Manipur's tragic ethnic conflict is threatening to acquire a new dimension by bringing more ethnic groups into the theatre. This looming danger was sensed all along by those who intimately understand the state’s complex multi-ethnic demography. But others chose a simplistic view.
Even as the nearly-three-year-old confrontation between the majority non-tribal, predominantly Hindu Meiteis and Christian Kuki-Zo group of tribes is showing signs of easing, a new conflict front is opening up between Kukis and Nagas, whose settlements in the hills are closely interlaced.
For the moment, this new friction is largely restricted to three of the state’s 10 hill districts. The latest is in Ukhrul, where Kukis and Tangkhul Nagas are now in a dangerous faceoff, with two fatalities already counted and over 50 houses belonging to both sides destroyed in the Litan area along the Imphal-Ukhrul road. Earlier, even while the Meitei-Kuki conflict was raging, tension had begun brewing in the Tamenglong and Kangpokpi districts between Kukis and Zeliangrong Nagas.
Like other Naga tribes in Manipur, the Zeliangrongs claim that the lands on which the Kukis are now settled were originally theirs, leased out to the latter. They are also unhappy that camps for Kuki militants who signed a suspension of operation agreement with the government were being relocated to lands they consider theirs.
For about a year, the militant Zeliangrong United Front waged a campaign of destroying poppy fields that they claim were cultivated on their lands by Kukis, causing dangerous frictions.
Last month, the problem was compounded with the Tangkhul Nagas also coming into the picture. On the evening of February 7, trouble exploded in Litan village when a few drunken Kuki men assaulted and injured a Tangkhul man. Efforts to reach an amicable settlement failed. The open hostilities that broke out by February 9 are now threatening to spread.
Quite obviously, a single spark could not have caused an inferno had the ground not been dry and ready to catch fire. The Tangkhuls, too, consider the Kukis migrants settled on land leased to them by nearby Tangkhul villages. They claim these leased lands still belong to Tangkhuls. The Kukis, however, counter-claim that all the lands they are now settled on are rightfully theirs.
It is pertinent to note that steam for the current Kuki-Tangkhul tensions began building over compensation claims for lands the government had acquired for broadening of the Imphal-Ukhrul highway.
Modern land regulations under the Manipur Land Revenue and Land Reforms Act, 1960 are not extended into the hill districts. Instead, the customary laws of indigenous tribes are still in vogue there. The current land administration system is roughly modelled on what independent India inherited from British revenue management in the Northeast and Myanmar, wherein the hills were left unadministered, designated as ‘excluded areas’ or ‘partially excluded areas’.
The unfolding conflict in Manipur is an indication that changes in this archaic system are called for. Entrenched interests can be predicted to resist any move to introduce modern land laws in the hills, but the need of the hour is at least to codify the customary laws so they can be justly and impartially applied to all stakeholders.
Equally importantly, the law must make it mandatory for traditionally shifting populations to adopt a sedentary and enumerable lifestyle. Deadly frictions between mobile and sedentary populations are a historical reality and continue to be so. Kuki villages tend to constantly split and proliferate, which often causes frictions between them and their neighbours.
History tells us that when the British took over the Northeast, the valleys—where agricultural surpluses led to state formation with centralised bureaucracies—were easier to bring under one law. In the mountains, the numerous villages were like tiny kingdoms, often at war with each other. An agreement with one would not hold in the next village, prompting the British to leave them as unadministered territories, except for conducting occasional punitive expeditions.
Two centuries after the signing of the Treaty of Yandaboo in 1826, which brought the British to the Northeast, the socio-economic playfields have considerably levelled out. Efforts must now be made to evolve suitable, consensual reforms to bring the region out of its time warp, towards a more universal legal platform.
Meanwhile, the fact-finders who trooped to Manipur when the conflict was restricted to Meiteis and Kuki-Zos are largely silent on this new development. Now that both the warring sides are Christian tribal communities, they probably realise how wrong their familiar conflict template of a Hindu majority targeting minority Christians, Muslims, Dalits or tribals was.
The lesson is that the representation of traumatic conflicts in complex multi-ethnic social structures such as Manipur’s is never easy. The temptation before paratrooping observers is to adopt linear, textbook conflict models they are familiar with to comprehend what they witness. But these can be grossly inadequate.
While it is absolutely necessary to not give moral equivalence to victims and perpetrators, the line that divides the two is not always distinct in conflicts in such a complex and intertwined ethnic maze. Both conflicting parties can be victims as much as perpetrators.
As trauma scholars have cautioned, this shortfall can be true for the subjects of the conflicts themselves writing about them, as well as for observers from outside these theatres assessing the conflicts. While the former are prone to what Dominick LaCapra calls ‘fidelity to trauma’, leading to a sense of victimhood, the latter can end up ‘numbing empathy’, which media scholar Tony Harcup interprets as ‘objectivism’.
LaCapra’s recommendation for trauma representation is to find the ‘middle voice’. In retrospect, the lack of interest of many in this middle voice in covering Manipur’s crisis may have complicated and prolonged the conflict itself, reminiscent of what Bertrand Russell anticipated as the harm that even good men can do.
Pradip Phanjoubam | Editor, Imphal Review of Arts and Politics
(Views are personal)
(phanjoubam@gmail.com)