The three-year-old ethnic conflict in Manipur has expanded beyond just Meiteis and Kuki-Zo tribes. Another major community in the state, Nagas, who have maintained a semblance of neutrality so far have now stepped, threatening a relapse into the Naga-Kuki bloodletting of the 1990s. Already, competitive hostage taking of civilians amongst the two community is making this conflict front gruesome.
This front is poised to be more dangerous with fewer means to control it. When the fight was between the Meiteis and Kuki-Zos, bad as it was, it was still possible to separate them physically, with Meiteis retreating to the Imphal valley and Kuki-Zos into the hills, and then the authorities keeping a buffer ring in between so the two warring groups cannot confront each other till the situation normalises.
In the new scenario, such a separation will be virtually impossible for the traditional home grounds of Nagas and Kukis in the hills almost totally overlap. The Nagas claim they were the original land owners and it was they who had allowed the Kukis to settle in their land as tenants. Kukis dispute this claim.
Land, therefore is at the crux of this new dispute. The older conflict between the Meiteis and Kukis had some reflections of this as well. The tension in this case is between the idea of the traditional pre-modern notions of homeland pitted against the modern Westphalian state and its commensurate land revenue administration.
Sadly, in Manipur, these differing outlooks to land have been allowed to institutionalise. Broadly, these traditional outlooks can be characterised as a three-way division between Meiteis in the valley who inherited the legacies of a past feudal principality with wet rice agriculture driven economy, the sedentary Nagas in the hills living off a mix of settle agriculture and foraging, and Kukis who were once constantly mobile shift-cultivators and foragers.
With the advent of the decolonised modern era, things have transformed considerably, but some vestiges of the past continue to haunt. In 1960, when Manipur was still a Union Territory, modern land revenue administration, titled Manipur Land Revenue & Land Reforms Act, MLR&LR Act 1960 was introduced, but only in the Imphal valley. Its hills were left untouched in the pattern of the British administrative structure of directly administering the revenue plains while leaving the non-revenue backward hills as “Unadministered” or else “Partially Administered” areas.
Manipur hills therefore continue to be under customary land laws of the communities there. Even the Indian Forest Act, under which Reserved Forests and Protected Forests are declared, has an added feature in the hills of the Northeast region, including Manipur, introducing a new forest category called “Unclassed Forests”. These are by definition, government land but community owned and managed.
Of Manipur’s forests in the hills, nearly 52 percent are under this “Unclassed Forest” category, and almost all of them are in traditional Naga areas.
Two layers of conflict potential can be anticipated from this land administration architecture, especially if it were to be treated as permanent and static, and not just a phase in the path of progressive changes, as all modern laws are meant to be.
The first is between the valley and the hills governed by two sets of laws. The valley under the modern land law is where individual owners lease their plots of homesteads and farmlands from the government for commensurate taxes paid to the government. It is also open to all Indian citizens for settlement. Land in hills on the other hand remain exclusively in the custody of traditional communities, prohibiting all others from buying or settling there. A sense of besiegement amongst the valley population from this is a factor behind a section of the Meiteis demanding Scheduled Tribe status so their land too is made exclusive to them as in the hills.
The second is between the hill communities. The Nagas claim they are the original population and their customary land laws are applicable to all, although these customary laws are not codified aggregating the outlooks of all communities who share the same living space, in particular the Kukis. Nagas are sedentary, their villages therefore grow big, but seldom splinter into many.
The Kukis on the other hand are non-sedentary, their villages are generally small and continually multiplying. Records of Reserved Forests and Protected Forests, most of which were declared during the 1960s while Manipur was still a Union Territory, bear evidence to this. It will be recalled that the Manipur forest department was a primary target of Kuki-Zos when ethnic conflict broke out in 2023.
Further complicating this conflict dynamics are also several insurgencies amongst the Nagas and Meiteis, fighting the Indian state for the restoration of what they believe were sovereign status before they became part of India. Militancy amongst the Kukis is not separatist, but came into prominence as a consequence of the Kuki-Naga conflict of the 1990s. Yet a Suspension of Operation, SoO, agreement was signed with the Kuki militants in 2005 and modified in 2008.
In this scenario, the Nagas and Meiteis have often alleged Central forces, in particular the Assam Rifles, of using Kukis as proxies to undermine their struggles. Similarly, in the wake of the Meiteis and Kuki-Zos conflict, the latter have alleged the Manipur state police as biased against them.
Bizarre though these claims may be, the underlying complex architecture of conflicting interests make these claims plausible in varying degrees. To neutralise Meitei and Naga insurgents the Indian state could indeed want Kuki militants as counterinsurgency allies. Likewise, the Manipur Police too may have tended to align with those opposed to Manipur fragmenting, the Meiteis, and be pitted against those who aspired to splinter the state, the Kuki-Zos.
Whatever the truth, the bitterness and mistrusts caused by these impressions are tangible. It can only be hoped all forces of the Indian state will rise above the pulls of local arenas of conflict, and instead see the nation as the only legitimate wielder of legitimate power of coercion as Max Weber defined, and under this legitimate hegemony, rather than calibrate different militant groups on the scale of friends and foes, aim to make all law breakers to submit to the law.
This article was first published in The New Indian Express. The original can be read HERE
Editor, Imphal Review of Arts and Politics and author
