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A Background Note on the Manipur Violence

The horrific violence which has erupted in BJP-ruled Manipur has had all the signs of orchestrated ethnic cleansing. The gang rape, parading naked and other forms of sexual violence against Kuki women by mobs of men from the dominant Meitei community, which has now become known across the world,  was facilitated by the Manipur police, who are also the source of the weapons wielded by the heavily armed mobs. Not only this, but the current violence is the direct outcome of ongoing policies pursued by the BJP in the State and at the Centre.

The immediate trigger behind the current phase of violence was the Manipur High Court order to the State Government to recommend the Meitei community’s appeal for inclusion in the Scheduled Tribes list to the Union government. The High Court order has now been challenged in the Supreme Court. But clearly this one order could not have led to such a chain of events without a prior build-up, and we must understand the underlying situation in Manipur. The demand for inclusion of Meiteis, who are by far the dominant community in Manipur, in the Scheduled Tribes list understandably angered and alarmed the Kukis as well as Nagas, Mizos and other tribal communities of Manipur. Scheduled Tribe status for Meitis would not only entitle them to the benefits of reservation in education and jobs, it would also give them land rights in the territory currently set aside for the tribal communities.

As it is, tribal communities are already being deprived of many of their traditional settlements with the declaration of tribal land as protected or reserve forests and wildlife sanctuaries. The Hill Areas Committee, which is supposed to have administrative powers over hill areas has systematically been robbed of its powers. Some reports suggest that large mineral deposits in the hill areas, which mining corporates are eager to exploit, are partly behind the BJP’s apparent drive to dispossess the Kukis and other tribal communities.

Adding to the anxiety of the tribal communities of Manipur is the BJP’s constant invocation of an Assam-type National Register of Citizens for Manipur and the branding of tribal refugees who are driven by adverse circumstances in Myanmar to seek refuge in the tribal settlements of adjoining areas of Manipur hills as ‘illegal infiltrators’. The Kukis and other tribal people of Manipur share close kinship and ethnic ties with their counterparts across the border in Myanmar and while the BJP government of Manipur follows a hostile policy towards refugees the tribal communities of Manipur obviously feel sympathy for their own persecuted brothers and sisters. Many are Christians and the attacks on churches in Manipur, which are in tune with the Sangh brigade’s aggressive anti-Christian campaign elsewhere in the country, complete the circle of alienation and marginalisation of the tribes of Manipur in their own homeland. The BJP claims to be specially committed to the development of the North East. Its growth in Manipur has been primarily among the Meiteis in the valley but the party has also been pretending to follow a policy of increased tribal outreach with its much trumpeted “Go To Hills 2.0” campaign. The current ethnic violence exposes the true essence of the Sangh brigade’s sinister North Eastern game plan. Protection of cultural diversity and the constitutional rights and aspirations of the tribal communities is central to peace, democracy and development in the North East and the BJP’s agenda of Hindutva majoritarianism is antithetical to the diverse mosaic of North-Eastern India. The three month-long silence of Modi and his government as Manipur burned, and the inadequate and misleading comments with which Modi broke his silence when the horrific gang rape and sexual assault of Kuki women became widely known through a viral video, cannot conceal the BJP’s direct orchestration of ethnic cleansing in Manipur. As in Gujarat, Muzaffarnagar and elsewhere, once again, minoritized women are the target of endless violence and their bodies the sites on which the horrors of supremacist nationalism are enacted. The world must not remain silent this time.