Manipur has been on fire for more than 75 days now. The nature of violence and brutality committed by Meiteis and Kukis on each other makes one wonder if humanity has any trace left in the region. A 31-year-old man guarding his village was beheaded and his head stuck trophy-like on a pole for all to see – all because he belonged to a different ethnic group. The other side hasn’t been less brutal either.
What’s unfortunate is that each group has hardened its stance and believes its people are victims. This victimhood mentality runs so deep among the two communities – in fact three, if we add Nagas, who, thankfully, aren’t a part of the ongoing violence – they are no longer sensitive about the intensity of violence and heinousness of crime. As a community, they have stopped feeling the pain of the other, even when the nature of the offence is grisly.
Even the video of the two Kuki women being paraded naked failed to evoke much sympathy from the other side. “Oh, but they do the same to us, our women all the time,” said one Meitei student studying in Delhi University.
The Meitei-Kuki divide is dangerously absolute.
This, however, is not a black-and-white story. Meiteis constitute 41.39 percent of Manipur’s population, but are, by law, forced to inhabit the valley alone, which covers about 10 percent of the geographical area of the state. Under Manipur’s Land Reform Act, they are not allowed to settle in the hilly regions, which is 90 percent of the state’s territory. In sharp contrast, other tribes like Naga and Kuki along with their 29 sub-tribes, who reside in 90 percent of the state’s territory, can move into the remaining 10 percent of the state’s territory.
Much to their apprehension, the Meitei numbers have dwindled from 48 percent in 2001 to 44 percent in 2011. Interestingly, they accounted for more than 65 percent of the total population of Manipur in 1951.
Here, it needs to be mentioned that the Naga-Kuki tribes have mostly converted to Christianity, whereas the Meiteis are largely Hindu Vaishnavites. But then the orgy of violence being orchestrated today is not exactly religious in nature, as many vested elements are trying to make it. It’s a battle between two ethnic groups of Manipur, both of whom feel they are tribals but one is not recognised despite having more claims to being sons of the soil.
The mischievous attempt to project it as a Hindu-Christian battle, in which Christians – tribal Kukis converted in the last one century – are facing the persecution of the worst kind is to give the rising, new India a bad name globally. It fits into the Western Soros-ian narrative in which India is being ruled with majoritarian haughtiness, pushing minorities into the peripheries.
The truth is that there hasn’t been a better, safer place for minorities. Historically, India has given refuge to every persecuted community – from Zoroastrians to Jews – and they never felt, however minuscule they might be in terms of population, compelled to give up their indigenous lifestyle for a Hindu way of life.
After Independence, too, minorities have officially received equal, if not the preferential “first claim on resources” treatment. One can look at the state of religious institutions of Hindus vis-à-vis other minorities to comprehend the difference. Hindu temples, for instance, are run by the ‘secular’ Indian State while the minorities are free to operate their religious institutions the way they want.
Coming back to the Meiteis, they have a deeper grievance of being discriminated against for their religion. They feel they have been left out of the tribal category primarily because they are Vaishnavites. They have a point, here. After all, they all belong to the same civilisational whole. One can read their folktales and folklores to realise not just a sense of oneness among them, but also the fact that these people were an extension of the Indic civilisation. It was actually a British colonial mischief to first bracket these people out of the Hindu fold by calling them “Animists”, and then go for further division between the valley and the hills.
Prof BB Kumar, in his book, The Tribal Societies of India, quotes the Census 1921, as saying: “Animism as a religion should be entirely abandoned, and all those hitherto classed as Animists should be grouped with Hindus.” Even eminent sociologist H Risley found “no sharp distinction” between Hinduism and Animism.
Their folklores, too, share a similar story: of one people, with overarching civilisational connection. Kumar, in another book, Folklores and Folklore Motifs, invokes several local legends that hint at common cultural, civilisational continuity. As per a Naga story, a “God known as Jillmasa had connection with a cloud, and as a result of that god, tiger and three others namely Asapu, Tuthoh and Kepi were born. Asapu and Tuthoh went to the valleys of Brahmaputra and Manipur, respectively. Kepi stayed there. The three became the ancestors of Mayangs (Indians), Meitheis (Manipuris) and Huas (Nagas), respectively.”
He also recounts an Angami (Naga) story that says the Nagas and the plainsmen were “the descendants of two brothers and their followers, who used Chombu and Chemu trees to lighten their paths. The former gave light for several days, but not the latter. Thus, most people who followed the brother using Chombu tree for blazing the path went to the plains. The ancestor of the Nagas was the second brother”.
Then, there’s another Angami legend, as per which Nagas and Teprima (Indians) are the descendants of Ukepenopfu and her wise husband, who had a long moustache and beard reaching down to his feet. “He imparted all his knowledge and wisdom to the younger son, who became the ancestor of Teprimas (Indians). The elder one (ie, the ancestor of the Nagas) was frightened to see him and ran away and thus remained poor in knowledge and wisdom.”
Manipur, and the rest of the Northeast, is bleeding precisely because the British executed with great élan their “divide and rule” policy when they first entered the region after the Treaty of Yandaboo following the first Anglo-Burmese war in 1826. They created the artificial divide between the hills and the plains; so the hills became the homes of the Kuki-Naga tribes and the Imphal Valley, the abode of Meiteis. After dividing the region between the hills and the valley, the British came up with another masterstroke in the Eastern Bengal Frontier Regulation Act, 1873, which prohibited an outsider’s — “British subject or foreign citizen” — entry into the area beyond the Inner Line without a pass and his purchase of land there.
Post-Independence, the Nehru administration continued with these colonial policies — of course, in newer terms such as ‘Inner Line Permit’, and in the name of safeguarding tribal culture and traditions. But, in reality, the government of free India did exactly what the colonial masters had done before 1947: to outsource the northeast to missionaries. In fact, the access and control that Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru gave to Dr Verrier Elwin was unprecedented. No wonder, Manipur, which had just 45 Christians in 1901, and 4,000 two decades later, finds its hilly regions mostly converted today.
What ails Manipuri society is that it is heavily weaponised. To make matters worse, each ethnic group has armed militias. So, when the divide is deep and dangerous, violence becomes the obvious outcome. There’s no trust for the other, no sympathy either. What has further complicated the matter is the poppy growing culture, especially among the Kukis, though a section of Meiteis too have deep drug nexus, besides the ongoing flux in Myanmar just across the international border.
As Sreemoy Talukdar wrote for Firstpost in his recent article: “The destabilising factor of armed insurgents from Myanmar — many of whom have kinship ties with transnational ethnic communities straddling India and its immediate neighbours — slipping into the northeastern states through the porous border and adding to the complexity of Kuki-Meitei clashes and exacerbating the ongoing conflict in Manipur, has been under-reported.”
The state government has failed to control the situation. Worse, it doesn’t have the trust of a fairly large segment of its own people. The gravity of the situation, thus, demands strong measures from the central government. It just cannot afford to let the situation deteriorate any further. Maybe given the almost unbridgeable divide between the hills and the valley, the government can look at granting autonomous district councils under the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution to Kukis and Nagas — something on the line of the Bodoland Territorial Council in Assam. Simultaneously, the Meiteis too need justice: they have a legitimate demand and it cannot be brushed aside because of the faith they profess. They are as tribal as Kukis and Nagas.
Accepting such demands may bring in new players with similar proposals. But given the scale and intensity of violence in Manipur and also the great societal divide between the valley people and the inhabitants of the hills — a byproduct of disastrous government policies, of course — the Centre has no option but to bite the bullet sooner than later. A lot of violence has already marred Manipur. It cannot be allowed to bleed any further.
(Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views)
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