Decode Politics: Manipur says ‘Protected Area Regime’ back after 13 years. What it means

The Manipur government said the Centre had reimposed PAR via a communication sent to Chief Secretaries of the three states, saying relaxations were being withdrawn “with immediate effect”.

Incidentally, senior officials in both Mizoram and Nagaland told The Indian Express that they had not received any directions to this effect from the Union Home Ministry yet. “Whatever we know about this, we have only seen in media reports. We are still awaiting these directions,” a top Home Department official from Nagaland said. A top official in Mizoram also said the same.

There was no word from the Centre on the Manipur government’s announcement.

The Union Home Ministry is also yet to notify a change in the existing guidelines which exclude these three states from the PAR as of now.

According to the Union Home Ministry’s guidelines, a foreign national is not allowed to visit a ‘Protected Area’, as laid down in the Foreigners (Protected Areas) Order, 1958, “unless it is established to the satisfaction of the Government that there are extraordinary reasons to justify such a visit”. The guidelines also specify certain areas within the Protected Areas which can be visited by tourists with a permit. For grant of Protected Area Permits for reasons other than tourism, prior permission is needed from the Union Ministry of Home Affairs.

Prior permission from the Ministry is also required for permits for tourism in areas not opened for tourism.

Till 2011, this regime extended to all of Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim, Manipur, Mizoram and Nagaland, and to parts of Jammu & Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttarakhand, all of which are border states.

However, in 2010, this had been relaxed for the entire area of Manipur, Mizoram and Nagaland, first for a period of one year, and periodically extended after that. The PAR remains in place in the other areas.

This relaxation was made with an eye on boosting tourism in these states, with the UPA government in the Centre at that time stating that the lifting of the restrictions had been requested by the state governments.

But even with this relaxation, certain restrictions continued to be in place. For instance, citizens and foreign nationals of Afghanistan, China and Pakistan origins still needed prior approval from the Union Home Ministry for entry into these states.

Through the course of the ongoing conflict, the Manipur government and most sections of Meitei civil society have alleged that an uncontrolled influx of “illegal immigrants” from the Chin community — which shares an ethnic bond with the Kuki-Zomis and Mizos — from neighbouring Myanmar was one of the key reasons for the instability in the state and the present conflict.

The Manipur government earlier pressed upon the Union government to scrap the mutually agreed Free Movement Regime (FMR) with Myanmar, which allowed tribes living along the border on either side to travel up to 16 km inside the other country without a visa and to stay up to two weeks. In January this year, the Centre announced that the FMR was being cancelled, and that the entire length of the porous Indo-Myanmar which runs along Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh would be fenced.

While the Manipur government welcomed these decisions, they were stiffly opposed in Mizoram and Nagaland as the international boundary cuts through Naga and Kuki-Zo-Chin communities residing on both sides of it. The FMR had been conceived to protect their traditional rights of free movement across the border.

Reintroducing the PAR would further restrict movement in these states.

A former Manipur chief secretary criticised the decision to bring in the PAR again. “I do not think the existing situation warrants bringing this kind of a restrictive regime. If the concern is unregulated entry across the Myanmar border, this can hardly address that. It’s not like people crossing a border will apply for a permit to do that,” the former official said.

While Nagaland’s Tourism and Home Ministers did not respond to queries from The Indian Express, the state has been emphasizing its tourism. The recent Hornbill Festival, the state’s biggest tourist draw, drew 2.05 lakh visitors, 2,527 of whom were foreign tourists.