Manipur is a state with immense tourism potential. It is blessed with a cool climate and stunning natural beauty: endless hills and valleys, verdant forests, lakes, rivers, waterfalls, and diverse flora and fauna. No wonder it is called the Switzerland of India . It is home to the beautiful Meitei culture which is a distinctive synthesis of Sanamahism and Hinduism, and also hosts several tribal groups, each with their own customs and language. It is home to one of India’s most iconic classical dance forms.
Manipur produces perhaps more sportsmen and women per capita than any other Indian state. It has tremendous hydroelectric power potential that can not only supply 24/7 electricity to all its residents for the foreseeable future, but also leave surplus that can be supplied to other states.
Despite these advantages, Manipur’s potential has been squandered thus far, due to decades of governmental neglect, corruption and misrule. An insurgency that first tore the state apart in the 1960s continues to fester. It has claimed thousands of lives over the past decades. There are no industries. There is no private sector. Government jobs are scarce and very difficult to secure. As a consequence, there are few opportunities for employment.
The only viable highway connecting Manipur to the rest of India – which passes through Nagaland – is routinely blockaded for months at a time, crippling the state with shortages, skyrocketing prices of essentials, and unimaginable suffering. Another highway, which passes through Assam, has inexplicably been kept in a state of disrepair for decades.
Illegal foreign infiltrators from a couple of neighbouring countries have been settled in the state for the past decade or so, occupying pristine public lands in various districts, and setting up slums in the heart of the capital, Imphal (the first-ever slums in the history of Manipur!). These foreigners constitute a severe security threat to the nation, and aggressively compete with legitimate citizens for land, resources and employment. Needless to say, they have no intention of assimilating the local culture.
It would not be wrong to say that Manipur has become a failed state.
Yet, there is new hope today, for the first time in decades. The new government in the state has promised to turn it around by building infrastructure and creating a strong tourism sector.
Tourism is the ideal catalyst for kick-starting small economies. It is known to have transformed the fortunes of Maldives and Seychelles in less than a decade. Bali, Aruba, Jamaica and the South Pacific islands have also benefited immensely from tourism. For instance, tourism accounts for over half of Jamaica’s foreign exchange earnings and about a quarter of its jobs.
Tourism creates a demand for new hotels, inns, bed-and-breakfast establishments, restaurants, resorts, bus and taxi services, tourist guides, entertainment services, cottage industries and souvenir shops, and much more, all of which create new jobs. It infuses cash into the local economy. It creates a need for new roads, railway lines and stations, and new or expanded airports. This also generates employment.
In short, if planned and implemented properly, the tourism sector alone can transform the economy of a small state like Manipur within a decade, and lead to long-lasting prosperity.
Normality Must First Be Restored In Manipur
Manipur has been designated as a “disturbed area” since 1980. For normality to be restored in the state, four pre-conditions must be met, without which it is futile to even think of developing the infrastructure for tourism:
- Re-impose law and order. Free the people and businesses from threats and harassment. Create an environment that makes them feel safe to venture out after sunset, as in other parts of the country.
- Deport all illegal foreign infiltrators, even if they have been given Indian documents. Manipur must not be allowed to go the way of Assam and West Bengal.
- End corruption, as promised. This is easier to achieve in Manipur than anywhere else, as Manipur is a very small state (population 2.72 million), with a correspondingly small bureaucracy and government machinery.
- Free Manipur from the constant threat of blockades from Nagaland by linking it to the rest of the country by highway and rail, via Assam. This will have the additional benefit of giving tourists more options for reaching Manipur. It is heartening to note that steps in this direction have already been taken.
Eight Steps To Develop Manipur Into An Attractive Tourist Destination
Once the above four conditions are met, the following developmental steps should be taken:
1. Develop places of natural beauty into tourist destinations, in an eco-friendly way that does not damage the environment. Manipur’s USP is its unmatched natural beauty. Leverage it to attract tourists. Make places such as the Loktak Lake and Sendra island, Keibul Lamjao National Park, the state’s many waterfalls, caves, and picnic and camping sites easily accessible by road. Equip them with facilities and personnel to handle tourists.
2. Develop at least two hill stations per district. Manipur’s hilly areas enjoy a cool, pleasant climate even during the summer months. This will make Manipur an attractive destination for domestic tourists. Manipur has 16 districts, which will give it at least 32 hill stations to start with. More can be developed later. This will decentralise tourism, instead of concentrating it in a few places in the state.
Develop adventure sports such as hiking, trekking, camping, mountaineering, ballooning, paragliding, in each hill station to give tourists value for their money. Give easy loans to local entrepreneurs to build hotels, restaurants, inns, bed-and-breakfast facilities, etc. Ensure that this is achieved in an eco-friendly manner.
3. Develop new cultural institutes and hold more cultural festivals. Manipur has a beautiful and unique culture, which, unfortunately, is in danger of dying out. Revive it by developing five new institutes (for starters) – one each for Manipuri classical dance, performing arts, music, Manipuri martial arts and films.
Develop these in five different cities of Manipur instead of basing them all in the capital. Have each institute hold regular events and festivals. This will have the effect of reviving and rejuvenating Manipuri culture, and of creating a cultural ecosystem that will help attract tourism.
4. Develop historical places as tourist destinations. How many people know that the Indian national flag was hoisted for the first time on Indian soil by Subhash Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army (INA) in Moirang, Manipur? Moirang is home to the museum, which is in a poor condition. Transform it into a place of national pride.
There are many other notable historical places in Manipur that can attract domestic as well as international tourists, such as the two millennia-old Kangla fort, the world’s oldest Polo ground, the British and Japanese Second World War cemeteries, the Red Hill where the Indian Army inflicted a catastrophic defeat on the Japanese army, and many more. Leverage them all as tourist attractions.
5. Designate suitable historical places as world heritage sites. Sites with world heritage status are a touristic force multiplier. If a British-built railway station in Mumbai can be designated as a World Heritage Site, then why not the Kangla Fort, and the world’s oldest Polo ground?
6. Develop religious places as tourist destinations. Manipur is home to many beautiful temples, such as the Shree Govindajee temple, the Gopinath temple, the Marjing temple (considered to be the birthplace of polo), and festivals such as Lord Jagannath’s Rath Yatra, among others. Develop and showcase them effectively while keeping religious sentiments in mind.
7. Develop Manipur as India’s gateway to South-East Asia. Make it possible to take a road or train trip from any of India’s major cities all the way to Singapore, via Manipur, Myanmar, Thailand and Malaysia, within the next 10 years. Make it possible to reach Vietnam and Cambodia by road, via Laos. Develop the border town of Moreh as an economic hub. Trade with Myanmar and other South-East Asian countries will create a plethora of new entrepreneurial opportunities and new jobs in Manipur.
If necessary, help build roads in Myanmar for easy access to the rest of South-East Asia. Develop Imphal’s Tulihal airport into a hub to reach the rest of India, especially to Buddhist religious places such as Sarnath (via Varanasi), Bodh Gaya, etc.
8. Develop Manipur as the sports capital of India by creating the necessary infrastructure. Manipur has a unique sporting ethos that is not found anywhere else in India. The proposed National Sports University is a good initiative. It will succeed in producing world-class athletes only if it adheres to the highest global standards.
Create world-class academies in various cities of Manipur for athletics, football, hockey, combat sports, weightlifting, water sports, etc. Leverage the expertise of retired sportspersons and athletes by having them certified as coaches and employing them in these academies. Transform Manipur into a finishing school for the best sportspersons from across India. Create year-round sports leagues as well as tournaments – which will give tourists more reasons for visiting Manipur and staying longer.
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A Four-Pronged Strategy To Promote Tourism
- Develop a world-class Manipur tourism website and boost its search rankings using search engine optimisation (SEO). Ensure that the website is well-designed, attractive, user-friendly and informative. It should be a one-place stop that contains all the information prospective tourists need – the different options for reaching Manipur, a detailed list of tourist attractions, hotels, restaurants, local tour operators, how to book licensed guides, bus and taxi services, weather and climate information, etc. This is an inexpensive way to raise the state’s touristic profile.
- Create a large number of promotional YouTube videos (on an ongoing basis) that showcase the state’s natural beauty and tourist attractions. Again, this is an inexpensive way to promote the state.
- Have films, serials, TV ads, and reality TV shows filmed in Manipur. This is an effective and inexpensive way to garner publicity.
- Run TV ad campaigns about Manipur tourism on Indian TV channels. This will undoubtedly cost money, but it is a necessary investment that can pay the state back several folds in terms of tourism revenues.
These four actions are enough to firmly place Manipur as a beautiful, exciting and affordable touristic destination in the Indian tourist’s radar.
Manipur should work toward becoming a destination for domestic tourists, first, by solving its long-standing issues (the four pre-conditions of the above roadmap), developing touristic infrastructure and getting the basics right (the next eight steps), and by having an effective strategy to promote itself (the last four steps).
Revenue from domestic tourism itself is enough to kick-start Manipur’s economy. Once domestic tourists start flowing in, word will spread, reviews will appear on the internet, and international tourists will inevitably begin to arrive.
Manipur stands poised on the threshold of a momentous change. The new government is faced with a prodigious challenge: to revive a failed state from nearly seven decades of decay and despair. It is also a massive opportunity, one that can transform the fortunes of the people and serve as an example for other states.
Transforming Manipur into a peaceful, stable and prosperous state will bring profound, long-lasting benefits to the nation. It will bring development and employment to an entire state and improve the lives of lakhs of people in the process. It will help increase India’s gross domestic product. It will encourage Indian tourists to travel within the country instead of going abroad. It will bring in more international tourism revenues. It will bring stability to the North-East and develop Manipur into a much-needed bridge to South-East Asia.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.