1 Year of Manipur Violence: Biren Singh Has Ruptured the State's Shared Space

The violence has also sharpened and widened the territorial separation between the Kuki-Zomi-Hmar and the Meiteis.

In his overzealous attempt to protect the State’s territorial integrity and consolidate his and the BJP’s majoritarian agenda, Mr Singh has ruptured Manipur’s shared territorial space.

(Photo: The Quint)

It is one year since the outbreak of violence on 3 May 2023, but peace continues to be elusive in Manipur as the source of structural violence remains unaddressed.

The unwillingness to address this – and the fact that this violence is allowed to continue by a partisan and majoritarian state – means that armed militia like the Arambai Tenggol and proscribed Meitei armed organisations continue to be given a free hand to relentlessly target Kuki-Zomi-Hmar villages located in the foothills beyond the ‘buffer zones’.

The violence has so far claimed over 220 lives and displaced over sixty thousand population across the divide, of which the major brunt is borne by the Kuki-Zomi-Hmar with 176 deaths, 360 churches, 7000 houses and 200 villages burnt, and over 41,000 displaced.

Despite the fact that ‘buffer zones’ were ideated by none other than Union Home Minister Amit Shah, and by the security establishment, and enforced since Shah’s visit to Manipur towards the end of May 2023 as a tactical ploy to forestall violence, the continued and willful transgressions of these zones by Meitei armed groups from the valley continue to be the major source of violence.

The recent viral video which depicts the grisly chopping off of the palm and head of one of the two Kuki victims of this violence and the dragging of the decapitated corpse after they were reportedly killed by an alleged central paramilitary forces’ shelling on 14 April 2024 at Phailengmol in Kangpokpi district, the new theatre of aggression, sits oddly with the claim by Prime Minister Modi on 8 April 2024 that the Centre’s ‘timely intervention’ and efforts of the state government has ‘markedly improved the situation’ in Manipur.

However, on close scrutiny, the continuing violence would not have been possible without the complicity of both the central and the state governments.

Overdrive of Distorted Narratives

To any perceptive observer, a routine pattern of transgressions across the 'buffer zones' and post facto justifications of such transgressions since early June 2023 becomes evident. These transgressions are justified post facto by a distorted and manipulated narrative which persistently projects the Kukis as the aggressor. This narrative deliberately ignores the persistent role of Meitei armed groups in perpetuating offensive strikes beyond the ‘buffer zones’.

Under the cover of such a distorted narrative, several operations by the state police and the paramilitary forces were launched in the foothills. Such operations, especially the ones by the state police commandoes, were allegedly accompanied by armed Meitei groups and resulted in extensive burning of Kuki villages.

The extensive burning down of houses in Sugnu and Moreh towns, among many others, are glaring exemplars.

Unfortunately, this narrative overdrive, which singularly casts the blame on the Kukis, also becomes the staple diet of various unscrupulous Imphal-based and mainstream Indian media groups and official narratives. Not surprisingly, Tushar Mehta, the Solicitor General of India, flagged this narrative in one of his depositions before the Supreme Court in early August 2023 when he openly claimed that several of the Kuki-Zomi-Hmar dead bodies who were killed by armed Meitei mobs during the initial days of the outbreak of violence are ‘infiltrators’.

In what is seen as a dismissal of such a distorted narrative and affirmation of the citizenship of the unclaimed(able) corpses lying in various hospital morgues in Imphal, the Supreme Court directed the state government on 28 November 2023 to make arrangements for the ‘dignified burials’ of 87 bodies. This was done on 21 December 2023 after an overnight security operation and their subsequent airlifting from Imphal to Churachandpur and Kangpokpi.

Coming back, such a distorted narrative is conveniently used to create mass hysteria around a putative danger, mostly imaginative, posed by such unnamed ‘infiltrators’ on the state’s demography, territorial integrity, and security of India.

From a little over 2,000 ‘illegal’ immigrants identified by the State Cabinet Sub-Committee in April 2023, there are now attempts to exponentially inflate the numbers to hundreds of thousands to lend credence to this distorted narrative.

The latest salvo from Chief Minister Biren Singh a couple of days ago has it that more than 996 new Kuki villages have come up since 2016 as a result of ‘illegal immigration’.

For one thing, the fact that the alleged creation of new villages happened largely under his nose points partly to the failure of his predecessor and majorly to his government to forestall this possibility. Selective targeting of the Kuki-Zomi-Hmar group and its ethnicisation cannot be used as an excuse to shirk the state government’s responsibility and accountability.

For another thing, the correlation between the growth of these alleged new villages with the ‘unnatural’ decennial population growth of Kuki-Zomi-Hmar-dominated districts is yet to be established by official census data. This becomes imperative as the population growth of these districts in the past two decennial censuses (1991 and 2011) is far below the state’s average.

Biren Singh Has Ruptured Manipur’s Shared Territorial Space

The blatant attempt to squarely blame the creation of new villages and the cultivation of poppy by the Kuki-Zomi-Hmar group as a principal cause of deforestation and environmental degradation also sits uneasily with actually existing realities.

Indeed, several colonial ethnographic accounts including that of Sir James Johnstone, who is considered to have a very favourable disposition towards the Meiteis, showed that extensive deforestation had already happened towards the close of the 19th century with the urban boom in construction and railway industries. The fact that the report of the Superintendent of Police in charge of Narcotics and Border Affairs report during 2017-2022 demonstrates the involvement of all major communities, including the Meitei and ‘Kuki-Chin’, also exposed the malafide intent of such a narrative.

Interestingly, Singh’s inconsistent position on this became evident as he claimed five years ago in an interview during an India Today conclave that no ‘illegal immigrant’ existed in Manipur – and that the state does not need an Assam-like National Registrar of Citizens (NRC).

Although he expressed his concern over a porous Indo-Myanmar border where illegal immigrants from Bangladesh and Myanmar (Rohingyas) could sneak into the state in this interview, his obsession with the Kuki ‘illegal’ immigrants happened only around 2019 and reached its climax around the latter half of 2022 when the majoritarian agenda aggressively pursued by frontal Meitei civil society groups and the state government, converge and mutually reinforced one another.

Taking a cue from Paul Brass, the eminent expert on India who emphasised the pivotal role played by the state in laying the grounds for Hindu-Muslim communal riots in various parts of North India, I argued elsewhere that this convergence and the aggressive majoritarian agenda of the state prepared the ground for an ‘institutionalised riots system’ in Manipur since 3 May 2023.

The use of distorted and manipulated narratives to provide ex post facto official and intellectual justification might help Biren Singh and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to electorally consolidate their majoritarian agenda and appeal. It may also be gainfully used as a political optics to invoke the sacrosanctity of the state’s territorial integrity, and the largely imaginative dangers posed by the Kuki ‘illegal immigrants’ on the state’s demography and India’s national security.

Yet, this narrative distorts the actually existing realities in the state and has leveraged selective targeting of the Kuki-Zomi-Hmar groups as the problematic ‘others’.

In his overzealous attempt to protect the state’s territorial integrity and consolidate his and the BJP’s majoritarian agenda, Singh has ruptured Manipur’s shared territorial space. The sharpened ethnic and territorial overlap, which has been in place since December 2016 with the reorganisation of district borders to simultaneously cater to ethnic/tribe demands and leverage the state’s divide-and-rule policy by carving out seven additional districts from the extant nine districts, has turned full-circle after one year of the outbreak of violence in Manipur since 2023.

Studies by Henry Hale in the East European context may provide an ominous sign for Manipur as he established that the emergence of ethnic core region(s) within a multiethnic state, the kind of which obtains in Manipur since 3 May 2023 violence, is a recipe for state collapse.

What is more disconcerting is the fact that this violence has not only militarised societies across the territorial divide, but has also sharpened and widened the territorial separation between the Kuki-Zomi-Hmar and the Meiteis. The large-scale recruitment and training of youths in the name of defending their respective lands and communities is not only bound to worsen the ‘ethnic security dilemma’ but has also inculcated a deep sense of mutual hate, suspicion and insecurity.

This does not augur well for inter-communal peace and solidarity and is bound to leave a black imprint on Singh’s political legacy. Clearly, deeply diverse and heterogenous societies like Manipur have not learnt their lesson well from the large-scale comparative worldwide study of the late Walker Connor, one of the most eminent experts on nationalism, that attempts to engage in ‘nation-building’ without accommodating deeply diverse and divided societies often resulted in ‘nation-destroying’.

(Kham Khan Suan Hausing is a Professor and former Head of the Department of Political Science, University of Hyderabad. He is also an Honorary Senior Fellow, Centre for Multilevel Federalism, Institute of Social Sciences, New Delhi. Views are personal. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)