People of Manipur need concrete action on ground

Tirthankar Mitra, IPA, 18 August 2023: Manipur is passing through the worst of times. The border state in one of the hinges of India's North East needs special treatment from the centre. Bordering Myanmar, after having witnessed one of the bloodiest battles of freedom struggle where Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose led Indian National Army fought with British forces, Manipuris had shunned violence for years and walked the path of normalcy. A few sporadic incidents occurred but militancy was rebuffed till in a camouflaged form, it found sum and substance in the attacks of communities living side by side like brothers over the ages.

The state has about 3.3 million people living in it. Of these 53 per cent belongs to the ethnic Meiteis far outnumbering Kukis and Nagas. State government of Manipur cannot wash its hands off the violence and arson made worse by crimes against women and displacement of children. The violence has been fuelled by weapons looted from the armouries of police, Manipur Rifles and IRB battalions.

Even before the smoke of the burning huts have cleared and vigilante parties continue to roam the state, questions arise as to why the loot was allowed to happen. After all, state forces' armouries stocking arms and ammunition for upkeep of law and order are not guns slung on the walls of a householder to be aken down in self defence. Usually these arms depots are heavily guarded. . The wonders never cease as to why no incidents of firing by those guarding the armouries, even in self defence are yet to be reported. One is in the dark about the action taken against those who surrendered to the mob.

The situation warrants that the responsibilities on the police, intelligence agencies and civil administration have to be fixed. No pick and choose approach can restore normalcy.

Thankfully the Supreme Court has directed former Maharashtra DGP Dattatray Padsalgikar who is functioning on the apex court's order to "investigate the allegation that certain police officers colluded with the perpetrators of violence (including sexual violence) during the conflict." The nation needs to know whether the acts of abject surrender to a mob was further tainted by the complicity of some of the men in uniform. Not even baby steps have been taken to kick start the peace process. In this grim and grave Near the start of Netflix’s now-long- running reality show Selling Sunset, real estate agent Heather Rae El Moussa (née Young) pans to the camera and makes a rather Marxian observation about labour in a wage- based economy. The impeccably made- up agent (it has been reported that she and her coworkers, not Netflix, pay for their own makeup artists) says, “It’s hard because if you don’t work and hustle . . . you don’t get paid.” A few scenes later, she is ostensibly “at work” at the office of her employer, the Oppenheim Group, but is chided by another agent for excessively gossiping: “Heather, shut up and do some work!” “I told you, I don’t have a computer!” she cries back.

The office scenes in the show are often like this: not a lot of emailing or other obvious work going on, but small groups of women inevitably veering into shit-talking. It quickly becomes clear that, like for any good salesperson, building and maintaining relationships — in their case, with multimillionaires and their handlers — is the real job.

Soon to enter its seventh season and having spawned two spinoffs, Selling Sunset follows a rotating crew of female real estate agents and their male bosses at the Oppenheim Group, a brokerage dealing with luxury property mainly in the Hollywood Hills and the Sunset Strip. It is the apotheosis of TV producer Adam Di Vello’s work. His first long-running megahit show, The Hills, prefigured Selling Sunset’s approach, with high-quality footage — described in one publication as “cinematic” — of attractive women dealing with often very banal workplace drama (eyerolls and sideways glances over laptop screens are perfectly rendered).

While the series traffics in many of the usual antics of reality TV, the show in effect chronicles the increasingly luxury-obsessed nature of gentrification and the entrepreneurs who aid and abet it. Selling Sunset pulls the curtain back on many of the dynamics — such as the role of agent- developers and increasingly of investor- fuelled home flipping — driving the overproduction of high-income housing and the shrinkage of affordable housing in cities like Los Angeles.

Over the course of six seasons, the show has become less and less about real estate, perhaps because of the increasing fame of the agent- influencers. As the focus lands more and more on infighting between a handful of model-esque female agents, Selling Sunset can veer into the territory of Bravo’s Real Housewives shows. But it is possible to contextualize the show in relation to the broader political economy of Los Angeles real estate. In his seminal 1990 book, City of Quartz, Mike Davis argued that a key transformation in the city’s post-industrial economy, marked by steep inequality, was “the conversion of the tract lot — the basic input of Los Angeles’ major mass production industry — into a luxury good affordable only by a shrinking minority of local residents.” Davis chronicled how this transformation led to persistent conflict between homeowners (especially the affluent) and the previously dominant land development industry, which includes, albeit on a smaller scale, the boutique developers that the Oppenheim Group’s agents work with.

Selling Sunset offers some insight into the hypercommodification of the single-family home as outside investors target increasingly segmented parts of the city’s housing market. While the hills above Sunset Boulevard, where the agents most frequently sell property, have always been for the wealthy, their clients are definitely new money, with an eye to level, rebuild, and sell at a profit. Viewers might almost pity the neighbours of the new houses: they are often garishly bland and uniformly boxy in white and black, with huge expanses of tinted windows and sliding glass doors, and which achieve their large size by extensive excavation of hillsides. One such house features an actual putting green on an extended balcony, and was built by a software developer who says he basically created a construction company to realize his vision. The new seller’s entrepreneurship illustrates the role that this housing is taking on as investment property for the newly rich to park their surplus wealth.

Sitting high above the sightlines of the middle-class tract home that, Mike Davis wrote, was increasingly being turned into a fortress to guard against the poor, the new luxury boxes also reflect real estate’s struggle to redevelop their old-money neighbours. The banal, semiopaque aesthetics conceal anonymous, frequently absent occupants who personify global capital. The conflict between existing homeowners and developers is alluded to when Heather tells a potential buyer that a massive house under construction on the slopes of Beverly Hills will be among the last of its kind, after the city recently closed a zoning loophole exploited by new-money developers to erect the bigger, more pricey houses. (One local luxury agent attempted to repeal this ordinance as a threat to his future earnings; he was later made to apologize for trying to do so.)

Most of this social context lies outside the scope of Selling Sunset and its offshoots. Viewers are transported by drone between different luxury properties and the restaurants and coffee shops where the agents meet up; it’s a self-contained world. But within it, there are occasional references to the agents’ pressing need to overcome obstacles to the growth of home prices, and therefore to the overall profit margin of their firm. (IPA/To be continued) situation, the daily death toll is merely "total number of lives lost."Men are being murdered, women raped and molested and every day in relief camps is one of dismay and the nights are sleepless. Meanwhile, the state which provides pivotal stability to ASEAN forays continues to be in flames.

Mere appeal to surrender the weapons looted and used in ethnic conflict will be cries in the wilderness. A weaponised society, being a sure recipe for disaster, concerted operations have to be launched to recover the arms and incentives offered to those surrendering them voluntarily. The perpetrators of violence need to be put behind the bars sans any regard to community or socio-political group. This has to be done with alacrity.

The ruling dispensation has to reach out to all political players, youth and civil society groups and take them on board to explore the path to the peace process. A strong commitment to restore peace and a shared perspective will go a long way in this regard. The discussion on a no-confidence motion in the Parliament this week gave no real assurance to the suffering people of Manipur as the assurances by the Prime Minister and the Home Minister, are yet to reach the ground. This is time for concrete action and just not lip services.