Ethereal in her mirrored potloi, its translucent jaliphee veil stretching down to her cylindrical kunmin skirt, Radha—lover and consort to the god Krishna, goddess of compassion and devotion—appeared in the posters as the symbol of the new land. To her sides were the coiled dragon herald ‘Pakhangba’ and ‘Kanglasha’, the beast with a dragon’s head and a lion’s body—markers of the Sanamahi faith, which had been sought to be stamped out when Hinduism became Manipur’s official religion in the 18th century.
Fresh from her triumph in the Bangladesh war, a goddess herself to many in her victorious nation, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi spoke of her wishes in the third person: “It is our wish that Manipur may shine like a gem and impart beauty to the whole of India.”
Even as savage ethnic cleansing and killings continue to tear apart the state Indira birthed in 1972, the image on the poster helps us understand what went wrong. There were communities in Manipur—Naga, Kuki, Zo, Pangal Muslims—for whom the glow from the gem seemed ominous, wrote scholar Sudeep Chakravarti in a brilliant book on India’s eastern borderlands. And anxieties of identity among the Meitei of the plains kept simmering.
The violence in Manipur is the story of what happens when counter-insurgency uses the manipulation of ethnicity and identity as its tools instead of institution-building and the rule of law.
The insurgent tide
The birth of the Meitei insurgency is enmeshed with the story of Hijam Irabot Singh. A charismatic figure from a poor home in Hijam Leikai—who could never complete school due to poverty—Irabot became tied by marriage to Manipur’s monarch, Maharaja Churachand Singh. For a time, he was in charge of the Nikhil Manipuri Hindu Mahasabha, an organisation set up to resist Christian evangelism. Then, in 1934, a women-led rebellion against forced labour by the monarchy swept across the state.
Furious with the violence against women, Irabot rebelled against his brother-in-law: The women, author Homen Borgohain records him saying, had “asked for a handful of rice and you gave them a pail of blood.”
To Irabot, it seemed that the liberation of Manipur could only come about as part of a wider rebellion by the region’s peoples—Meiteis, Nagas, Kukis, the Zo—for an independent Northeast. Later, incarcerated in Irabot Sylhet jail, he would encounter Communist Party of India leaders such as Hemanga Biswas and Jyotirmoy Nandi and helped set up the organisation in Manipur.
For many in Manipur, accession to India choked their legitimate political aspirations. Even though the state had authored its own Constitution in 1948 —and conducted elections where, as historian Priyadarshini Gangte recorded, each candidate had a ballot box of their own bearing their photograph—it was only accorded the status of so-called C-category state, with no elected leadership.
Future Meitei insurgents, historian N Joykumar Singh records, sought to address this democracy deficit using both Irabot’s communism and his ideas of a pan-ethnic insurgency. The Meitei State Committee, set up in 1966 , turned for support to the so-called Federal Government of Nagaland to create a joint revolutionary movement. The Meitei State Committee achieved little—the most lethal weapon in its arsenal later turned out to be an unserviceable machine gun—but it did lay the template for future movements.
The emotional support enjoyed by the Meitei State Committee was made clear in 1969 when police had to open fire to contain mobs who tried to attack Indira on her visit to Imphal that year.
Led by Oinam Sudhirkumar Singh, the United National Liberation Front (UNLF) sought to build an armed movement to free Manipur from migrants—among them, ethnic Marwari traders from Bengal—and thus bring about what it called a national rejuvenation. UNLF reached out to both China and East Pakistan for assistance, but was treated with suspicion by their intelligence services. In one case, dozens of UNLF cadre were deported from East Pakistan into Tripura.
The Revolutionary Government of Manipur, in the next iteration of these efforts, did succeed in receiving training at a Pakistan Army base near Sylhet. The group’s cadre conducted a series of successful operations inside Manipur, including robbing the post office in Imphal and the office of the Imperial College. The war of 1971, though, put an end to its operations.
From 1978 on, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) led by N Bisheshwar Singh again resumed the campaign, mounting a series of lethal actions against the Border Security Force (BSF) and police. The People’s Revolutionary Party of Kangleipak (PREPAK) and the Kangleipak Communist Party joined the campaign. Levels of violence would surge until the mid-1980s.
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A toxic competition
Ethnic assertion among the Meitei mirrored the growth of similar insurgent movements in its hills. The National Socialist Council of Nagaland’s Isak-Muviah (NSCN-IM) faction exercised de facto control over four of its five hill districts – Ukhrul, Senapati, Tamenglong and Chandel. Even as the NSCN-IM signed a ceasefire with the government in 1997, its influence remained intact. Even worse, the rival NSCN-Khaplang faction continued to operate from across the border, in coordination with the PLA.
The Kuki National Army, formed in 1988, was one response to the growth of ethnic Naga armed power, followed in quick order by the establishment of Zomi military groups. Each ethnic militia fuelled fear in the other communities—and support for their own armed groups.
From the early 1990s, the region saw multiple inter-ethnic conflicts—Kuki-Naga, Meitei-Muslim, Kuki-Karbi, Hmar-Dimasa, and even Kuki-Tamil clashes, pitting the community against traders in Moreh who settled there during imperial British rule. The extension of the ceasefire with the NSCN-IM into Manipur in 2001 sparked large-scale violence as fears grew among the Meitei that their state would be divided.
Ethnic groups have had a complex relationship with the Indian State—sometimes collaborating with the Army against each other, and striking at the military at others.
Although Indian troops have struck across the border into Myanmar, expert Bibhu Routray noted that the attacks inflicted no significant casualties on the PLA or NSCN-Khaplang. The organisations have continued to strike the Indian Army, as well as Zomi and Kuki insurgent groups. The contestation between the groups, scholar Seikholal Kom has written, has been fuelled by struggles to control lucrative revenues from legal trade and trafficking in narcotics across the border town of Moreh.
Long-running militarisation has also created bitter resentments against the Indian Army. In 2004, 12 women famously marched to Imphal’s Kangla Fort, disrobed, and chanted slogans asking soldiers to rape them. The protest followed the alleged rape-murder of Thangjam Manorama, suspected to have been working as a courier for the PLA.
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A fractured polity
Ever since the long insurgency in Manipur began, the well-respected BSF officer EN Rammohan wrote, New Delhi sought to buy off ethnic élites by showering the region with cash—and allowing them to siphon it off. Large-scale extortion by ethnic armed groups, he observed, was also tolerated, with the government quietly allowing them to collect a percentage of salaries and development funds directly from government offices. The policy bought a degree of peace—but also corrupted the polity, further weakening institutions.
The rise of chief minister N Biren Singh has seen efforts to build legitimacy for his party through the use of new Hindu nationalist mythos. In 2018, Biren Singh proclaimed that, in the time of Krishna, god made the Northeast by marrying the princess of Arunachal Pradesh. Although this appeal to Hindu feeling has helped the Bharatiya Janata Party build its reach among some ethnic Meitei, it has stoked fears among other groups. The chief minister’s anti-Kuki polemic has fuelled the fires.
Finding resolutions to conflict of identity needs genuine democratic institution building, which will allow communities to meaningfully exercise power over their own lives. The failure to build them has made everyone in Manipur—Kuki, Meitei, Zomi and Naga—a victim and come to threaten the very ideals of India.
The author is National Security Editor, ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)