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COMMENT BY SOBAM HARIPRIYA SOBAM HARIPRIYA SOBAM HARIPRIYA SOBAM HARIPRIYA
Soibam Haripriya, in her turn, talked about three interrelated aspects pertaining to popular movements in the North East- through an analysis of poetry, the anxiety of representation reflected in their literature, vigilante action giving rise to psychovigilante activism, and the governmental award constituted during the pro- Inner Line Permit activism, being given to mothers giving maximum birth. The poem that she analyses is from the translated anthology The Valley of Lofty Hills, and it deals with issues of immigration and anxiety of identity, the nation’s antagonism to the local, and the precolonial’s to the postcolonial. There is the depiction of the Mayang, and his language is incomprehensible to the Europeans, showing how disdain for the spoken gets translated into disdain for the speaker. But the Mayang is also a representation of the postcolonial immigrant into the Northeast and as working class labour, thus reflecting fear of Indianisation. The self is seen as savage, but also the self that grieved the loss of nature caused by the development projects of Look/Act East policy, such as the laying of roads or building of highways. So there persists a continuum in anxiety over immigration to anxiety about nationhood and nationalism. Many of the groups that were part of the Inner Line permit Movement took it upon themselves to drive away the immigrants and therein lies the connect with vigilante action.
The ILP and the AMSU (All Manipur Students’ Union, who are generally antagonistic forces come together to carry out raids on the trades and shops of immigrant traders, in the name of a collective identity. And women giving birth to maximum children are being rewarded for their contribution to this ‘collective identity’, thus contributing to vigilante activism. And Ms.
Haripriya here attempts to caution against such vigilante trajectories of popular movements and to question notions of the ‘collective’ that comes out of such fallouts of the popular movements.
