Monideepa Banerjie | Manipur smoke signals were ignored by Delhi

Geography, they say, is everything, even destiny. Nothing could be truer for Manipur today, where since May 3 a section of the state’s minority tribal and majority Meitei populations have clashed with a bitterness that is unremembered and has left several people dead.

Such was the scale of the violence that 24 hours or so later, the Centre felt it must step in. In an oddly coy fashion -- there appears to be no official notification about it -- the Centre is widely reported to have promulgated Article 355 of the Constitution in Manipur, that empowers it to protect states from external threats and internal disturbance, in this case, the latter.

If you have never been to Manipur, think of a football stadium. As your aircraft begins to descend into Imphal airport, you will see the capital city sprawled out below you -- a vast valley as flat as a football field surrounded by hills that rise like spectator galleries. These hills cover 90 per cent of Manipur and house 40 per cent of its population -- the Kuki and Naga and several other smaller clans who are mostly Christian.

Their land is protected by the law and cannot be purchased by outsiders.

The majority Meitei people are 53 per cent of Manipur’s population and live in the Imphal Valley which is 1,864 sq km in size but covers just 10 per cent of the state’s land mass. Anyone can buy land in Imphal, including the tribals who live in the hills. As the number of “outsiders” buying land in Imphal grew, the Meitei -- the indigenous residents of the Imphal Valley -- began to feel marginalised in what had been their homeland and kingdom for centuries.

A narrative about the tribal identity gained ground. In the early 1700s, the Meitei had become Hindus but over the last five to ten decades, a section started returning to their ethnic religion called “Sanamahism” and underscoring how, before its accession to India in 1949, the Meitei were counted as “a tribe among the tribes of Manipur”. In 2013, a section of the Meitei, including the Sanamahis, raised the demand for Scheduled Tribe status -- something they felt would protect Meitei lands.

They went to the Union ministry of tribal affairs demanding tribal status. The ministry referred the matter to the state government, which sat on the issue. Unless a state recommends a change of status of a community and sends detailed ethnographic and socio-economic reports, the Centre can do nothing.

So, the Meitei Tribe Union went to court. On March 27, the Manipur high court directed that the state government to “consider the case of the petitioners for inclusion of the Meetei/Metei community in the Scheduled Tribe list expeditiously, preferably within a period of four weeks from the date of the order”.

On May 6, a BJP MLA from Manipur went to the Supreme Court challenging the high court order. But it was too late.

The Kuki erupted in protest, outraged because tribal status for the majority Meitei in the state means more competition for the minority population for benefits available to the Scheduled Tribes, including reservation in jobs, education, even land.

While the ST issue was the immediate trigger, Manipur was on a powder keg ever since chief minister N. Biren Singh’s BJP government launched a drive last year to clear reserved and protected forests in the hills of encroachment and insisted that villagers, who lived inside the forests, get their identities verified.

The purpose of this exercise was the government’s bid to protect forests, identify illegal immigrants from neighbouring Myanmar and crack down on tribals cultivating poppy in the hills to supply the narcotic to the drug trade.

But these measures put the Kuki tribals on edge. They accused the state government of step-motherly treatment.

Then in March, the state government announced that it was withdrawing from the Suspension of Operations deal in place since 2008 between the state, the Centre and two Kuki insurgent groups, which was a kind of ceasefire. The Centre rejected the state’s withdrawal from the tripartite deal but the issue made the Kuki jittery. The Manipur high court order on the Meitei demand for Scheduled Tribe status pushed them over the edge.

At the end of April, a sports facility the chief minister was to inaugurate in the Kuki-dominated hill district of Churachandpur was set on fire hours before the event. The Indigenous Tribal Leaders Forum called for non-cooperation against the state, the Kuki Students Organisation backed the forum and the All Manipur Students Union called tribal solidarity marches on May 3.

The Meitei were not sitting around. This majority community dominates the 60-seat state Assembly where only 20 seats are reserved for SC/ST. The chief minister is Meitei. The last tribal chief minister Manipur had was the Congress’ Rishang Keishing in 1997. So, when the politically dominant Meitei held demonstrations against Myanmerese infiltrators and the growing drug menace, it further stirred the pot.

On May 3, as the Kuki marched in tribal solidarity across the hills, a memorial to Kuki soldiers was allegedly vandalised by the Meitei. Geography kicked in to decide the fate of many in the violence that followed. The Meitei who lived in the hill districts took a beating and the Kuki who had made Imphal their home bore the brunt.

The huge concern is that if the violence is not contained immediately, it may spread to other neighbouring states. Kuki and Meitei are spread out across the Northeast and people from the other states live, study and work in Manipur in large numbers. The latter are being evacuated but tensions are being reported from Meghalaya and Mizoram too. The Naga people who live in the hills of Manipur and have little love lost for the Kuki have so far largely remained silent. But for how long?

A return to normality is clearly a priority in Manipur. The Centre must take a hard look at the simmering issues in the Northeast states and encourage the state governments to resolve them. Since all the states in the region are either BJP-led or BJP-friendly, surely that should not be a problem. In fact, the BJP’s dominance of the Northeast may be the best time to set up peace committees among groups at loggerheads and push for a resolution of differences that could be centuries old.

But the way the smoke signals coming out of Manipur were ignored, the way thorny issues were allowed to snowball into the outburst that Manipur saw over the past few days, intent will always be in question and wounds will take ages to heal.

Monideepa Banerjie is a senior journalist based in Kolkata who has extensively travelled in and reported from the Northeast region