badal Rai's days are filled with nightmares. Every day, early in the morning, he lowers himself into a one-metre-diameter hole in the ground and descends deep into the darkness below. With a torchlight fitted to one side of his head, the frail-framed boy crawls and starts digging with his pickaxe for coal - for Rs 200 a day. Welcome to the hellish world of Meghalaya's rat-hole mines, a place where the sun never rises.

Claustrophobia is a non-issue. Rai's fears are whether the deep burrow will cave in to bury him alive or whether he will be able to gasp for breath when water fills the narrow tunnel. In vain are his dreams of going back home with enough money to his parents in Nepal.

Tales of frequent accidents and deaths due to cave-ins of mine walls, sudden floods, falls in the pits and suffocation abound in these death holes, as do stories of quiet burials.

"In my five years here, I have seen and heard about countless accidents which occur with alarming regularity. Deaths are commonplace. There is no one to keep track. Everything is given a quiet burial here," says Purno Lama, a 34-year-old mine manager from Lad Rymbai, about 19 km away from Jowai, the district HQ of Jaintia Hills. "Children are preferred because the rat holes are small in size and it is not easy for large-sized adults to enter these tunnels," he says.

While the local media have often reported such accidents, it is difficult to quantify these accidents. The reason: coal mining is an unregulated activity in Meghalaya because of Sixth Schedule laws that permit private ownership. There are no registration laws for the labour employed nor are antecedents of the miners verified. With no documenting authority and lack of health facilities, almost all deaths and accidents go unreported.

"Getting the exact figure of deaths or accidents is impossible as none of the mines are government-registered. Whatever we know has come out through interactions with child miners and managers working in the coal pits," says Hasina Kharbhih, team leader of the Shillong-based Impulse NGO Network that has been doing seminal work on the child miners.

"During my last visit to a coal mine near 8 Kilo in Jaintia Hills on April 22, it was a child miner who passed on the information that an accident in his mine had killed a teenager just three days prior to my visit," she says.

Meghalaya is estimated to contain about 600 million tonnes of coal reserves. There are approximately 5,000 rat-mines, most of them located in the coal-rich Jaintia Hills in places like Lad Rymbai, Lad Sutnga, Bapung, Lakadong and Khliehriat.

The mines are of various shapes and sizes. Some are just a small and crude opening of one-metre diameter where Rai works, some have big openings of about 36 sq metres and are equipped with creaky bamboo ladders to the bottom of the shaft which can be about 500 feet deep with four rat-hole tunnels leading away at the bottom. It is to these narrow burrows that child miners are made to crawl to chip away at a coal seam.

These primitive rat holes pockmark much of Jaintia Hills' undulating landscape which must have been a sight to behold before the mad rush for coal raped the lush green region of its natural beauty.

"The inhuman conditions in the mines have to be seen to be believed. No medical facilities exist and safety equipment for the child miners is something never heard of. There is no water supply, no sanitation facilities," says Kharbhih.

Robbed of their childhood, the child miners are a submissive lot here because of threats, beatings and corporal punishments like being locked away in mine shafts in the darkness for long periods of time. In many cases, these children have been sold by their own relatives for as little as Rs 5,000.

Mine-owners deny the use of children in the mines. "No children are employed in the mines. They are like our own children, why will we push them to the mines," asks Wonderful Shullai, an owner of five working mines. But he keeps mum on being asked if he can vouch the same for all the mines.

[ via Hindustan Times ]

The Mobile Theatre That Rocks Assam

By Shreya Roy Chowdhury

Despite bomb blasts and terror attacks, the mobile theatre Kahinoor continues to be a runaway hit in the boondocks of Assam

Jatin Bora lives in rooms with gaping doorways, uses bathrooms with no basins and sleeps in beds without mattresses. But he earns a staggering Rs 39 lakh a season — 10 months — for his pains. Bora, 40, is the Shah Rukh Khan of the ‘mobile’ Kahinoor Theatre, which performs to packed houses in the remotest outposts of Assam.

Kahinoor Theatre is masala unlimited — dances, romantic romps, good-natured teasing, a dash of violence and, occasionally, a triple role for its lead man. The hero fights with friends, saves the heroine from villains, and defends his homeland in war. In the interiors of Assam, these plays stand in for films, the troupe performing at over 70 locations between August and April. They have even performed their own version of Ben Hur, Jurassic Park and Titanic, which ran for a record four years.

Itinerant it may be, but the 34-year-old outfit does not travel light: lights, tents, sets, cookingware and 2,100 chairs are carted from village to village. Last month, they performed for the first time outside Assam, in Delhi. The posters are unabashedly filmi, with the opening credits as long as any film’s. A mix of stock footage — horses, rapids, hills — forms the background. “Kahinoor Theatre” slips out from behind a rotating earth to take position in front — remember Universal? “We’re experts at chamak,” laughs the troupe’s 70-year-old producer, Ratan Lahkar. Special effects, such as they are, are almost entirely manual. Viewers can see both the hand moving the light and the trolleys used for backdrop changes.

Touring uninterrupted for months is a challenge . The hero may get respect and love from his fans but he still has to carry his bedding along. Where possible, Bora is allowed a luxury accommodation in a PWD guesthouse that may be as far as 15 km from the performance venue. His entourage consists of a driver for his Innova and a ‘caretaker’. Still, he could have done worse. At least he didn’t have to build his own toilet by placing bamboo poles over a pit. Lahkar, who shared that experience at Rampur with actor Mahananda Sarma in the 70s, relates with relish and helpless giggles the unfortunate incidents related to the makeshift contraption.

Poorly maintained cinema halls and frequent bomb blasts have affected the film industry, he says, but Kahinoor has flourished. One reason for this could be that Lahkar is daring in his choice of scripts, even introducing the classics to a rural audience. With a master’s in political science, he’s one of the first educated artistes to join mobile theatre and widen its horizons. Over the last three decades, Kahinoor has produced plays based on The Mayor of Casterbridge, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and the Greek and Indian epics. Sophocles, Shakespeare, Sudraka are all part of their repertoire.

The mobile theatre remains a largely male world. Of the 120 members in Kahinoor, less than a dozen are women. “People know what kind of lifestyle it is,” says Aichengfa Boruah, Kahinoor’s 28-year-old heroine. “( But) My parents believe in me.” This is her first stint with a mobile theatre. Girls, she says, stay with small families and are well taken care of. “They cook what we like, give us gamuchas (cotton scarf) and stay in touch,” says Boruah. “The boys in the team are like bhaiyyas.” She, like Bora, has her own car, driver and a caretaker who cooks for her. Her college-professor mother encourages her fiancé, a Guwahati-based businessman, to chaperon her. “He’s seen me perform so many times, he must know the scripts by heart,” she laughs.

The only problem is there isn’t a break. “Even if we die, we can’t stop,” she says dramatically. She once performed with a festering boil that she’d taken antibiotic injections for. “In three plays, I had five dances. I got picked up and flung about. It was painful.” Bora’s father was in the ICU with a brain tumour on the first day he performed for Kahinoor, back in 2007. The play was Abuj Dara Achin Kaina (Insensitive Bridegroom, Unknown Bride) where he had a triple role — possibly a first in theatre — of a film actor, a policeman and a dwarf. He recalls, “I was under a lot of stress. But kisi bhi condition mein (in any condition), the show must go on.”

Mizo Church Warns Homosexuals

Aizawl, Jun 6 : Terming homosexuality as against the tenets of Christianity, the Mizoram Presbyterian Church has threatened to excommunicate and suspend its homosexual members if they were found living together.

The decision was taken by the Synod Executive Committee, the highest decision-making body of the largest church in the state, during a meeting this week.

According to church sources, the SEC decided to excommunicate and suspend its gay and lesbian members ‘‘from the membership of the church if they lived together as husbands and wives’’.

This is not the first time that the Mizo Church has come down on its homosexual members and kicked off a controversy.

Last December, delegates of the Synod, the highest conference of the Presbyterian Church, felt that the present creed of the church was too lenient on homosexuals.

According to Church rules, "Two men or two women living together as married couples should be punished as a man or woman who commits adultery... and the punishment is suspension from the church membership for a period of six months."

Triple Blasts Rocks Haflong Town in Assam

Guwahati, Jun 6 : Ending months of peace, three blasts within an hour Saturday rocked Haflong, the headquarter town of Dima Hasao (erstwhile North Cachar hills) district.

No person was, however, injured in the blasts.

Police said that the first blast went off at about 7 p.m. in front of the office of the executive engineer of the irrigation department.

The entrance of the office was damaged in the blast.

The next blast went off barely five minutes later at the district agriculture office, partially damaging the structure.

The third blast went off between the revenue and forest department offices of the district autonomous council office at about 8 p.m.

No group has yet claimed responsibility. Police are investigating the incident.

The district had witnessed relative peace since the last quarter of the past year after the major militant organizations active in the district surrendered arms or declared ceasefire.

Northeast in The News Again

By Sevanti Ninan

Politics of complexity? At Mao Gate last week. Photo: PTI

As Manipur and Nagaland get locked on a collision course, how much does the mainstream know of the issues involved to cover it sensitively and intelligently? Not much, going by the coverage…

The action is in Manipur and on the border, the angst is in Nagaland. The stand-off between the NSCN (I-M) and the Manipur government which has led to a continuing blockade of goods going to Manipur is a challenge for the media on both sides.

What stand does the media within a state take on a conflict with another state?

Should it be objective or parochial? The media in Nagaland can hardly ignore the extraordinary human situation that has developed in the neighbouring state, and has written on it, but the newspapers here have learned to be careful when they deal with the demands of Naga groups. An editor spoke off the record of the gross human rights violation that the blockade constituted of the people of Manipur, but said writing about it in those terms was difficult, so papers in the state were sticking for the most part to publishing press releases.

Misrepresentation?

In Manipur, the media has been accused by the United Naga Council of misrepresenting the cause of the death of two Naga students at Mao Gate on May 6, and of blacking out the extent of the attack launched on Naga protesters by the Manipur Police and the Indian Reserve Battalion. But local papers in Imphal have carried that criticism. It arose from a news agency report attributing the deaths to a stampede. A Kohima-based journalist counters that there was enough TV footage on Doordarshan and there were enough still photographs used by newspapers to show that the young men were indeed killed by firing.

And what of the media in the rest of the country? Does it even begin to explain the issues sparked by the Autonomous District Council (ADC) elections in the tribal areas of Manipur, which led to the blockade in the first place? Should it just focus on the human story caused by a really prolonged blockade? For a change, thanks to the impasse, there have been full page feature stories in some of the mainstream dailies, and occasional TV coverage of Manipur.

Back in April the Imphal Free Presshad also been critical of the Ibobo government's decision to hold the ADC elections in tribal areas which are seen as taking away rights of the Naga tribes in Manipur. Particularly when the elections were being so vigorously opposed by the local hill people. But Naga civil society organisations represented by the Coordination Committee of Naga Civil Society launched last fortnight an effort to get the media outside the two states to see the demands behind the blockade from their point of view. They want journalists to come to Nagaland and understand the issues that prompted the economic blockade in April.

Challenges for the media

There are two problems in covering this issue. One, the complexities of the Naga demands are a challenge for the press outside the state, so it is easier to leave out the details creating the impression of an unreasonable demand which affects other states and is not likely to be conceded. Secondly, in the face of a blockade which even the Central Government is seen as doing nothing to end, the time is hardly right for the the NSCN IM or Naga civil society groups to expect to garner sympathy for their cause.

The prolonged stand off between Manipur and Nagaland has raised a bunch of media issues. How much does the media in the rest of the country simplify the issues involved in a bid to give the impasse some coverage? And when the aggrieved people imposing an economic blockade are the Nagas, a divided community themselves, how representative of all Nagas can the media outside Nagaland take their grievances to be? A journalist in Dimapur asserts that the so called Apex bodies are not necessarily representative of all tribes.

Nagaland generates more news all year round than some sleepier states but a Kohima or Dimapur dateline in Indian newspapers is rare. Manipur, by contrast, has been far more in the news over the last year, with Imphal datelines. The blockade which began in April has been enough of a human story to merit even a couple of full page stories in the bigger mainstream papers, and some 10 months before, the killing of a young man in the heart of Imphal by Manipur commandos also led to some continuing coverage. But nowhere near what it might have been if such stories had not been located in the Northeast.

Last week, against the backdrop of the turmoil, talks were held in Kohima on Naga demands. It was billed as the first ever talks held on Naga soil, between the representative of the Government of India and the NSCN (I-M) headed by Muivah himself. But the Times of India, the Indian Express and The Hindu covered it from Guwahati, and the Hindustan Times did not devote even a brief to the news, Mail Today likewise. It is almost as if the media in the rest of India has decided that the Northeast, and Nagaland in particular, should be left to its own incomprehensible politics, no matter how great a price people in the region pay for unresolved issues.

Tailpiece

Last Monday morning Delhi woke up to a Hindustan Times whose front page headlines were in a font designed to match the font of the half jacket Volkswagon advertisement the paper carried. Two days later, on June 2, Mumbai woke up to a Times of India which had converted all the Ts in its headlines, including the one on its masthead, to the emblem of a new mobile service provider, Uninor, which has blue clover leaves resembling a T. DNA and the Indian Express on the same day ran sponsored banner headlines relating to the same company. All of which prompted Mumbai journalist Mahesh Vijapurkar to ask, are we now seeing a new genre: paid headlines?