The three-year-old ethnic conflict in Manipur has expanded beyond just the Meiteis and Kuki-Zo tribes. Another major community in the state, the Nagas, who have maintained a semblance of neutrality so far, have now stepped in, threatening a lapse into the Naga-Kuki bloodletting of the 1990s. Already, competitive hostage-taking of civilians among the two communities is making this conflict front gruesome.
This front is poised to be more dangerous with fewer means to control it. When the fight was between the Meiteis and Kuki-Zos, bad as it was, it was still possible to separate them physically—with Meiteis retreating to the Imphal valley and Kuki-Zos into the hills and then the authorities keeping a buffer ring between them so that the two warring groups could not confront each other till the situation normalised.
In the new scenario, such a separation will be virtually impossible as the traditional homelands of Nagas and Kukis in the hills almost totally overlap. The Nagas claim they were the original landowners and it was they who allowed the Kukis to settle on their land as tenants. Kukis dispute this claim.
Land, therefore, is at the crux of this new dispute. The older conflict between the Meiteis and Kukis also reflected this. The tension in this case lies between traditional pre-modern notions of homeland and the modern Westphalian state and its commensurate land revenue administration.
Sadly, in Manipur, these differing outlooks on land have been allowed to institutionalise. Broadly, these traditional outlooks can be characterised as a three-way division between Meiteis in the valley who inherited the legacies of a past feudal principality with a wet rice agriculture-driven economy—the sedentary Nagas in the hills living off a mix of settled agriculture and foraging and Kukis who were once constantly mobile shift-cultivators and foragers.
With the advent of the decolonised modern era, things have transformed considerably, but some vestiges of the past continue to haunt. In 1960, when Manipur was still a Union territory, the modern land revenue administration titled the Manipur Land Revenue and Land Reforms Act Act was introduced, but only in the Imphal valley. Its hills were left untouched in accordance with the British administrative structure of directly administering the revenue plains, while the non-revenue backward hills were classified as ‘excluded’ or ‘partially excluded’ areas.
Manipur hill lands, therefore, continue to be governed by the customary laws of the communities there. Even the Indian Forest Act, under which reserved forests and protected forests are declared, has an additional feature in the hills of the Northeast, including Manipur: the introduction of a new forest category called ‘unclassed forests’. These are, by definition, government land but community-owned and managed.
Of Manipur’s forests in the hills, over half are under this ‘unclassed forest’ category, and almost all of them are in traditional Naga areas.
Two layers of conflict potential can be anticipated from this land administration architecture, especially if it were treated as permanent and static rather than a phase in a path of progressive change, as all modern laws are meant to be.
The first is between the valley and the hills, governed by two sets of laws. Under modern land law, the valley is where individual owners lease their homestead and farmland plots from the government in exchange for commensurate taxes paid to the government. It is also open to all Indian citizens for settlement. Land in hills, on the other hand, remains exclusively in the custody of traditional communities, prohibiting all others from buying or settling there. A sense of besiegement among the valley population is one factor behind demands by a section of the Meiteis for scheduled tribe status, which would make their land, too, exclusive to them, as land in the hills already is.
The second is between the hill communities. The Nagas claim they are the original population and that their customary laws apply to all, although these customary laws are not codified, aggregating the outlooks of all communities who share the same living space, particularly the Kukis. Nagas are sedentary; their villages, therefore, grow big but seldom splinter into many.
The Kukis, on the other hand, are non-sedentary; their villages are generally small and continually multiplying. Records of reserved forests and protected forests, most of which were declared during the 1960s while Manipur was still a Union territory, bear this out. It will be recalled that the Manipur forest department was a primary target of the Kuki-Zos when ethnic conflict broke out in 2023.
Further complicating this conflict dynamics are also several insurgencies amongst the Nagas and Meiteis, fighting the Indian State for the restoration of what they believe was their sovereign status before they became part of India. Militancy amongst the Kukis is not separatist, but came into prominence as a consequence of the Kuki-Naga conflict of the 1990s. Yet, a suspension of operation agreement was signed with the Kuki militants in 2005 and modified in 2008.
In this scenario, the Nagas and Meiteis have often alleged that central forces, in particular the Assam Rifles, are using Kukis as proxies to undermine their struggles. Similarly, in the wake of the conflict between the Meiteis and Kuki-Zos, the latter have alleged that the Manipur state police is biased against them.
Bizarre though these claims may be, the underlying complex architecture of conflicting interests makes these claims plausible to varying degrees. To neutralise Meitei and Naga insurgents, the Indian State could indeed want Kuki militants as counter-insurgency allies. Likewise the Manipur Police, too, may have tended to align with those opposed to Manipur's fragmentation, the Meiteis, and consequently been pitted against those who aspired to splinter the state, the Kuki-Zos.
Whatever the truth, the bitterness and mistrust these impressions have caused are tangible. It can only be hoped that all forces of the Indian State will rise above the pulls of local arenas of conflict, and instead see the nation as the only legitimate wielder of legitimate power of coercion as Max Weber defined, and under this legitimate hegemony, rather than calibrate different militant groups on the scale of friends and foes, aim to make all law breakers to submit to the law.
Pradip Phanjoubam | Editor, Imphal Review of Arts and Politics
(Views are personal)
(phanjoubam@gmail.com)
