Everywhere around, the great playwright Ratan Thayim saw the frenzied madness that precedes the apocalypse. A monkey, a survivor of the Ramayana who had gone on to fight in the Great World War, was crying in front of a photograph of Darwin. A curse prevented the monkey from becoming a man, but the priest who promised to help him had become a follower of Mao Zedong. The Kauravas had won the battle of Kurukshetra, and the streets were awash with preachers offering new religions at cut-price.
Ever since savage ethnic cleansing began in Manipur last month—claiming over a hundred lives and the homes of tens of thousands—Thayim’s surrealist poetry is providing a more accurate guide to reality than the insights of administrators, spies and experts.
The Government of India had turned insurgent groups into state-funded ventures since 2006, paying thousands of demobilised Kuki insurgents Rs 6,000 a month for staying in camps. The backlog of payments was adroitly manoeuvred to transform surrendered insurgents into electoral campaigners.
Large-scale contracts were handed out, to élites in all communities, in an effort to corrupt them into compliance. The state discreetly looked away from endemic drug trafficking and extortion.
As successive governments claimed they were making peace, they were manufacturing a dystopia. There are many narratives which collide in Manipur, but the story of why the Kuki have gone to war helps understand the unfolding conflict.
Also read: Ethnicity was manipulated to control Manipur insurgency–the hate this unleashed set it on fire
Encountering the modern world
Faced with grinding shortages of workers to serve the carnage of Ypres and Flanders, historian Radhika Singla records, Imperial Britain needed Indian bodies. The Maharaja of Manipur, among other native rulers, provided Nagas, Lushai and Meitei—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.
Enslavement had been embedded into the monarchical order, before Manipur was annexed into British India in 1891, and then allowed to become a nominally-independent state. The keeping of human chattel by the king ended, but the British continued to use forced labour, often for their own ends.
The peoples of the hills, anthropologist James Scott has taught, are practitioners of the Art of Not Being Governed, skilfully using terrain to avoid taxation by valley-based state. The hillmen used their mountain redoubts to avoid state slavery, raids, conscription, taxation and forced labour.
Even though colonial discourse cast the Kukis as savage plunderers, historian Jankhomang Guite has pointed out that the reality was considerably more complex. The hill tribes often helped fight the wars of lowland princes, and provided refuge to them during invasions from Burma. The Kuki ran a crude taxation system, charging protection money from cultivators and traders operating on their lands.
The relentless demand made by the Great War for human bodies, though, led Britain to turn to the Kuki hills—regions which were well outside the control of the Imphal-based princes. The Kuki were less than enthused by their first great encounter with the modern world—and decided to fight back.
Local uprisings against imperial power had broken out in what are today called the Chittagong Hill Tracts, as early as 1845–71. There were fresh insurrections in 1872 and 1888, and the Anglo-Chin war of 1889-90. Late in the spring of 1917, Kuki chiefs met at the village of Jampi, and sacrificed a sacred Mithun cow, to vow they would not travel to France. Legend has it that bullets were sent from village to village, as talismans seeking support.
The empire was equally determined to ensure compliance, and ordered the Kukis to surrender their guns: “It is essential to the administration of a country peopled with uncivilised tribes that they shall be made to understand that legitimate orders cannot be disobeyed with impunity and that defiance brings certain punishment,” political agent JC Higgins asserted.
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The Little War of the Great War
Fought into the shadow of the Great War, the Anglo-Kuki war began with raids against ethnic-Nepali cattle farmers settled by the British in the Khuga valley, near Churachandpur. The settlement had been a simmering source of resentment since the land was among the best available to the Zou and Thadou for cultivating rice. Elsewhere, villages were fortified in anticipation of the inevitable counter-attacks by superior forces, and food stocks dispersed.
Early on, the British believed the Kukis were being inspired by an ethnic-Meitei pretender to the throne, Chingakhamba Sana Chaoba Singh, someone who claimed magic powers that would protect the tribes. The so-called primitive fighters were, however, well-prepared for war.
Like in other little wars, or insurgencies, the odds were stacked against the rebels—who had to depend on their tactical skills and wits. The British had anticipated that, when confronted with force, Kuki opposition would collapse. Instead, the insurgents melted away.
Even though the Kukis only had small numbers of firearms, the superb scholarship by Jangkhomang Guite and Thongkholal Haokip records, the tribes had learned to extract nitrates from the excrement of the bats in the Senlung caves. This could be mixed with charcoal and saltpetre to be made into gunpowder.
Large numbers of children and women were forced into concentration camps at Ningel, Tengnoupal, Bongmol, Lonpi and Nungba, by the Assam Rifles, former Governor Robert Reid recorded, in an effort to coerce the Kuki insurgents to surrender. The camps were also used to torture suspects with lashings. Elsewhere, entire villages were burned down and crops looted, in an effort to snuff out rebellion by starvation.
These barbaric colonial-era practices, the eminent Indian Administrative Services Vijendra Jafa recorded, remained part of lexicon of counter-insurgency in the northeast until well into the 1960s —embittering relationships between New Delhi and the region’s people for generations.
Following the Anglo-Kuki war, an unquiet peace was restored in the hills. The British had shown they could crush Kuki rebellion, but at an economic cost the empire did not wish to pay.
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A questionable freedom
The Anglo-Kuki war wasn’t the only tragedy imposed by the empire in the region: The hideous miscalculations that led to the Manipur war of 1891, documented brilliantly by Caroline Keen, fractured society, opening the way for both religious nationalism and communism. The independent fighting in regions like Nagaland and Mizoram was particularly ferocious. Assam and Manipur saw a variety of ethnic-nationalist and communist-inspired movements. Lacking deep political legitimacy in the region, New Delhi utilised the imperial tools of deal-making and coercion.
Freedom, to make things even more complex, gave some ethnic formations territories where they could exercise political power—but left others, scholar Telsing Haokip observes, out in the cold.
Equitable economic prosperity, education and a politics that looked beyond ethnic contractors could have built a different kind of northeast, writer Sudeep Chakravarti has noted. The process of democratisation could have devolved power and agency to entwined communities, allowing them to resolve their conflicts. Instead, electoral politics served to harden and consolidate antagonistic ethnic identities — a process which has reached its grim climax in Manipur, where rival militia are engaged in pushing entire peoples off their land.
Learning all the wrong lessons from the empire, independent India chose to rule the northeast through cash and coercion. Like in so much of India, communities have responded to the absence of genuine democratic institutions by sharpening group boundaries and raising walls of identity. The fate of Manipur is a cautionary tale of what could happen across much of India tomorrow — and a test of the Republic’s ability to prevent it.
The author is National Security Editor, ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Anurag Chaubey)