Opinion Harsh Mander writes: As Manipur crisis intensifies, where is the state?

I travelled with a team of the Karwan e Mohabbat, our citizen initiative which from 2017 has strived to reach out to victims of hate violence, to offer solace and solidarity to the survivors. In Manipur, we spent many hours listening to survivors in seven relief camps on both sides of what is now perceived popularly to be a “border” between the Imphal Valley, home mostly to the Meitei, and the mountains, inhabited mainly by the Kuki and Naga tribal peoples. We met scores of community leaders from both communities.

The grief, the rage and above all the hate on both sides are boundless. The grief in both Meitei and Kuki camps almost mirrored each other. In the Imphal Valley, where Kukis were in the minority, crowds set their homes on fire. The same happened to Meitei people who had lived for generations in the mountain villages of the Kuki tribal people. The unbearable grief and rage of both were that neighbours of the “other” community, with whom they had lived for generations with peace and goodwill, turned overnight into murderous and pitiless enemies. They each recalled their fearful escapes, often trudging kilometres with children, sick and old people on their backs in the cover of the night. They spoke of pregnant women who gave birth as they escaped, of hungry, frightened babies whose cries they had to stifle. They spoke of people killed, of people who could not survive the arduous journeys. They mourned with us daughters abducted and sexually assaulted, and sons who never returned.

But it was their narratives of fury, of congealed hate on both sides that worried me the most. I was struck first by how as people grieved inconsolably about the loss of their homes and loved ones, they completely erased from their memories the acknowledgement that people of what was now the “other” had often suffered almost identical tragedies; that their own people had on the one hand been felled by the violence, and at the same time they had also perpetrated these same atrocities. They refused to carry not just the burden of grief for what was done to them but also of culpability and guilt for what they had done to each other.

But even more gravely, I found that the same narratives of the evil of the “other” community were articulated whether we spoke to community leaders, students, women or residents of relief camps. The narratives of the Meitei people were that the Kuki people were foreigners, who had illegally immigrated from Myanmar and would one day outnumber the indigenous Meitei people to whom Manipur belonged rightfully. They had benefitted from reservations for tribal people to capture jobs and seats in educational institutions, while the Meitei are prohibited even from buying land in the mountains. They accuse them of endangering Meitei youth by cultivating poppy illegally. They claim that the Kuki people are illegally clearing reserved forests for their farms and settlements, and threatening the ecology of the region. They claim that Kuki militants roam freely, and their violence and gun and drug trafficking thrive under the protection of the Assam Rifles.

The Kuki people have an entirely different narrative. They allege that their farmers may cultivate poppies for bare survival, but that profits from the drug trade are mostly harvested by politicians and big business in the Imphal Valley and beyond. They claim to be legal citizens of Manipur and allege that Meitei people want Scheduled Tribe status to grab their lands and reduce them to a minority in their mountain abodes. They (Meitei) also want to corner the seats in the legislatures and educational institutions that are reserved for tribal people. They also allege that a militia of Meitei youth is actively supported by the chief minister of Manipur and that it is these militants who ravaged their lands and people. They allege that long years of work by the RSS to convert Meitei nationalism into Hindu nationalism has turned the Metei people implacably hostile to the Kuki people, also for their Christian faith. And they believe that the Manipur state police and paramilitary forces protect the Meitei militants and those who raped and murdered.

The two narratives about the same lived reality are so utterly irreconcilable, that as long as people on both sides of the conflict are not willing to take a few steps down from what they passionately uphold as the truth of the evil “other”, there is no space for dialogue to even begin. In the midst of all of this, the state government has done nothing to establish and support the relief camps for an estimated 20,000 Kuki internal refugees. It is largely the local church, supported by local contributions, that is running more than a hundred Kuki relief camps. Children in these have been reduced to eating watery rice with salt. Signs of malnutrition are already unmistakable. No camps have temporary schools. The refusal of the state (and central governments) to establish camps with basic services of safety, sanitation, nutrition, education and health care is another disgraceful abdication by the state of its fundamental constitutional duties.

I searched desperately for signs of hope in Manipur for peace and healing. I could find this only in stories we heard in the camps of people of the “other” community who helped save lives. These, and the acknowledgement of their shared suffering and indeed their shared belonging, alone can create the space even for the start of any dialogue.

Mander is a human rights worker and writer