In a letter to Mapanna Mallikarjun Kharge, national president of the Indian National Congress, on 21 November 2024, Jagat Prakash Nadda, national president of the Bhartiya Janata Party, wrote that more than 10 Peace Accords with the insurgencies of the Northeast, which the BJP referred to as the Ashtha-Laxmi have been signed. The letter appears to have been written as a reaction to Mallikarjun Kharge’s letter to the President of India on 19 November 2024 about the ongoing violence in Manipur, calling the President’s office to intervene.
What intrigues the most is the eighth paragraph of the letter in which the BJP national president reminds the United Progressive Alliance during the INC era of legitimising the “illegal migration of foreign militants” to India when P Chidambaram was the Home Minister. JP Nadda links this with the ongoing violence in the state. Such claims indicate the violence in the periphery state is closely connected with the ruling Hindu nationalist regime’s counter-insurgency strategies in the region.
At the onset of the violence, it was perceived as an ethnic clash, not counter-insurgency, as said by India’s Chief of Defence Staff, General Anil Chauhan, in May 2023. This coincides with Home Minister Amit Shah’s four-day visit to Manipur to get a stock of the violence in the same month. However, when violence first erupted on 3 May 2023, the central security forces were quickly deployed in various locations where the two warring groups, the Meitei and Kuki, cohabit, not to control riots but generally as a counterinsurgent force.
For instance, reports about the involvement of the Assam Rifles, India’s top counter-insurgency force in the violence about gradually delegitimising the valley-based insurgent groups (VBIGs) while siding with Kuki insurgents who are under the Suspension of Operation agreement can be simple proof. This further proves that the violence manifests certain features of the state’s insurgency problems.
This strategy likely is to draw Meitei insurgents operating in Myanmar to an extent Bangladesh into the violence to confront the Kuki insurgents’ warfare for an imagined ethnic homeland, also known as Zale’ n-gam, encompassing the territories of India’s Northeastern states, including the southern districts of the Manipur, parts of Bangladesh and Myanmar and corner Meitei insurgents to initiate ‘peace talks’ with the Indian Union. On the other hand, the Nagas have been claiming Manipur’s northern districts, including the Naga-inhabited areas of Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, and some parts of Myanmar for their ethnic homeland, also known as Nagalim.
Whereas the Meitei sub-nationalists, urban elites and poor have acted fiercely against the two sub-nationalists’ territorial claims, making the ‘territorial and administrative integrity’ of Manipur sacrosanct and inviolable to Meiteis. Interestingly, this coincides with the politics of the ruling regime and Hindu nationalist organisations of making a unified India and broadly can be referred to as ‘integrationist.’
Until recently, the violence witnessed full-blown insurgency activities that have become an act of terrorism. However, such acts are not targeted towards the Indian Union but are against ethnicities. This indicates that the violence is the result of a combination of the ruling regimes’ counter-insurgency strategies infused with the politics of Hindu nationalist organisations. Moreover, prolonging the violence for over a year has manifested in the form of Hindutva politics while attempting to counter Christianity-inspired ethnic insurgencies involving the two sub-nationalist groups, the Kuki and the Naga, and siding with the sub-nationalist Meiteis who are predominantly Hindus/Animists.
Such strategies are being carried out through ethno-religious-inspired politics by embracing the Meiteis culture and religion. This is because the Meiteis absorbed much of the Indian culture and tradition during medieval times and adopted Vaishnavism as their religion in the eighteenth century. In another sense, the Meiteis have provided spaces for Hindutva idealogues to consolidate within Manipur’s political realms.
Furthermore, Hindu nationalist organisations like Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram have long viewed the large concentration of Christian populations in the Northeast as the problem for insurgency and separatism and have continuously worked to reconvert Christians into Indigenous religion and tame the Christianity-inspired insurgent movements. Such organisations have consistently held that there is a ‘foreign hand’ behind these secessionist movements. Likewise, in his Vijayadashami speech at Nagpur’s headquarters in October 2023, the RSS chief questioned ‘foreign powers’ who may be taking advantage of unrest and instability in the state.
Above all, under the titular Monarch, Leishemba Sanajaoba, who is also the BJP’s Rajya Sabha member, has been deeply engaged in revisiting and rebuilding the old socio-religious traditions of the state, especially regarding the socio-religious divide of the state influenced by the politics of belongingness to the Bhoomi (land) of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. This leads to the point of confronting the crux of the ethnic divides with the violence enabling Hindutva to propagate its ideologues in the state. This is instigated through its politics of embracing the Sanamahi revivalism of Meiteis because Hindu nationalist organisations see Animism as the backward form of Hindus. At the same time, revisiting the state’s glorious sovereign order appears to have infused Meiteis sub-nationalism with Hindutva politics.
According to scholar Edward Moon-little’s work on “Biomoral politics among Meitei revivalists,” Meitei revivalists during the Hindutva times are firmly rooted in the millennium-old belief that Pakhangba, the Meitei’s primordial deity, will return and that the people of the Hills and Valleys will come together despite their socio-religious differences. In addition, the Hindutva-influenced revivalist activities became the state’s decolonisation movement fuelled by various Meitei-based socio-cultural organisations asserting a unified state based on the politics of ‘indigeneity.’ The titular monarch, Leishemba Sanajaoba, has cemented this as the BJP’s Rajya Sabha member since he continues to engage in state socio-religious activities.
It appears that the ruling Hindu nationalist regime in Manipur has figured out a political approach to confront insurgency problems in the region. However, this had severe repercussions on the state’s political affairs, leading to Hindutva-imbued violence centred on the issues of ethnicity, citizenship, border making and national security. Sanjib Baruah, in his article “When Civilizational Nationalism Meets Subnationalism: The Crisis in Manipur”, wrote that the religiously infused sentiments among Meiteis have made the defence of Manipur’s territorial integrity more emotionally charged than ever, making the territorial claims for the Naga and Kuki’s demand for separate administrative arrangement even more hard to achieve.
However, it is too early to claim that the regime has countered the Kuki and Naga insurgencies in the region. Moreover, the VBIGs have distanced themselves from showing overt religiosity during the violence, and only a faction has partially entered into the so-called ‘peace talk’ with the Indian Union. Nonetheless, the use of ethnoreligious agendas to counter insurgencies in the Northeast is a significant shift that has already shown results.
The writer is ICSSR-doctoral candidate, Department of Political Science, Manipur University
