For hours, fragments of burning paper drizzled on the perfectly manicured lawns of the Raj Bhawan in Imphal, covering the grass with the ashes of centuries of learning and literature. Two decades ago this April, activists of the Meetei Erol Eyek Loinasillol Apunba Lup, seeking to eradicate the Bengali script from their homeland with matches and buckets of kerosene, set fire to the Manipur State Central Library. Estimates suggest 145,000 books, some of them priceless manuscripts, were lost in the arson, for which no one was punished.
Libraries are a small, even trivial, loss compared to the lives lost, the brutal violence, and the ethnic cleansing Manipur has faced since 2023. Yet, the burning of the library offers an opportunity to reflect on the forces that engendered the ethnic warfare and consider how they might be engaged.
Early this month, the Centre began what can only be described as an effort to play-act normality—ordering bus services to resume across the state’s fraught ethnic borders. To no one’s surprise, the peace-buses led to more bloodshed. Fighting between ethnic groups continues, meanwhile, as rival chauvinists seek to assert territorial sovereignty.
Land has, in fact, become the only truth that matters: The houses in Imphal’s neighbourhoods like New Lambulane or those near the old palace at Haokip Veng, once home to the ethnic Kuki elite in the city, remain shuttered, with an ever-present risk of being seized by the ethnic Meitei militia Arambai Tenggol. Tens of thousands of ethnic Meitei, meanwhile, stay in refugee camps in Bishnupur, their lands and homes emptied by the prospect of attack by Kuki-Zo insurgent units.
To many, the idea of catching a bus home might seem faintly ridiculous, even insulting.
A divided city
For a brief while in the 1970s, we know from anthropologist Duncan McDuie-Ra’s luminous book on Imphal, Borderland City in New India, that it might have been possible to conceive of Imphal as a cosmopolitan, multicultural city, much like Shillong. The yellow-and-red cube-shaped Shankar Talkies was once among the spaces where Imphal residents of all ethnicities shared space to watch Hindi pop films. Early in the 2000s, though, ethnic Meitei insurgents ordered Hindi films banned as part of a broader programme to enforce the use of the Meitei Mayek script and language.
Till recently, the Shankar Talkies building was used by the Spirit of Faith Church, an evangelical sect seeking to draw Meitei converts to Christianity. Those converts, journalist Makepeace Sitlhou has reported, had to flee, facing threats from Arambai Tenggol.
Imphal’s Rupmahal—once the beating heart of its politically charged performance theatre scene—was also killed off by the Hindi movie ban. The theatre’s courtyard has become a market, with vendors selling knock-off clothing brought from China through Myanmar.
Arambam Somorendra, one of the protagonists of Manipur’s new theatre and an early participant in the United National Liberation Front’s (UNLF) insurgency against the Indian state, was among those who helped give Rupmahal its special place. He was assassinated in 2000, allegedly by the cadre of a rival breakaway group, the Kanglei Yawol Kanna Lup. The banners carried above his funeral procession proclaimed a line from one of his poems: “On your fields, today, lie scattered the blood drops of your son.” The killers were not named, though; there were no prosecutions.
For much of the 1990s—in large part because of the anti-India insurgency men like Arambam Somorendra helped set off—Imphal remained a curfewed city—the few venues for the production of a metropolitan culture that might transcend ethnicity. Leaving aside the small, illegal liquor shops in neighbourhoods like Kabui Khul, which drew men from all sections of society, cultural life remained regulated by the demands of ethnic belonging and tradition.
Early in the new millennium, Imphal sprouted new glass-and-steel buildings, appearing to transform itself from a quiet provincial town into a beacon of modernity. Largely to compensate for dysfunctional public health services, spanking-new specialist hospitals grew in the city. Tuition and coaching centres preparing students for competitive examinations expanded dramatically. The government’s plans to build a new highway linking Imphal through Moreh to Bangkok promised dramatic new economic opportunities.
The new Imphal, which emerged after the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) was lifted from the city in 2004, was suffused with K-pop-inspired bands, cafés, and fashion contests. This new youth culture, it would turn out, elided over the problem of ethnic identity instead of addressing it.
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The shadow of history
Following Manipur’s incorporation into the British Empire in 1894, the relationship between the Meitei of the Imphal plains and the peoples of the hills around them changed dramatically. The Hindu rulers of Manipur, like kings elsewhere in India, had long treated Adivasi populations as chattels. The Empire ended slavery but replaced it with a system of forced labour. Lambus, or headmen, were appointed from the Meitei community to secure labour and revenue from the hill people and meet the Empire’s endless need for native bodies.
The Maharaja of Manipur, among other native rulers, provided Nagas, Lushai and Meitei to serve in the war effort of 1914-1918—communities who, as colonial army officer Leslie Shakespear noted, “had in many cases done this sort of work for Government before in border expeditions, and knew the work.” The rewards included a lifetime exemption from forced free labour.
Large-scale rebellions against colonial authority were common. The Kukis fought a protracted insurgency against the British in 1917-1919. From 1934, political scientist Homen Borgohain records, women-led insurrections broke out over levies on rice.
The independence of India failed to address these problems. Even though Manipur had authored its own Constitution in 1947—and conducted elections where, as historian Priyadarshni M Gangte writes, each candidate had a ballot box of their own bearing their photograph—it was only accorded the status of so-called C-category state or one with no elected leadership.
Leaders of the Meitei insurgency against India, like the charismatic Hijam Irabot Singh, believed that an alliance of all of Manipur’s ethnic communities was needed to build a new, socialist order. Early insurgent groups also sought to expel Marwari and Bengali settlers who had arrived from the plains. Tensions flared. In 1969, when then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi visited Imphal, police had to open fire on protestors to maintain order.
The insurgent leadership could, however, never find the means to deliver on their own vision of an inclusive Manipur. The anti-India insurgency threw its weight behind reviving pre-Hindu cultural traditions and faith among the Meitei, excluding groups like the Kuki and Naga.
In 1993, Kuki communities were savagely attacked by the National Socialist Council of Nagalim in an effort to evict them from Naga territory. “Women raped and killed,” Sudeep Chakravarti records in his superb account of the conflict, “Children burnt alive in a church. Children killed in transit camps. 1994. Several women were raped and killed while out collecting herbs. Twenty-five men were shot to death with automatic weapons after their hands were tied at the back.”
Kuki insurgents armed themselves—leading on, almost inexorably, to conflict with the ethnic-Meitei groups which had been operating through their territories. Even after ceasefires were signed between the government and Naga and Kuki groups, skirmishing went on—often for control of territories from which to extort government contractors and civil servants.
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A murderous progress
Economic development, McDuie-Ra writes, further contributed to the ethnic tensions. Ethnic Meitei, faced with rapid demographic growth from 1951 to 1961, began fearing their community would be marginalised. The changing status of traditionally underprivileged ethnic groups also caused concern. Enabled by missionary education and rents extracted from the region’s notoriously corrupt development programmes, a small Kuki elite emerged. Their presence in the bureaucracy, the result of reservations, as well as business success, stoked the resentments of the ethnic-Meitei underclass.
To capitalise on these resentments, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) sought to create Hindu nationalist mythos, linking the Meitei to a broader Indian identity. In 2018, former chief minister N Biren Singh proclaimed that in the time of Krishna, god made the Northeast by marrying the princess of Arunachal Pradesh. Kukis became part of this new Hindutva’s demonology.
Finding peace in Manipur requires political engagement that seeks to engage, rather than erase: To build a library that allows all texts, so to speak, rather than none. Fearing the consequences of conflict in the Northeast, the Government of India has engaged ethnic insurgents, using one to contain the other. This has, perversely, ended up perpetuating the conflict. The time has come for New Delhi to turn its attention from running buses to thinking about what democratic engagement might really mean.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited Aamaan Alam Khan)