Three events from last fortnight provide the latest evidence of the complexity of Manipur’s ongoing ethnic crisis. The most recent of these is the discovery of the bodies of two young Kuki men belonging to Taphou village in Senapati district in the early hours of Sunday by a joint search team that included Manipur Police and the Central Reserve Police Force’s special CoBRA commandos. What made this a bigger tragedy is the day that followed was the Kuki community’s harvest festival, Chavang Kut.
According to a report, the two men had been abducted on October 28 by suspected armed Naga men. No conclusive evidence yet, but amid the social media noise, there are also allegations and photographs that the two were armed and were ambushed while returning to attack a neighbouring Naga village, Tazeikaiphun, where another attack had been repelled the previous day.
Before Nagas got dragged into the conflict, the familiar portrayal of the Manipur conflict was of aggression by majority Hindu Meiteis against minority Christian Kukis. This convenient framing has now fallen apart.
The Naga-Kuki conflict, in many ways, is an example of Johan Galtung’s “frozen conflict”, periodically exploding into dynamic clashes. This dimension of the conflict is more primordial and probably will be harder to resolve.
Kukis and Nagas share the same traditional living spaces in Manipur’s hills. Unlike the Imphal valley, where modern land laws are in vogue since 1960, hill lands are still left to customary laws. Expectedly, when there are several communities involved, each with their own customary land laws, there would be trouble.
The Nagas believe they are the original owners of these hills and the Kukis came later, and were allowed to settle as their tenants. Kukis reject this formulation.
The second event was a massive rally by the Coordinating Committee on Manipur Integrity or Cocomi, a conglomerate of several Meitei civil society organisations, on October 31, calling for an end to an alleged proxy war by India using Assam Rifles, among other things. The rally was endorsed and supported by the apex Naga civil society organisation, United Naga Council or UNC.
This is a widely-shared impression among the Meitei and Naga public. The state government is entering into a suspension of operation (SoO) agreement with 25 Kukis militant groups, although it’s often cited that the latter never fought Indian forces. They see this as a counterbalance strategy against Naga and Meitei separatist insurgencies.
Fracturing hostile adversaries, or bheda, is indeed the third of four statecraft strategies recommended in Kautilya’s Arthashastra,. The first two being persuasion, or sama, and bribe, dama. Only when these do not work, coercive force, or danda, is to be resorted to.
Splintering adversaries understandably is a legitimate war strategy, but when used in civil unrest, it can have grave unintended consequences. Even in suspecting this is happening, the toxicity induced in the relationship among communities, not just combatants, is bitter—as Manipur is experiencing.
The third incident is the killing of three Meitei firewood collectors on October 19 at Sunulok or Nongshum foothills by suspected Kuki militants, just as conflict between the two communities was seemingly subsiding. Two of the assailants have since been apprehended.
Subsequent raid by a combined team of police and the CRPF at the nearby Sinai SoO-designated camp, where 150 militants were listed as interned, led to the discovery that only one cadre was present along with 17 other men, none of whom belonged to any SoO-linked group. The camp has now been taken over by the CRPF.
This development seemed to many a confirmation of the suspicion that the SoO cadres were being given a free hand to fight Nagas and Meiteis, and it is this which prompted the rally by Cocomi and UNC.
Some media spin doctors are already claiming that the Nongshum killing has to do with objection to tree felling. Ignorance of Manipur’s forest management history since British days is evident here. As a protectorate state, Manipur had a British political agent whose responsibility was to oversee the state remained in the British sphere of control, and also be an advisor to the maharaja.
Manipur’s first forest management initiative on the advice of political agent Colonel H P Maxwell, was to earmark “valley forest reserves” with the stated objective of raising forest revenue by bringing the practice of firewood collection from forest groves under a government lease system.
It also helped that Meitei Hindus brought along the trait of nature worship from their earlier Sanamahism, and considered each forest grove to be under the guardianship of a deity. Therefore, except for annual pilgrimages, they generally did not take possession of them. There are over 160 such sacred groves within the valley itself and the number is over 360 in the whole state.
Nongshum hills, where the three Meitei firewood collectors were killed, is one of these. It is on the edge of the 31.08 sq km Khamenlok-Gwaltabi Reserve Forest, declared so in 1946. According to records, here too, revenue from leasing out right to firewood collection was the objective.
At the time there were only seven villages within this reserve forest—one of the Tangkhul community, two Kom, one Maring and three Kuki. In the valley area adjacent to it, there were 14 Meitei villages. The vegetation at the time was described as not a primary forest, but secondary growths and degraded shrubs.
The trouble also is that, at last count, from seven villages within the reserved forest in 1946, there are now 49, and the increment is solely on account of proliferating Kuki villages.
Manipur’s British-era reserved forests—the first of which is the 9.71 sq km Heingang hillside within the valley, declared in 1913—were, by The Merged States (Laws) Act 1949, brought under the Indian Forest Act, 1927 after allowing some old features to remain.
What, then, is the way forward? Easier said than done, but it will have to be about scrambling previously-held archaic notions of land and belonging, and reassembling them into new laws that accommodate legitimate concerns, anxieties and aspirations of all stakeholders. Secularism here has to be redefined to mean not just separating religion from State, but also ethnicity from State.
Pradip Phanjoubam | Editor, Imphal Review of Arts and Politics
(Views are personal)
(phanjoubam@gmail.com)
