Peace continues to elude ethnically divided Manipur

Radhika Ramaseshan

Senior Journalist

MANIPUR is awash with blood and violence ever since the spark of an ethno-religious conflict was lit three months ago. The Centre refuses to acknowledge the existence of a carnage, while Chief Minister N Biren Singh, sitting pretty, has claimed that normalcy has ‘returned’ to the state, citing over 90 per cent attendance in schools as ‘evidence’. On July 29, a huge rally was organised in Imphal by the Coordinating Committee on Manipur Integrity. Led by women from the dominant Meitei community, the rallyists raised slogans calling for a genocide of the Kuki-Zo tribals, the target of the conflict, branding them as poppy cultivators and drug abusers — a running theme in the Meitei discourse to validate the attacks on the Kuki-Zo. While it is true that poppy plants abound in the hills, home to the Kuki-Zo, the nature and complexities of the drug trade suggest the involvement of powerful vested interests which are not geography/community-specific.

Will the Central and state governments allow the situation to fester without an intervention? It’s not as though the northeastern region has not experienced serious, long-lasting disorders whose solutions were not found ultimately. In the miasma of destruction, the contours of an answer were glimpsed when Koki-Zo legislators asked for a separate administrative arrangement in the hills. This was not a panchayat-like template. It was akin to a self-governance model along the lines of the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution which empowered the tribes to govern and develop the areas under their control, which might not be feasible when a non-tribal majority dominated the state’s political and administrative structures and called the shots. But a whiff of a suggestion for a separate administration recalled for the Meiteis the notion of a separate ‘Kukiland’, which was raised in the late 1980s by the Kuki National Organisation (KNO), the largest Kuki-Zo insurgent outfit. It was like a red rag to a bull, despite the idea being articulated tentatively enough to not sound aggressive.

In a recent article on why a separate administration for Kuki-Zo could pose a threat to India’s sovereignty, RK Sanayaima Singh, former adviser to Delhi’s Manipur Students’ Association, pointed out that it was “intertwined with geopolitical dynamics and the echoes of trans-boundary pan-nationalism”, an overstatement defying credibility.

The writer harked back to the Kuki-Zo’s romanticised aspiration for the Zale’n-gam or the land of freedom, which for the dreamers embraced parts of Myanmar, Nagaland, Assam, Tripura and even the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh. When the British redrew boundaries under the 1834 Kabaw Valley Agreement, they handed over a large portion of this land to erstwhile Burma to appease the Ava or Burmese King. Although the apprehension was that a separate administration might germinate the Mizo National Front’s (MNF) purported goal for a ‘unification’ of the areas inhabited by the Chin-Kuki-Mizo ethnic tribes, the fact is that over the years, the imaginary Kukiland has been scaled down to the hills of Manipur but includes the parts inhabited by the Naga tribes, who have no love lost for the Kuki-Zo. The MNF rules Mizoram and is an ally of the BJP. But that did not stop Mizoram CM Zoramthanga from recently addressing a solidarity march for Manipur’s victims, signifying that the fault-lines criss-crossing the North-East transcended geographical boundaries and political allegiances.

Conversely, the arguments stacked up in favour of extending the Sixth Schedule to the hills emanated from the limited representation that the tribes have in the Manipur legislature (out of 60 seats, only 19 were reserved for the STs), which marginalised their voices and diminished their influence in policymaking. The uneven presence allowed the Meitei-majority government to introduce Bills that impacted tribes’ rights and interests, the most recent act of which was to declare tribal areas as reserved forests and protected lands without proper statutory compliance. Therefore, the articulate voices from the Kuki-Zo community sought political autonomy for the tribes under Article 244A of the Constitution, which asks for an elected body to function as a legislature within a state, or in other words, as a state within a state.

In a scenario where the battle-lines have become irredeemably accentuated, it is hard to envisage the Kuki-Zo getting a fraction of what they sought in better times. However, it is edifying to recall that other states in a conflict-contagious zone eventually found workable solutions, which might not have entirely satisfied the dissatisfied, but in the circumstances allowed for a degree of give-and-take and some sort of coexistence with their adversaries.

In Assam, in the 1980s, the National Democratic Front of Bodoland sought the creation of an independent home for the Bodos, the largest ethnic grouping among the state’s plains tribes. The Bodos had reasons to feel browbeaten by the erstwhile Asom Gana Parishad dispensation, which pandered largely to the Hindu Assamese.

The Bodos were engaged in a long-drawn strife with the Assam Government to press home their demand for a 50-50 division of the state, which no government was willing to concede. The issue was flagged by the relatively peaceful All Bodo Students’ Union (ABSU). Soon, two insurgent groups, the Bodo Liberation Tigers and the National Democratic Front of Bodoland, got into the act and clashed with the police and non-Bodos living in the area, inflicting serious casualties.

Eventually, a tripartite agreement between the Centre, the state government and the ABSU birthed the Bodoland Territorial Council, which endorsed the idea of a state within a state and administered a territory created by restructuring seven contiguous districts. The Tigers laid down arms, while the front split into three factions, one of which exists as a throwback to a bloody past. But the council restored a veneer of normalcy to a once-troubled region.

Peace might be more elusive in Manipur, given the state’s complicity in the ongoing bloodshed which has emboldened a large section of the civilians to persist with assaults and rapes. The flashpoint is long gone.

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