Opinion In Manipur, a continuing saga of political and administrative abdication

On August 29, days before violence returned to Manipur’s Koutruk, a Meitei village in Imphal West district, close to the border with the Kuki-Zomi majority Kangpokpi district, Chief Minister N Biren Singh had expressed confidence in the restoration of peace in the state within the next six months. In an interview to PTI, he emphasised that “as a CM for all”, his “job is to protect Manipur and people of Manipur”. The fragility of that promise — not the first one to be made in the nearly 16 months of turbulence in the state — has become apparent once more in the aftermath of the attack by alleged Kuki militants that killed two, injured 10 and saw the deployment of RPGs and sophisticated drone weaponry.

As Manipur grapples with the aftershocks — Koutruk has been one of the worst afflicted in the ongoing ethnic tensions between the Kuki-Zos and the Meiteis — BJP MLA Rajkumar Imo Singh, the CM’s son-in-law, has requested the Home Ministry to withdraw the nearly 60,000 central forces from the state because of what he calls their failure to stem the unrest. He has also called for the unified command of security forces, operationalised last May, to be handed over to the CM’s office on grounds of partisanship and ineffectuality. This is part of a disappointing script of abdication of responsibility, a shifting of blame. It also highlights the fault lines that have gouged the state into distinct factions. Politics in Manipur — from the reorganisation of regions to its architecture of violence — hinges on deeply-entrenched questions of identity. In the absence of adequate infrastructure creation, education, and vitally, employment, the mobilisation of ethnic differences into insurgencies and acts of violence has become a way to bargain for economic and political power. The present crisis began with a Meitei demand for ST status and a Kuki-Zo pushback. And yet, instead of addressing these structural lacunae, the Centre and Singh’s government have kept alive the spectre of the outsider-disruptor, framing it as a law-and-order situation. This, even as the nearly 5,000 weapons looted in the early days of the crisis remain missing and the fresh burst of insurgency indicates an intelligence failure, worrying not least because of the crisis in Myanmar next door.

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The situation in Manipur is a result of the dereliction of duties by the Centre and the state administration. The dialogue that the CM spoke of in the interview, as “the only way” forward should have begun much earlier. The process of peace needs more than lip service. It requires resolve — and the honesty to own up to errors and begin afresh.