The Manipur government’s anti-drugs campaign, grandiosely named “War on Drugs”, is almost as old as the BJP’s six years in power there under Chief Minister Biren Singh. On March 21, the government completed a year in its second term, yet six years down the line, the way ahead on this battlefront does not seem any shorter, or the challenges any smaller.
Manipur has had a drug problem for decades, thanks to an ancient trade route that connects it to Southeast Asia and therefore to the infamous Golden Triangle not too far away from its eastern border. In geographical terms, this is a tri-junction where the Mekong River, at a confluence point, splits the landmasses of three nations—Myanmar, Thailand and Laos. Beginning in the 1970s, this had become the focal point of an international network of illegal opium and heroin trade.
Shelby Tucker has a good account on how this came to be so in his book Burma: The Curse of Independence. It is intriguing how this predicament was a fallout of geopolitics of the time—more specifically the Cold War between the Capitalist West and Communist East blocs. The latter bloc was then gaining influence in East and Southeast Asia, prompting the US-led West to attempt halting this march by opening a Cold War front in northern Myanmar’s Shan State.
At the end of WWII, even as China’s struggle against imperial Japan ended, a bitter internal power struggle began between Mao Zedong’s communist Red Army and Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang). The Kuomintang soon retreated and two divisions of their army ended up taking refuge in Myanmar’s northern Shan State in 1950.
According to Tucker, as the Kuomintang troops in Myanmar, assisted by the US, waited for an opportunity to regain China, they turned to streamlining poppy cultivation and refining practices already prevalent. Myanmar ultimately complained to the United Nations, and international pressures, coupled with the growing realisation that China could not be retaken, led the US to pressure Taiwan to evacuate the Kuomintang from Myanmar. The infrastructures for drugs they left behind were taken over by local warlords, the most infamous being Khun Sa. Thus was born the notorious Golden Triangle.
The final blow to the Kuomintang fightback against communist China came no sooner. Tucker notes that as the US itself began facing trouble in Vietnam towards 1970—when a rift appeared between the then USSR and China—it jumped to grab the opportunity and began sending out friendship overtures to Mao’s China. After Secretary of State Henry Kissinger visited China in 1971, President Richard Nixon also did so the following year.
Manipur has always been a natural and major transit route for the Golden Triangle drugs. Since the late 1970s, the state has had more than its fair share of drug addiction problems and related scourges such as HIV/AIDS infection, spread mainly from needle-sharing among heroin addicts. The problem became compounded by high levels of youth frustration, leading them to choose political radicalisation and take the path of insurgency, or fall to the lure of drugs and alcohol. A state with a population of less than 3 million—by 2015 had 24,457 people living with HIV/AIDS, according to an estimate by the National Aids Control Programme. While the spread of HIV/AIDS is somewhat under control now, the drugs problem is not.
In the last few years, the problem has acquired another dimension. From just being a transit route and suffering its collateral damages, today a new culture of illegal poppy cultivation has arrived in a big way in its hills—Manipur is therefore poised to also become a source and not just a route of this international drug trafficking network. The administrative lull because of extended nationwide Covid lockdowns starting March 2020, and equally Myanmar plunging back into chaos and lawlessness since the February 1, 2021 military coup, are probably additional factors accelerating Manipur’s own descent into the darkness of this netherworld.
This new poppy cultivation culture is now getting progressively more complicated. The challenge is hence no longer just about narcotics control, but also extensive and severe deforestation of hillsides, intensive use of pesticides, weedicides and fertilisers contaminating springs and streams, and ultimately rivers and lakes. Another issue is the faceoffs between forest administrators and villagers who are found to have encroached into previously uninhabited forested hillsides—declared as protected forests or reserved forests under the Indian Forest Act—often for the purpose of poppy cultivation. In this mushrooming multiplicity of related issues, the Biren government’s “War on Drugs” has often tended to get diverted from its central focus.
The flashpoint came on March 10. Civil society organisations of Kuki tribes held peaceful rallies at different places to protest government eviction notices served to villages deemed to have encroached into reserved forests. One of these rallies turned violent and protesters clashed with the police. The government, in response, called an emergency cabinet meeting and made some tough decisions, one of which is rather rash. The first said the government would not be taking back its decision to evict encroachers from reserved and protected forests. The second reaffirmed its drive against poppy plantation will continue. The third said the state government would be pulling out of the Suspension of Operations (SoO) agreement with two Chin-Kuki militant groups, the Kuki National Army (KNA) and Zomi Revolutionary Army (ZRA).
The government has not said the three decisions are related but their juxtaposition is too close to not be read otherwise. While the earlier two are understandable and indeed seem to have received the nod from New Delhi, the last is where the state government may end up embarrassed. The SoO is a tripartite agreement between the Centre, the state government, and 25 Kuki militant organisations. Can a responsible party then unilaterally pull out without prior notice? Indications are, the Centre has said no to this. The state government biting off more than it can chew is one thing, but the deadly Golden Triangle now seems to have expanded its boundaries, bringing with it its peculiar brand of social woes to burden all unfortunate to come within it. Manipur’s cup of woes is overflowing yet again.
Pradip Phanjoubam
Imphal Review of Arts and PoliticsEditor of