Large inhabited areas of Manipur, including state capital Imphal, are literally burning. Visuals of leaping flames rising from buildings such as educational institutions, medical facilities, people’s homes and religious places, are apt to daunt the stoutest heart. Thousands have been rendered homeless in the mayhem and have had to be moved by the Army to less risky locations. When they can return to their own homes in safety is hard to tell. Suddenly the state has been transformed into a military garrison.
The personnel of the Army, the Assam Rifles, the CRPF and the BSF flown in overnight from states far and near must now be counted in multiples of thousands. A shoot-at-sight order has been passed following consultations with the Union home ministry. Chief minister N. Biren Singh heads a BJP-led government and his party is in a majority on its own. A retired chief of CRPF has been named security adviser to the CM, presumably on the Centre’s advice.
This seems to suggest that the government — at the state and the Centre — is not sanguine that firefighting operations would produce a semblance of normality at an early date. A more shaky advertisement for a “double-engine sarkar” is hard to imagine. It seems clear that the absence of effort to work toward resolving a long-simmering dispute politically has led the state to the present tinderbox-like situation.
The central problem appears to lie with claims being made on the quota system by the majority Meitei population who live in the valley area or the plains that are surrounded by hills. The remainder of the state population is the hill tribes — principally Kuki and Naga — of the surrounding hills region. The Meitei are mostly Hindu with a small Muslim fringe. They are called “advanced sections” by the hill tribes who are generally Christian and animists. They are also more than half the number in the 60-member Assembly.
The Meiteis claim to be an indigenous tribe and hold that their kingdom, which stretched from areas now in Myanmar to those in present-day Bangladesh, merged into the Indian Union in 1949 as a tribal entity but the very next year this seemed to be lost. They are now seeking to reclaim that status and have been petitioning the judiciary in that regard for the past 10 years. The present CM has been in office since 2017 and is a Meitei, but his government has dragged its foot on the volatile issue.
However, in April this year, a single-judge bench of the Manipur high court saw merit in the petition before him. It ordered the state government, refraining from taking action for 10 years, to recommend to the Centre “preferably within four weeks” that the Meiteis be notified as a Scheduled Tribe (ST). It is curious that the high court overlooked the fact that the Meiteis already enjoy reservation benefits as they are generally classified as OBCs or SCs. Trouble started after the high court order, with apprehension spreading that the doors will now open for the majority community to claim a share in the ST quota.
It is plain that, politically, over the years the BJP has not taken steps to dissuade Meitei organisations from asserting their claimed tribal identity, although they get benefits as SCs or OBCs. Conceptually, the quota system is intended to bring into the socioeconomic mainstream sections of society that are steeped in poverty and have lagged behind on economic and educational benchmarks. It is to be hoped that violence will not spread to other states in the Northeast since some hill tribes are spread across several states.
