Abandoning Manipur; Ravi Raj; Tang Ping
Opinion Watch
Abandoning Manipur
Manipur is far from gaining normalcy even after 120 people lost their lives and over 4,000 houses were set on fire, and The Indian Express in its Editorial has opined that the Bharatiya Janata Party’s N. Biren Singh government in the state is part of the problem.
The daily claimed that the “Kukis believe that the Manipur police, including Manipur Rifles, favour the Meities, and the latter accusing Asam Rifles of turning blind eyes to poppy cultivation in the Kuki-dominated areas”. The daily said that the BJP government stoked fire by ordering demolition of a church in Imphal, alleged to have come on an encroached land.
Manipur may immediately need healing touch, but more than that the decades’ old practice of playing one tribe against another by political and non-political actors will need to be laid to rest. Manipur is burning because of the toxic cocktail poured to the tribes by the vested interests for decades, and the BJP now has got a taste of the sourness of the recipe.
Ravi Raj
Tamil Nadu Governor R. N. Ravi is a neo-convert to politics, and The Asian Age has said that his initial resistance to reallocation of portfolios in the state in the wake of the arrest of minister V. Senthil Balaji is a new low. The daily said that the ministers hold their positions till the pleasure of Governor, which the court have ruled to mean “pleasures of legislature”.
The daily also questioned Ravi giving statement on the continuation of Balaji in the council of ministers of Tamil Nadu. The daily, however, called for public debate on the issue of the continuation of ministers who are arrested by investigative agencies.
Morality is the bedrock of governance which leans on trust of the people, and thus a minister arrested by an investigative agency should be sacked forthwith, while the said politician should also be not fielded by parties in elections until name cleared of all the charges.
Tang Ping
Tea was introduced to the British industrial workers as slow intoxicants to keep them working for long hours, and the same habit is employed by employers now in Asian countries to force the men-machine running for extended hours. The Economic Times in its Editorial has noted the pushback from the workers, with South Korea to see the trend now.
In China, the workers resorted to ‘tang ping – lying flat’ as a mark of resistance to long hours of work, said the business daily, adding that the MZ generation (millennials and generation next) in South Korea are opting for life against long working hours. It stated that now trend is for ‘mo yu – touching fish (lazing around)’, while opining that valourizing work is essentially a game for second-and-third world countries.
The daily found no parallel in India for the malaise, but exploitation of the employees in the fifth largest economy of the world is also arguably not less than South Korea and China.
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