August has been a turbulent month in Manipur. While the ethnic conflict between Meiteis and Kuki-Zo tribes seems to have eased a little, quite unfortunately another conflict front which opened up between the Nagas and Kukis earlier in February has only escalated. A string of gruesome incidents of violence, the latest of which were two outrages in quick successions, is testimony.
First, an ambush on August 27 on a passenger vehicle on Imphal-Tamenglong Road between Kangpokpi district headquarters and Tamei (in Tamenglong district), killing four Naga passengers and injuring several more. Second, an August 31 attack on a Kuki village along the IT Road killing three and injuring four.
Conspicuous by their absence now are the crusaders who rushed in to report the earlier conflict, many of whom have earned a reputation for themselves for the self-righteous stands they took. On this new front, their plots seem all completely lost.
In no conceivable way can this new development of a feud between Nagas and Kukis – although it is an extension of the earlier conflict – be portrayed as Hindu majority targeting Christian minorities or vulnerable tribals being victimised by a bigoted majority, or be fitted into other familiar templates of communal tensions elsewhere in the Indian heartland.
Quite obviously, and sadly, all the loud diagnoses of the Manipur problem all along have been at best partially right, if not completely off the track. When a diagnosis went wrong, it is only imaginable that remedial measures too would have gone wrong. In this scenario, it is also difficult not to recall Bertrand Russell’s essay ‘The harm that good men do’.
The pictures Manipur’s endemic crisis continue to evoke, though often ignored, are of the conflict fault-lines frozen and embedded within the very fabric of this multi-ethnic society. For indeed, this story is also about traditional communities who lived in isolation, now having to grapple and come to terms with the reality of postcolonial modernity.
So long as these hostilities remained dormant, a deceptive semblance of peace prevailed. Johan Galtung termed this as “negative peace”. Given the provocation, these underlying hostilities can reactivate to cause infernos. This theory probably explains the periodic and cyclic eruption of ethnic violence in places like Manipur, and indeed the entire Northeast and the contiguous geographical belts beyond.
James C. Scott has a convincing profile of this conflict landscape in his book Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchic History of Upland South East Asia. This mountainous massif in upper South East Asia is punctuated by numerous fertile, well-irrigated valleys. Stable and productive agrarian revolutions in these valleys, led to surplus economies, ultimately making way for the emergence of what Scott calls “Paddy States”.
By contrast, the mountain people were still living off a subsistent economy of primitive jhoom agriculture and hunting-gathering, with community affiliations rarely extending beyond isolated clans and villages. They therefore had no need for the centralised bureaucracy of a state.
A peculiar relationship between these paddy states and the non-state-bearing populations in the mountains is only to be predicted in this “Zomian” theatre in Scott’s words. This relationship is not always of hostility as a great deal of heritages and legends of origin are shared, but certainly meant different levels of development and power, as well as worldviews.
It is in this traditional world that colonialism arrived and superimposed its understanding of modernity and statehood as defined by the Westphalian state model. Even in the postcolonial era, this readjustment remains incomplete, therefore the hidden fault-lines of today in this conflict landscape.
The notion of land ownership is where conflict potential is foremost in this mix of primordial and modern worlds. Before the modern world’s intervention, for the feudal principalities the idea of land was not confined to their subjects’ immediate habitation but extended into the state’s spheres of control and spheres of interest. Likewise, for sedentary populations, the idea of land was a fixed territory in the vicinity of their immediate settlement and under their control. For those with nomadic traits, anywhere they pitch their tents become their land.
When all these three come to be confined within a definite geography and timeframe, conflicts of interests are only natural. Anthony Sattin’s picturisation of this friction in Nomads: Wanderers who Shaped Our World is interesting. Of all the analogies from the ancient world he cites, the description of the first murder in the Bible is most illustrative. Adam and Eve’s first-born son Cain kills his younger brother Abel. Cain is a tiller of the soil and Abel a wandering shepherd.
The former paddy states have had the least difficulty in adjusting to modern land tenureship for they already have internalised the principle of eminent domain which makes the state the ultimate owner of all land within its boundaries. Amongst the population in the mountains, customary laws held, and is still allowed to hold even in this postcolonial era. The trouble is, customary laws are as varied as there are communities and these outlooks often are conflicting, as Sattin notes.
This quest by scholars is almost a profile of Manipur’s ethnic relations dynamics. At one level there is a divide between the thickly populated central Imphal Valley, traditional home of Meiteis where modern land laws are in vogue, and the sparsely populated surrounding hills which form 90 percent of the state’s land area, traditional home of Nagas and Kukis. Here, customary laws still decide ownership of land. Nagas see themselves as original custodian of these hills and Kukis as their tenants who arrived later, defining the second major and more deep-rooted fault-line.
Easier said than done, but quiet obviously, the need is for all parties to come to terms with a consensual common legal platform to make the state their common homeland. In this, an acknowledgment of a shared geographical destiny they cannot splinter without causing ethnic mayhem is vital. Equally, those who wish to arbiter this conflict need also to absorb this wisdom and refrain from playing one party against the other, deliberately or otherwise.
This article first appeared in The New Indian Express. The original can be read HERE
Editor, Imphal Review of Arts and Politics and author
