Why Manipur crisis may rank among one of the most misinterpreted tragedies in India

The ethnic violence in the volatile north-Indian state of Manipur, that has so far claimed 152 lives, displacement of 50,000 and has led to the arrest of nearly 15,000 people, has been one of the most misinterpreted and little-understood tragedies in recent times. The narrative in the western and liberal media that tends to interpret India through the orientalist lens of either Christian evangelism or ‘Hindu majoritarianism’ holds the BJP, the party in power at the Centre and the state, responsible for the explosion of violence between the Meitei and the Kuki groups. The Meiteis are predominantly Hindus who form a narrow majority and occupy the plains of Imphal valley that is geographically smaller but more developed while the Kuki tribes, that share ethnicity with the Chin, Hmar and Zo (or Zomi) people, are mostly Christians based on the state’s hill districts that are geographically larger and predominantly agricultural. To explain the orgy of intermittent violence between the two communities since May 3, media has predictably focused on the majority-minority and ‘Hindu-Christian’ divides, spiced up by the European Parliament’s so-called ‘resolution’ in July that interpreted the violence as an attack on ‘Manipur’s Christian community’. It completely misdiagnoses the problem. As India’s Supreme Court has observed, the violence has claimed victims on both sides of the ethno-religious divide, and both  Meitei and  Kuki women have been subjected to gruesome sexual violence. Clashes among these ethnic groups have occurred in the past, notably in 2015. What began on 3 May, however, is unprecedented in scale and intensity. It was seemingly triggered by a high court order that recommended the inclusion of the Meitei community in the Scheduled Tribes (ST) list, which, if adopted by the state, would allow the ethnic Meiteis to buy land in the protected hill districts populated by the Kukis and other tribes. Though the Meiteis are native to Manipur, they cannot buy land in the tribal-majority hill districts, whereas the hill-based tribal groups may buy land in the valley. This has been a long-standing grouse of the Meitei, who want a ‘restoration of their tribal status’. The ‘ST status’ issue is doubtless a major fault line that adds to the complexity of the socio-economic divide of the valley and hill districts of Manipur but, contrary to popular discourse, the crisis isn’t one-dimensional, nor are the painful developments occurring in medias res. The horrific bloodletting that has rendered the federal and state administrations virtually defunct for months, forced people to flee their burning homes and take refuge in jungles and relief camps across the border, and has created two de facto administrative zones along the valley and hill regions in the beleaguered state, owes as much to illegal migration, guerilla insurgency movements, drug cartels, narco-terror networks and other transnational crimes across borders as to the multifaceted crises unfolding in a dysfunctional Myanmar, the military-ruled, conflict-torn, heavily sanctioned nation that shares a 1,700km-long frontier with four Indian states, including a 400km unfenced, porous border with Manipur. The scale of the violence that turned Manipur almost into a war zone, with gangs armed with sophisticated weaponry burning down houses, massacring civilians, ravaging villages and townships and creating militarized buffer zones where even the Indian armed forces found it difficult to tread, cannot be explained by the narrative of ‘anger over a court ruling’, though the issue may have acted as a tipping point. What, therefore, lies at the heart of this violence? To get a better perspective, we need to closely examine two disconnected acts by the Indian state that took place at different times and garnered little attention. The first of these events happened in October last year when government agencies, led by the Centre’s campaign against drugs, destroyed approximately 40,000 kg of narcotics in the northeastern region. This pointed to a stark reality that has gone severely under-reported in India: Manipur’s traditional role as a transit point for the transnational drug corridor spanning Myanmar, Thailand and Laos — the infamous Golden Triangle— was changing, and the northeastern state was becoming more integral to the regional drug economy led by an explosion of poppy cultivation in its hill districts. An exploration of the drug angle is vital to our understanding of the nature of violence that exploded in Manipur and shattered its body politic. According to data from the state’s anti-drugs unit Narcotics and Affairs of Border (NAB), in the five-year period between 2017 and 2023, poppy cultivation erupted in Manipur across 15,400 acres of land in the hill districts, among which 13,122 acres were in Kuki-Chin-dominated areas, 2,340 acres in Naga-dominated areas and 35 acres were ‘others’. India’s campaign against drugs was being led by Amit Shah, the Union home minister, who in a meeting with chief ministers, bureaucrats and top cops of all northeastern states on ‘Drug Trafficking and National Security’, held in Guwahati, Assam, on October 8, 2022, said the federal government was trying to synergize the efforts of northeastern states and all anti-narcotics agencies to “go beyond” catching the drug abusers and distributors and nab the “masterminds who send drugs from outside the border to India”, which naturally meant that “the spread of drug network within the country will have to be demolished” by “preventing network and cross-border smuggling.” Calling drug consumption in northeast India “a serious problem”, the minister said the region shares international borders with four countries and “is close to Myanmar which is the second largest producer of opium in the world after Afghanistan". Part of the Centre’s efforts were directed towards constituting one ‘Anti-Narcotics Task Force (ANTF)’ as a single nodal point, detention of top 100 drug traffickers and “several measures” to “eradicate illegal farming in hilly and difficult areas using drones and latest technology.” I have gone into some detail in covering the conference outcome since it triggered a chain of events that ultimately led to the denouement on 3 May. On December 2022, two months after the holding of that conference, Manipur chief minister N Biren Singh, who leads a BJP government in the state, issued an ultimatum to the Kuki “rebel outfits” involved in illegal poppy cultivation. In December 2021, the Netherlands-based Transnational Institute released a report named ‘Causes and Consequences of the Opium Decline in Myanmar’ where it identified Manipur as a place where “poppy cultivation has significantly increased over the last 15 years, primarily as a means of subsistence” and that “Manipur seems to be more integrated within the regional drug economy and connected to other actors, notably from Myanmar.” The report also carried interviews of opium cultivators of farmers who “underlined that opium cultivation had improved their economic situation, yielding annual earnings typically ranging between $5,400-$9,400.” Now let’s look at what the Biren Singh government did in December last year. The state government suspended two police officers for letting escape two village chiefs from Kangpopki district, who were involved in poppy cultivation, and an angry chief minister issued a “last warning” to “Kuki militant outfits” that are “encouraging illegal poppy cultivation in the remote parts of the state and collecting unauthorised tax from cultivators”, and threatened to “declare war against poppy cultivators without any compromise,” according to a Times of India report. Data from Manipur’s NAB showed the state government has destroyed 18,664 acres of poppy plantations from 2017 to 2023, and the most severely affected regions of this drive were the Kuki tribe-dominated districts of Kangpokpi, where 4,397 acres of opium plantations were razed, followed by Churachandpur at 2,700 acres. According to an NDTV report, one of the big operations was carried out in December 2022, five months before the ethnic unrest broke out, that “coincided with the harvest season”, ending “all hopes of making any money from half-a-year worth of farming.” We know from NAB data that the explosion of opium cultivation occurred mostly in the Kuki-Chin populated region of Manipur — showing a 30 per cent increase from 2,001 acres in 2017-18 to 2,600 acres in 2021-22. It is also known that poor farmers belonging to the Kuki-Chin community depended on poppy farming for subsistence and that Manipur opium yields fetch good money in the international market. What has added volatility and complexity to this issue is the involvement of Golden Triangle drug cartels and cross-border insurgent groups from Myanmar who have found in Manipur abundant land, corrupt administration and desperately poor farming community to expand their narco-terror network. This, as the Dutch report pointed out, made Manipur more integral to the regional drug economy. The Diplomat magazine quoted Bhagat Oinam, a professor of philosophy at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, a Meitei by ethnicity, as saying, “What has happened over the past few years is an explosion in poppy cultivation in Manipur’s Kuki-dominated districts backed by drug cartels and insurgent groups with a cross-border network, resulting in huge loss of forest cover. They use the drug money to buy weapons.” The 3 May violence, therefore, wasn’t just a vociferous explosion of anger against a court ruling, but a cynical attempt by the drug mafias and narco terror networks — angered and disadvantaged by the state government’s ‘War on Drugs’ — to spark a civil war in Manipur, destabilize the government and force a rollback of the policy. In the court ruling on giving the Meitei community ‘ST status’, these actors found the perfect opportunity to spark ethnic violence. Since the unrest in Manipur, the drug operators and trade seem to be moving towards the neighbouring Mizoram, another state in India’s northeast affected by the Myanmar junta’s crackdown on the Kuki-chin community. This takes us to the second point — the destabilizing factor of armed insurgents from Myanmar, many of whom have kinship ties with transnational ethnic communities straddling India and regularly slip into the northeastern states taking advantage of the ‘free-movement regime’ (FMR). In July, India’s foreign minister S Jaishankar met his counterpart from Myanmar’s military-led government, U Than Swe, on the sidelines of the Mekong-Ganga Summit in Bangkok. During the scarce bilateral, Jaishankar “underlined the importance of ensuring peace and stability in our border areas,” and made it clear that India’s border areas have been “seriously disturbed recently and any actions that aggravate the situation should be avoided”. Jaishankar’s meeting with Than Swe followed India’s defence secretary’s two-day official visit to Myanmar, during which “the two sides discussed issues related to maintenance of tranquillity in the border areas, illegal trans-border movements and transnational crimes such as drug trafficking and smuggling.” The 1,643 km long India-Myanmar border runs across the four northeastern states of Mizoram, Manipur, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh, and is governed by FMR, an arrangement between the two countries allowing transnational ethnic tribes and communities to travel up to 16 km inside the other country without a visa. The northeastern states of India, populated by a diverse group of Sino-Tibetan communities, are closer to the south-eastern countries bordering India geographically, culturally, and even in terms of connectivity. These states are tied to the Indian mainland only through the narrow ‘Siliguri Corridor’. Instability in Myanmar, therefore, has a direct bearing on India’s national security. The ongoing pitched battle in Myanmar — between the military junta that seized power through a coup d’état in 2021 by unseating the democratically elected National League for Democracy government led by Aung San Suu Kyi, and ‘pro-democracy forces’ — has completely upended regional diplomacy, turned the Southeast Asian nation into a restive state beset with ethnic rivalry, violent crackdown and civil war, and has brought a simmering crisis bang on India’s doorstep affecting the sensitive northeastern states. American policy failures have worsened the crisis in Myanmar in two more ways, as I wrote recently for Firstpost. “One, wave after wave of debilitating sanctions (the US has imposed 20 rounds targeting key figures of the military junta, defence ministry, business entities, state-owned enterprises and brokers while the European Union and the UK have imposed six separate rounds) have triggered a meltdown in Myanmar’s economy. Investors have been spooked away, unemployment rates have shot up while the currency has suffered a collapse” leading to a refugee crisis. Two, America’s stated decision through the BURMA Act to back the armed insurgents operating within Myanmar that are seeking to overthrow the Tatmadaw, involves substantial injection of funds and “non-lethal assistance” for “ethnic armed organizations”. This has caused the regime to step up its brutalities in Myanmar’s Chin state and the northwestern Sagaing regions, both bordering India and offering the stiffest armed resistance to the military regime. In January 2022, reports emerged of the junta torching village after village in Chin state in western Myanmar bordering India. Guardian quoted human rights groups to report that as many as 80,000 people were forced to flee their homes, almost 900 were arrested between February 2022 and December 2021, while 182 people were killed during the same period. A year later in April 2022, the junta launched a massive airstrike on the resistance movement outside Pazigyi village in Sagaing region, killing more than 100 people, including children, using deadly ‘enhanced blast’ munitions, also known as ‘vacuum bomb’. A crowd had gathered in the village for the opening of a local office of the country’s resistance movement, according to reports.

The Chin Human Rights Organisation in Myanmar reported a total of 14 airstrikes by the Tatmadaw on rebels since the 2021 coup. In a report filed in January this year, VOA quoted the organisation as saying that “at least 200 Chin refugees crossed the border last week following airstrikes by the Myanmar military on a key rebel camp on the India-Myanmar border… Within the first half of this month, the Myanmar junta carried out four airstrikes in Chin state.” To escape the crackdown, Kuki-Chin refugees have sought shelter in India by thousands. According to figures from UNHCR, the refugee agency of the United Nations, the Myanmar civil war has displaced 1,827,000 people since February 2021, among which over 53000, mostly from the conflict-ridden Chin state and Sagaing region, have entered India’s Mizoram and Manipur states till May 2023. The massive influx of refugees, including armed militants, has affected the state’s delicate ecological and demographic balance and added to the volatility in Manipur where anger has started rising over illegal infiltration and its possible effect on employment and land rights. Notably in March, two months before the breaking of violence, the Democratic Students’ Alliance of Manipur (DESAM), an umbrella group of Meitei student organisations, held demonstrations outside the chief minister’s home demanding National Register of Citizens (NRC) in the state and the setting up of a Population Commission to stop the ongoing influx. According to a report in The Print, the students’ body issued a statement, claiming that “outsiders coming from the other side of Indian boundaries, especially Myanmar, are taking full advantage of possessing similar facial composition, skin colour, and language as they create and expand their own villages, encroaching land which is owned by the state on the hills of Manipur,” and “large numbers of illegal immigrants who have entered Manipur recently through the porous border” have settled in “new villages have come up in the hill areas with encroachment of forest land.” How credible is this claim? A report in The Hindu, citing satellite imagery data from government sources, reported that “in 1969, there were 587 villages in the Imphal valley, which is dominated by the non-tribal Meiteis. That dropped to 544 villages in 2021. On the other hand, in the hill districts — which are inhabited mostly by 34 Scheduled Tribes including the Kukis and the Nagas — there were 1,370 settlements and villages in 1969. By 2021, however, this had shot up to 2,244 villages.” In the month of July, the Manipur government requested Indian paramilitary forces to repatriate 718 refugees from Myanmar who had illegally entered the state and had settled in the Kuki-dominated Chandel district due to the clashes in the Sagaing region of Myanmar. An internal report of the state government had identified over 2,000 illegal immigrants from across the border in four hill districts, in addition to 5,500 illegal immigrants who were caught in the border town of Moreh in September 2020 among which 4,300 were pushed back. Under fire from the Opposition, Union home minister Shah told the Parliament that the government has fenced 10 kilometres, is fencing seven more kilometres of the border and from January 2023, have used biometrics to detect and update voter lists and Aadhaar’s negative lists to dispel “a feeling of fear” that had “crept into our Meitei brothers.” A day before the violence erupted in Manipur, on May 2, CM Singh at a press conference in Imphal said “illegal immigration from Myanmar to Manipur is such that we have so far detained 410 people from that country who have been staying in the state without proper documents. There is an additional 2,400 of them seeking shelter in detention homes along the border areas…who have fled Myanmar”, adding, “We have reasons to believe that there must be many more Myanmarese residing illegally in Manipur…” If drug cartel is one end of the spectrum, the other end is the massive infiltration by the persecuted Kuki-Chin people who have been settled illegally into uninhabited forested hillsides that are protected by provisions of the Indian Forest Act. The government’s eviction drive to remove newly settled encroachers from the reserved forests in March proved another flashpoint. The missing link in the puzzle between drug mafia, poppy cultivation, cross-border infiltration, insurgency groups and smuggling network is the access to lethal, illegal weapons and firearms that have found uninterrupted supply into the hands of both warring groups. While the Meiteis have frequently raided state police armories, the Kuki militants have benefitted from cross-border links with various insurgent groups battling the Myanmar army. According to a paper published by Anuradha Oinam of the Centre for Land Warfare Studies (CLAWS), “Myanmar’s ethnic groups, such as the Kuki-Chin or Zomi migrated and settled along the IMB bordering Assam, Manipur and Mizoram. Many insurgent groups such as the United National Liberation Front (UNLF), People’s Liberation Army (PLA), The United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA), National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN) and small groups of Kukis, Zomies have built camps in Sagaing Division, Kachin state and Chin state. They took shelter there, obtained arms, trained cadres, and, most importantly, engaged in illegal activities such as smuggling drugs and selling weapons to raise funds. This is possible because of the porous borders and frequent misuse of FMR. Therefore, managing and administering the border areas effectively is pertinent for reducing drug trafficking and illegal cross-border movement on unfenced borders.” The deadly violence has reportedly been fuelled by automatic weaponry such as (German-made) Heckler & Koch MP5 rifles, or folded AK 47s brazenly paraded by Kuki militants who have benefitted from the drug money to buy lethal firearms. In a ground report, Jaideep Mazumder of Swarajya quotes Indian intelligence sources to write that “the Arakan Army in Myanmar possesses Barrett M22 ASRs and have used those weapons with devastating effect against the military junta. The Arakan Army is a close ally of the Chin National Army (CNA) and Chinland Defence Force in Myanmar. The CNA is believed to have sent many of its well-trained cadres into Manipur to help the Kukis in the state in their fight against the Meiteis.” Evidently, the Manipur crisis is the result of a complex conflation of issues that cannot be explained by lazy analysis such as ‘Hindu majoritarianism’, or ‘anti-Christian violence’. As the state limps back to an uneasy calm, it will continue to pose a Herculean challenge to the writ of Indian state. This piece first appeared in The India Journal magazine. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views. Read all the Latest News , Trending News , Cricket News , Bollywood News , India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.