Manipur is a state in north-east India with a population of around three million. It has been embroiled in an ethnic conflict since May 2023, fought between the majority Meitei community and the minority Kuki tribe.
India’s north-eastern states have a history of ethnic rivalries dating back to before the country became independent in AD 1947. In Manipur, violence has erupted between the Meitei and the Kuki communities several times before.
The cause of such rife (?). Tensions had been simmering between the two communities recently, driven in part by the vicious Meitei largesse. The state government has been accused of pursuing policies that discriminated against Kukis, including forced evictions that threatened the security of their land, and through an attempt to cast them as illegal immigrants.
The violence was sparked by a court ruling in March 2023 that granted the majority Meitei scheduled tribe status, entitling them to the same economic benefits and quotas in government jobs and education as the minority Kuki.
It also allowed Meiteis to buy land in the hills, where the Kukis predominately live, further fuelling fears that their lands, jobs and opportunities would be taken away.
This prompted protests, mostly by Kuki student groups, which were met with violence and by early May, it had escalated into a full-blown civil disruption.
So far, more than 260 people have died, almost equal number of people wounded in the violence and more than 60,000 have been displaced. It has become a state concern to bring the violence under control.
We want a separate state. The clashes have strengthened a longstanding demand by the Kukis for their own separate state. Kuki groups say the violence has proved they can no longer live safely under the oppressions of a Meitei-dominant state and have pledged they will not stop fighting until their own state is granted. The Meitei community and the state government fiercely oppose the creation of a separate Kuki state.
"Everything is destroyed, there is nothing left.”
Sitting in a corner of a makeshift relief camp in Imphal's Pangei area, Basanta Singh tries hard to hold back tears as he talks.
Singh, along with his wife and two children, had to run for their lives from the Saikul area in India's northeastern state of Manipur when ethnic clashes erupted.
Singh belongs to the Meitei community and had been living in the hilly Saikul area - largely inhabited by the indigenous Kuki community - for over two decades. He ran a grocery store there. When clashes began, he was advised by his Kuki friends to move out to a safer place.
“We have lived there for so long. We were on good terms with the Kuki people there”, he says.
The goodwill Singh thought he shared with the Kuki community did not prevent his shop from being looted by the mob.
'''I had no option but to run. This is a civil war.”
The history of the Kukis, the Nagas and the Meiteis. History says the Kukis and the Meiteis originated from the land Zomia – a huge massif of mainland Southeast Asia running from the Central Highlands of Vietnam westward all the way to northeastern India and including the southwest Chinese province of Yunnan, Guizhou and western Guangxi. It is beautifully explained in the eponymous book on the history of highland people The Art of Not Being Governed : An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia by James C. Scott from the Yale Agrarian Studies Series.
Professor Scott explains, for two thousand years the disparate groups that now reside in Zomia have fled the projects of the organised state societies that surround them – slavery, conscription, taxes, corvee labour, epidemics and warfare. They were hounded by a very unfriendly environment, each day uncertain not knowing whether they would live the day or die !
It is estimated that around 1500 AD there were frequent military intrusions against hill people under the Ming and Qing dynasties culminating in the unprecedented uprisings in southwestern China in the mid nineteenth century that left millions seeking refuge towards south of southwest China.
In effect, Zomia, Professor Scott contends, has been peopled by runaways from several state-making projects in the valleys, most particularly Han state making projects; bound in the hills they acquired and shifted their ethnic identities to stave off further brutalities. Far from being remnants left behind by civilizing societies, they happened to be, Scott writes, as it were barbarians by choice, people who have deliberately put distance between themselves and lowland, state centres and other social structures.
The atrocities of Ming and Qing were the fuelling factors. The Ming (AD 1368-1644) and Qing (AD 1644-1911) dynasties resorted to mass killings, beheadings and other forms of brutalities that compelled large demographic shift from South west China towards the states of Manipur, Nagaland, Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram further squeezing towards Bangladesh and Myanmar.
Beheadings(!). In the Taiping capture of Nanjing in AD 1853 the Qing governor general conducted mass execution of tens of thousands of suspected rebel sympathisers with 63 beheadings in a four-minute span !!
Woeful lives of Chinese Christians. In celebrated instances, the demonizing process was turned against foreign missionaries in the so-called Tianjin massacre of AD 1870, the series of violent anti-foreign crowd actions in the Yangzi valley in the early 1890s, and murders of Chinese Christian converts during the Boxer uprising of AD 1900.
The terrorised population, who were able to flee, settled as tribals in the hills and plains of Manipur, Nagaland, Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura, Mizoram, Bangladesh and Myanmar. During those early settlements population thrived on different cultural existence, some came down to the plains and others settled in the hills with a belief that as early as AD 1900 they grouped as tribals and with time the tribes were separated as Meiteis and Kukis – the latter naturally being the Chinese Christians surviving the Qing and Ming onslaughts.
The plains were filled early as the flow of mass to the plains were much more and from much early periods than the Chinese Christians who were wandering tribes taking time to settle in the hills of Manipur.
Is there a Chinese hand in Manipur violence(?). Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) Anil Chauhan says yes. He says Manipur had armed forces deployed for counter insurgency operations since 2020 AD but much of the force had been re-deployed in northern India and almost 25,000- armed force from Assam Rifles were taken away from Manipur area since the insurgency situation normalised.
“There you have it, the elephant in the room. It is China. This is one major strand in the Chinese connection to Manipur. Because of China’s aggressive land grabbing activities in the border areas in the North there has been a security vacuum in Manipur which did not go unnoticed in Beijing.”
And Myanmar(?). China had been goading Myanmar into such violence and much of the militant forces have been infiltrating through Myanmar and seeing the easy border it has with Manipur (map above) the militancy has been on the rise due to Myanmar giving safe haven to the militants in Manipur.
Myanmar and China are hand in glove. But why(?). The relations between Myanmar and China have been a roller coaster ever since Myanmar became one of the first non-communist countries to recognize the People’s Republic of China in AD 1949.
But things began to change in the late 1980s when Myanmar faced increased western-led economic sanctions after a coup in AD 1988 and shortly after it, Myanmar introduced a number of economic reforms. It was under these conditions that the China–Myanmar relations started gaining momentum.
In terms of bilateral trade, China is the largest trading partner of Myanmar. It occupies the largest share in both imports and exports of Myanmar. According to data from 2019, the bilateral trade stands at about USD 12 billion out of the approximately USD 36 billion trade it conducts in total.
In 2019, China occupied a 32% share in its exports and a 35% share in its imports far ahead of any other country including India which doesn’t even break into the top 5 in either category despite sharing a lengthy land border. Since 2001 AD, Myanmar imports its largest share of goods from China, mainly machinery, metal products, vehicles, and telecommunication equipments (illustration above).
In Myanmar’s exports to China, there are some goods which are important to China. For instance, refined tin that China imports from Myanmar is used for circuit-board soldering. 30-35% of the overall tin concentrate required to produce refined tin comes from Myanmar despite China having the largest tin resources in the world (?). Similar is the case of rare earth metals, which is a group of 17 minerals used in manufacturing consumer electronics and military equipment. Myanmar accounts for around 13% of the global production and more than half of China’s domestic supplies. The majority of the exports to China, though, consists of oil and gas which make up around 32% of exports to China.
So, it is not solely an Indian problem, it is an India-China-Myanmar problem. If you look closely and, in more detail, than listen to what the newspapers and TV channels are blabbering, it is China doing a Pakistan and it has been, for long, Beijing’s norm to annoy India by all means.
But it is never going to happen just like that. Like the achievements of Chandrayaan-3 cannot be replicated by the Chinese-Russian effort to place Luna-25 on the moon, just like the enormously popular G-20 summit in Kashmir flourishing in spite of Chinese rumblings, just like India grabbing the demographic sweet spot overthrowing a growling China.
After the Manipur chief minister announced a war on drugs, his wife was accused of having connections to an alleged drug lord from the Kuki-Zo community. The claim came from no less than the Additional Superintendent of Police (ASP) in the Narcotics and Affairs of Border Bureau, Thounaojam Brinda (picture below), who later resigned.
In an explosive affidavit to the Manipur High Court, IPS Brinda accused the Chief Minister of pressuring her to drop the case against an alleged “drug kingpin”, a leader and former head of Autonomous District Council (ADC), Lhukhosei Zou.
Brinda, in the affidavit said she had received a call from then vice president of the Manipur working party, Asnikumar Moirangthem, a Meitei, on the morning after a raid at Zou’s quarters, which reportedly had yielded 5 kg (10 pounds) of heroin powder and 280,000 Yaba (methamphetamine) tablets.
It was learnt that the arrested ADC chairman turned out to be CM’s second wife Olice’s right-hand man in Chandel and that Olice was furious about the arrest, she wrote in the affidavit and added :
“The CM had ordered that the arrested ADC chairman be exchanged with his wife or son and to release him.”
Zou, who had jumped bail, was let go of all charges. All those named by Brinda in her affidavit have denied their role in the drug trade before the courts and in public statements, and none have been convicted of any offences.
Manipur sits adjacent to the infamous Golden Triangle, an area in Southeast Asia covering civil war-torn Myanmar (diagram below). The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) defines the region as one of the biggest drug trafficking corridors in the world. Heroin, opium and synthetic drugs like methamphetamine from the region are feeding the whole of the Asia Pacific region, the UN affirmed.
Lieutenant General Konsam Himalay Singh, a Meitei, who retired in 2017 shouted in an annoying tone - “the spillover of the drug trade into Manipur has been downright frustrating. This trade had caught up in Manipur in the last 15 years. The US, other Western countries and the United Nations had started keeping a strict vigil on the Golden Triangle but the results have not been satisfactory.
The operatives of the Golden Triangle extended towards the West into Manipur. It was accelerated by the armed groups who found easy money.”
He was referring to the array of armed rebel groups of different ethnicities, including the Kuki and Meitei fighters, that proliferated in Manipur and were involved in the drug trade across the porous borders with Myanmar.
What the stars foretell. In a long overdue decision, the Chief Minister of Manipur was asked to resign on February 9, 2025. It was reportedly under duress due to growing dissidence within the ruling Party government.
The top Court of India had recently sought the services of the Central Forensic Science Laboratory to provide a sealed-cover report on leaked audio tapes that it is examining, allegedly featuring the Chief Minister as an instigator of the ethnic conflict that has raged for more than a year between two communities. His continuation was long made untenable with the ethnic conflict having shown few signs of abating, and him being seen as championing the cause of chauvinists from one group.
The axe came too late as the ruling party had lost momentum, and the fatigue in the valley and hill regions with the state government was clearly coming out in the open. The rhetoric about the Kuki-Zo-Hmar communities, persistently being accused of being infiltrators from Myanmar and providing a haven to drug dealers and illicit crop cultivators, fuelled the antipathy on both sides of the conflict, resulting in violent groups openly brandishing sophisticated weapons — many looted from police armouries.
Arrival of a new dawn. The government is accelerating the process of involving civil society leaders in talks, taking up immediate issues such as the rehabilitation and return of over 60,000 displaced people. This will lay the ground for a political solution and address grievances in the hills and the valley. There are enough instruments in India’s federal system that allow for creative solutions within the state. Confidence-building measures and an end to wanton violence are a necessity and CM’s resignation should pave the way for more measures for a quick recovery.
Quaintly put, leaving everything aside, our children deserve to lead a beautiful life !!
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