August was a turbulent month in Manipur. While the ethnic conflict between the Meiteis and Kuki-Zo tribes seems to have eased a little, unfortunately, another conflict front—which had opened up between the Nagas and the Kukis in February—escalated.
A string of gruesome violent incidents, the latest of which were two outrages in quick succession, bore testimony to the conflagration. First, an ambush on August 27 on a passenger vehicle on the Imphal-Tamenglong Road between Kangpokpi district headquarters and Tamei, killing four Naga passengers and injuring several more. Second, an August 31 attack on a Kuki village along the same road, killing three and injuring four.
Conspicuous by their absence now are the crusaders who had rushed in to report the earlier conflict, many of whom earned a reputation for themselves for the self-righteous stands they took. Their plots seem completely lost on this new front.
Although it is an extension of the earlier conflict, in no conceivable way can this new development of a feud between the Nagas and the Kukis be portrayed as a Hindu majority targeting Christian minorities, or vulnerable tribals being victimised by a bigoted majority, or be fitted into other familiar templates of communal tensions elsewhere in the Indian heartland.
Quite obviously, and sadly, all the widely-heard diagnoses of the Manipur problem all along have been at best partially right, if not completely off the track. When the diagnosis went wrong, it is only imaginable that remedial measures too would have gone wrong. In this scenario, it is also difficult not to recall Bertrand Russell’s 1926 essay, ‘The harm that good men do’.
The pictures Manipur’s endemic crisis continue to evoke, though often ignored, are of the conflict faultlines frozen and embedded within the very fabric of this multi-ethnic society. For indeed, this story is also about traditional communities who lived in isolation, now having to grapple with the reality of postcolonial modernity.
So long as these hostilities remained dormant, a deceptive semblance of peace prevailed. Johan Galtung, a pioneer of conflict studies, termed this as “negative peace”. Given the provocation, these underlying hostilities can reactivate to cause infernos. This theory probably explains the periodic and cyclic eruption of ethnic violence in places like Manipur, and indeed the entire Northeast and the contiguous geographical belts beyond.
Anthropologist James C Scott has a convincing profile of this conflict landscape in his book The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchic History of Upland Southeast Asia. The region’s mountainous massif is punctuated by numerous fertile, well-irrigated valleys. Stable and productive agrarian revolutions in these valleys led to surplus economies, ultimately making way for the emergence of what Scott calls “paddy States”.
By contrast, the mountain people were still living off a subsistence economy of primitive jhoom agriculture and hunting-gathering, with community affiliations rarely extending beyond isolated clans and villages. They, therefore, had no need for the centralised bureaucracy of a State.
A peculiar relationship between these paddy States and the non-State-bearing populations in the mountains is, in Scott’s words, only to be predicted in this ‘Zomian’ theatre. This relationship is not always of hostility, as a great deal of heritages and legends of origin are shared; but it certainly meant different levels of development and power, as well as worldviews.
It is in this traditional world that colonialism arrived and superimposed its understanding of modernity and statehood as defined by the Westphalian model. This readjustment remains incomplete in the postcolonial era; therefore the faultlines remain hidden in this conflict landscape even today.
In this mix of primordial and modern worlds, the notion of land ownership is where the potential for conflict is foremost. Before the modern world’s intervention, for the feudal principalities, the idea of land was not confined to their subjects’ immediate habitation, but extended into the State’s spheres of control and interest. Likewise, for sedentary populations, the idea of land was a fixed territory in the vicinity of their immediate settlement, under their control. For those with nomadic traits, anywhere they pitch tents would become their land.
When all these three come to be confined within a definite geography and timeframe, conflicts of interests are only natural. Anthony Sattin’s picturisation of this friction in Nomads: Wanderers who Shaped Our World is interesting. Of all the analogies from the ancient world he cites, the description of the first murder in the Bible is the most illustrative. Adam and Eve’s first-born son Cain kills his younger brother Abel. Cain is a tiller of the soil and Abel a wandering shepherd.
The former paddy States have had the least difficulty in adjusting to modern land tenureship, for they already have internalised the principle of eminent domain, which makes the State the ultimate owner of all land within its boundaries. Among the population in the mountains, customary laws held and are still allowed to hold in this postcolonial era. The trouble is, as Sattin notes, customary laws are as varied as there are communities and these outlooks often clash.
This quest by scholars is almost a profile of Manipur’s ethnic relations dynamics. At one level, there is a divide between the thickly-populated central Imphal Valley, traditional home of the Meiteis where modern land laws are in vogue, and the sparsely populated surrounding hills, which form 90 percent of the state’s land area and is the traditional home of the Nagas and the Kukis. Here, customary laws still decide ownership of land. The Nagas see themselves as original custodian of these hills and the Kukis as their tenants who arrived later, defining the second major and deeper faultline.
It’s easier said than done, but the obvious need is for all parties to come to terms with a common legal platform to make the state their common homeland. While sharing a geographical destiny, it is vital to acknowledge that they cannot splinter without causing ethnic mayhem. Equally, those who wish to be arbiters of this conflict need to absorb this wisdom and refrain from playing one party against the other, deliberately or otherwise.
Pradip Phanjoubam | Editor, Imphal Review of Arts and Politics
(Views are personal)
(phanjoubam@gmail.com)