Eight months on, why India failed to contain ethnic violence in Manipur?

The unprecedented violence that has transformed large parts of Manipur in India’s Northeast into a state of unrest this year shows no signs of abating, even after nearly eight months.

This is in large part due to efforts by the ruling right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to simultaneously push its electoral and majoritarian interests over any sincere attempt to address the structural cause of this violence. This in turn leads to abdication of its constitutional obligation to uphold the rule of law and provide equal protection to its citizens across the divide.

The discord began on May 3 after the Manipur High Court directed the state government to submit a recommendation to the federal government on the demand of the majority Meitei community’s demand for Scheduled Tribe (ST) status, which would give them by way of affirmative action guaranteed quotas of government jobs and college admissions, among other benefıts.

This caused an uproar among tribal communities, who fear that extending ST status to the Meitei will amount to sidestepping and dissolving the protections that the tribes enjoy over employment, reservation in the legislatures and ownership of land.

The Meitei community constitutes the majority in Manipur, with around 53 percent of the state’s population. It controls 40 out of 60 Assembly seats and has enjoyed better access to employment and economic opportunities than the state’s ethnic minorities.

Statewide peaceful protests organised by various tribes, including the Naga and Kuki-Zomi, were met with violent retaliation. The Kuki-Zomi were selectively targeted.

This tribe has ties to ethnic groups in neighbouring Myanmar and parts of Bangladesh. The coup in Myanmar in 2021 spurred thousands of refugees to flee into Manipur, sparking fears among the Meitei of becoming outnumbered.

Once the violence erupted, at least 200 people were killed, more than 200 injured and 48,000 rendered homeless.

Government response

The state responded by suspending mobile internet services, deploying troops and declaring a “shoot-at-sight” order to “maintain public order and tranquillity.”

Over the past several months, blanket narratives like “illegal immigrants,” “encroachers” (over “reserved” and “protected” forest) and “Kuki narco-terrorists” were used to provide ex-post facto rationalisation by the powers-that-be and radicalised Meitei groups to selectively target the Kuki-Zomi and justify the violent reprisal.

These narratives are driven by a deep-seated xenophobia of the Kuki “others” who are sought to be either “annihilated”—as stated by Pramot Singh, the Meitei leader— at best, or reduced to second-class citizens at worst.

For instance, in April 2023, a state panel identified only 2,187 Kukis as illegal immigrants but mass hysteria was whipped up in the valley area as if they posed a grave demographic threat to the survival of the Meitei community who are cloistered within 10 percent of the state’s geographical area.

The aggressive narrative of the Kuki as illegal immigrants comes after the Bihari and Marwari “outsiders” were similarly targeted from the 1990s until recently.

The approach follows similar patterns witnessed in Assam and beyond where the Muslim minority have been targeted relentlessly. The indiscriminate targeting of Kuki, much like their Muslim counterparts in Assam or elsewhere, as ‘illegal immigrants’ and as the problematic ‘others’ is plausibly intended to simultaneously push BJP’s majoritarian agenda and consolidate its electoral support-base.

This violence has led to complete geographical and demographic separation as the Kuki and Meitei are cleared respectively from the valley and hill areas.

Since May, the violence has taken over 200 lives and caused extensive destruction of livelihood and property. In what is largely seen as a state-sponsored violence, the minority Kuki tribal group bore the brunt of violence as 158 of them were killed, 360 churches and over 200 villages burned, and over 41,000 have been displaced.

The conspicuous failure of the state to provide overarching security despite massive deployment of over 60,000 central paramilitary forces since early May means that the dictum “might is right” continues to regulate chaotic inter-societal relations.

Despite the claims of Home Minister Amit Shah in the lower house of the Parliament in early August that the Biren Singh-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government cooperated in restoring normalcy, there is evidence to the contrary.

For example, the December 14 stealthy early morning security operations to collect and airlift the mortal remains of 60 Kuki from two Imphal hospitals (and four Meitei from Lamka) to fulfil the Supreme Court’s directive to immediately ensure dignified burial suggests that a “security dilemma” continues to loom large.

Failure to act

The precarious situation stems from the deliberate refusal or inability of the Narendra Modi-led BJP government to not only dismiss Chief Minister (CM) Biren Singh, who also holds the State’s Home Minister portfolio, for his abject failure to establish law and order, but also impose President’s rule in the State to address the major cause of structural violence.

Under Biren’s nose, over 5,000 automatic rifles and 500,000 rounds of live ammunition were handed over to various ragtag mobs from various police armouries.

Given the widespread popular support that Biren enjoys from considerable majoritarian-minded Meitei in the valley, the central BJP leadership is apparently not keen to risk removing him as CM as it might spell the end of the BJP’s rule in Manipur.

In making this choice, Modi’s BJP government and the State signal that a commitment to its electoral interests trumps the demand for equal protection of its Kuki-Zomi citizens, who are one of the largest tribal groups in the Indo-Myanmar borderlands.

Antagonising them is not likely to be helpful towards India’s attempt to establish economic bridges with Southeast Asian economies via Manipur under its Act East policy.

Modi only broke his silence over Manipur’s violence on 20 July, after a video of two naked and abused Kuki women went viral, sparking widespread international condemnation.

The BJP’s approach to Manipur violence is seen to be half-hearted and driven more by a political stage-event management. Modi’s failure to visit the state stood in sharp contrast to his immediate extension of support to Israel after Hamas’ attack in early October.

Ideological danger

The settler-native discourse which undergirds the Israel-Hamas conflict has a strange resonance in Manipur’s violence as the Kuki are indiscriminately targeted as “illegal immigrants” and “encroachers” on state forests.

However, a failure to address the prolonged and pervasive lawlessness and security dilemma in Manipur exposes both the promises and limits of a muscular nationalism and an efficient “double-engine” government that the BJP represents both at the national and provincial level.

This is likely to have electoral implications for the BJP in the 2024 general elections even as it tries hard to win tribal and minority electoral support across the country.

To be sure, when Biren Singh-led BJP captured power in Manipur for the first time in 2017 despite winning barely 21 out of the 60 Assembly seats, it was compelled by an unstable minority government to engineer defection and forge coalitions within and across parties and social divides.

Twelve out of the 28 elected Congress party members of the State’s Assembly switched to BJP as a result.

While Singh effectively used this and the support of four Naga People’s Front and one Lok Jan Shakti party member to circumvent factional challenges within the BJP, he also skillfully managed to sell the BJP’s national manifesto of “sabke sath, sabke vikas” (development for all) to provincial stakeholders by undertaking a series of “developmental” initiatives in the tribal hill areas.

Towards this end, he organised a series of cabinet meetings in the hill districts’ headquarters under his pet project “Go to the hills.” This enabled him not only to forge a broader social coalition but to also co-opt influential social and political leaders across social divides.

However, Biren’s muscular Meitei nationalism and integrationist project began to unravel towards the close of his first term in 2021 and assumed aggressive form after the BJP consolidated its electoral support after it won 32 seats in the 2022 Assembly election.

The aggressive push to target and evict the Kuki “encroachers” over “reserved” and “protected” forest under provisions of the Indian Forest Act, 1927 was initiated from February 20, 2022 in Songjang in Lamka (Churachandpur) district and culminated in the demolition of three Kuki churches in Imphal at dawn on April 11, 2023.

The brazenness and haste with which these evictions were carried out without giving sufficient time for appeal clearly violated existing laws and constitutional mandate.

The BJP’s abrogation of the special status enjoyed by Kashmir in 2019, an act validated by the December 10, 2023 Supreme Court judgment, has brought into limelight its commitment to pursue its ideological commitment.

This will have important bearings on the future of sub-state constitutional asymmetry in Manipur and beyond. Seen against this background, targeting Kuki as “illegal immigrants,” forest “encroachers” and “narco-terrorists” lines up with BJP’s modus operandi in other parts of India where it pushes its aggressive majoritarian and integrationist agenda to justify and actualise the symmetrical enactment of laws or constitutional provisions.

How this will affect the electoral appeal and political traction of BJP in the 2024 national elections remains to be seen.