Autumn is festive season in the Northeast. In the true sense of John Keat’s immortal lines in his To Autumn, here this is the “season of mist and mellow fruitfulness, close bosom-friend of the maturing sun”. The rains have ceased, summer too has eased to give way to mild hints of the approaching winter, prompting people to get their warm clothes ready. Hard labours at the rice paddy fields too are just over with the paddies having fructified and awaiting a few more weeks before seeds ripen enough for harvest.
For any traditionally agrarian community, this a short interlude of restful bliss in the yearly cycle of life. In Manipur the season opens with some of its most enchanting festivals. This year however they were celebrated in subdued ways, in a mix of sombre and joyous note. This is also the first time in two years since the outbreak of a bitter ethnic conflict between two of its major communities – Meiteis and Kuki-Zo group of tribes – that people by intuitive consensus decided to not completely forgo these festivals.
Hence during October end and November beginning, in quick succession, Diwali, Kut and Ningol Chakouba enlivened the state. Christmas and New Year are not too far away, and then the traditional Spring festivals. If Autumn is rest time, Spring is the start of another cycle of life therefore, even though an occasion to celebrate, it nonetheless comes with a measure of uncertainty. T.S. Eliot sums up this mood in his equally immortal line, “April is the cruellest month” in his The Wasteland.
The last-named festival, Ningol Chakouba, traditionally celebrated on the second day of the Meitei lunar month of Hiyangei, is of much significance amidst the tragedy Manipur is in today. This festival has no religious or ethnic overtones, and is a pure celebration of the family and familial bonding in the primal sense. This is an occasion when married women return to their parental homes for a meal together with their male siblings and parents. Ningol is female sibling (though a ring of youthfulness in the term is often lost in translation) and Chakouba is invitation to a meal.
Though it is a culture which took birth amongst the Meiteis, because of the universality of its theme and non-affiliation to religion, it is today increasingly accepted and observed by many other communities as well.
This year, a Ningol Chakouba feast organised for Ningols of mixed marriages by a civil organisation, Indigenous People’s Forum, Manipur, at Chadong, a Tangkhul Naga village sitting on a picturesque dam-created lakeside in the Kamjong district, poignantly brought to the fore the traumatic duress mixed community families have been put through by the ongoing conflict.
The appeal from the gathering touched tens of thousands of hearts if responses in the social media are anything to go by. Beyond the administrative and political rhetoric of unity and oneness, or else of disunity and separateness, the gathering also reminded all that in Manipur’s boiling ethnic cauldron, there has also always been a quiet and organic integrations process.
That this spirit of coexistence should have been allowed to be broken at all is condemnable, but that the resultant mayhem have also been allowed to continue for close to two years now by the Indian state is simply and outrageously beyond comprehension. If the state government was unfit and incapable of tackling the matter, the Union government should have stepped in to do the needful long ago.
A recent statement by the Union Minister for Civil Aviation and also in charge of the Development of North Eastern Region, DoNER, Jyotiraditya Scindia, was disheartening in this regard. When quizzed on the Manipur crisis in an interaction with Indian Express, the minster characterised the trouble as a legacy issue, quite loudly reminiscent of the explanation by conflict scholar Jolle Demmers of the costly delay in intervention by the international community when a genocidal ethnic war broke out between Bosnian Serbs and Albanian in the former Yugoslavia in 1993.
In her book Theories of Violent Conflict: An Introduction, Demmers says just as the international community was preparing for the intervention, an adviser gifted the then US President, Bill Clinton, a copy of Robert Kaplan’s book Balkan Ghost, where the enmity between the two warring sides is characterised as primordial, therefore beyond rational arbitration. The uneasy feeling is, many in the Union government actually see the Manipur problem similarly just as Scindia has indicated.
While it is true that even if left on their own, hostilities ultimately have to cease, if not for anything else then out of sheer combat fatigue, the danger is, this can lead to what conflict scholars have termed as “frozen conflict”. There are numerous examples of this in international relations scholarship, practically all of them with less than desirable consequences.
Because these conflicts end without any tangible resolution or formal peace agreement, the warring side technically remain at war long after return of normalcy. The case of North Korea and South Korea is a prime example. The same is true of the Israel-Palestine equation, as scholars like John Mearsheimer have been cautioning. The uncomfortable but often unacknowledged truth is, these frozen conflicts are known for periodically unfreezing leading to resumed hostilities.
The Northeast is no stranger to conflicts which have become frozen without any tangible resolution, and many of them still remain as time bombs ticking and building tensions within, threatening future explosions. The apprehension is, the current strife between Meiteis and Kuki-Zo tribes may be tragically fated to become the latest in this list, given the general attitude of the powers that be.
Meanwhile, as in any civil conflict where the state has almost completely abdicated its responsibility of keeping the law strictly in its hands, there has been a phenomenal proliferation of gangs of hoodlums taking advantage of the conflict to extort money from the public in the name of the conflict. News of kidnapping for ransom, intimidation and brutal assaults on businessmen and salaried employees are becoming commonplace, dipping public sense of security to yet another nadir.
It is against this backdrop that the apparent lack of any sense of urgency leading to the seeming wait and watch approach of the Union government, so clearly evident in such statements as that of Scindia, becomes confounding.
This article was first published in The New Indian Express under a different heading. The original can be read here
Editor, Imphal Review of Arts and Politics and author
