The First Use of Weaponised Drones in a Civil Conflict in India

RAJKUMAR PANTHOIREN

On the 1st of September this year, a rather strange history was scripted, leaving behind a trail of dead and injured civilians and evoking national shock at the audacity. It will go down in history as the first weaponised drone attack deployed in a communal/civil conflict between two communities in India; another significant circumstantial evidentiary highlight being that it was done in a planned, cold-blooded manner on civilians and not armed opponents. In India, the first drone attack in a military context was the Jammu Air Force Station case of June 27, 2021. The Meitei-Kuki civil war-like conflict is the strangest phenomenon in post-colonial India in terms of the intensity and sustained nature of constitutional crisis, extreme militarisation disproportionate to a civil conflict and absolute state failure at both the Union and the State levels. It gets stranger by the day, with the convoluting power plays by multiple actors, state as well as non-state, pushing their respective agendas of dominant ethnic nationalism or resistant status quoism, and the Indian state’s larger counterinsurgency policy intercut by the dark, obvious underbelly of illegal drug money in a practically “open” Indo-Myanmar border context as well as implications of the current Myanmar crisis and the population push factors attached to it, the major chunk being the Chin refugee issue.

On 1st September, Kuki militants launched a coordinated attack using weaponised drones in a Meitei village called Koutruk in Imphal West. In the attack which was a combination-type offensive, with precision firing using snipers along with the drone bombs deployment, a young mother named Ngangbam Surbala Devi was shot in her head resulting in her death on the spot and injury to her minor daughter, who was taking cover with her. Several others including police personnel and also a journalist covering the mayhem were injured. The Kuki militants, taking advantage of the temporary gains in their surprise offensive resulting in the fleeing of the villagers, then burnt down a few houses of the village[i]. The months-long uneasy calm was finally broken and the Meiteis were caught off guard. It has to be taken cognisance that during this period of relative calm, and especially the few months leading up to the drone strikes, combined forces’ operations were done extensively, and complaints had come up that besides the routine recovery of arms, Meitei village volunteers were made to stand down. So, fringe Meitei villages were sort of vulnerable. The intensity of the combing operations in the Central Valley can be gauged by the fact that many Valley-Based Insurgent Group (VBIG) cadres were also arrested by the Manipur Police. The crackdown was clear on the Central Valley side. A civil society conglomerate of Meiteis called Coordinating Committee on Manipur Integrity (COCOMI) had flagged[ii] off a viral video, which purportedly shows celebration by a group of Kukis in fatigues in an ambulance after the Koutruk attack. COCOMI had claimed that “the ambulance was confirmed to have come from the Leimakhong area which houses one of the largest army camps.”

Interestingly, the drone strikes didn’t stop and continued the next day, and this time, another Meitei-inhabited village called Senjam Chirang in Imphal West was targeted. This village is not very far from Koutruk, the site of the first drone attack. This second attack resulted in injury by bomb splinter in the stomach of a young woman named Watham Sanatombi[iii], while her younger brother sustained minor injuries. Responding to the concerning security development, on 2nd September, the DGP of Manipur Police constituted a high-level committee comprising senior officers of the Manipur Police, Army, BSF, CRPF and Assam Rifles to study the drone attacks. The case has been handed over to the NIA now.

The severity, expertise and clinical precision of the attack was such that Inner Manipur MP Dr Bimol Akoijam, in an interview with a mainstream media channel[iv], observed, quite significantly, that the role of “possible rogue elements within the security establishment” cannot be ruled out, besides also not ruling out foreign elements. The Chin fighters in Myanmar, a kindred ethnic group of the Kukis, are known for their expertise[v] in drones during the current Myanmar conflict.

Barely days after the drone strikes by Kuki militants from Kangpokpi district, another serious attack happened in Moirang town of Meitei-dominated Bishnupur district from the Kuki-Zomi dominated Churachandpur district side on 6th September. An unguided rocket projectile fired from Churachandpur side, after having traversed few kilometers, hit a residential area in Moirang resulting in the death of a male senior citizen, who was preparing for a religious ritual. Again, several others were left injured. Incidentally, the house which got hit was that of the former Chief Minister of Manipur, M Koireng Singh, who was also an important collaborator of the then Indian National Army (INA).

The new phase of violence has to be seen in the context of the past few months’ uneasy stalemate marked by an absence of considerable violence, during which the Lok Sabha elections threw a big surprise for all when Dr Bimol Akoijam emerged as the dark horse winner of the Inner Manipur MP seat. His win had sort of vindicated the independent voice of the Meitei voters, who showed their absolute displeasure with the ruling dispensation despite threats[vi] and disruptions in the voting process. This almost paradoxical (to outside observers) reaffirmation of faith in democratic resistance was noticed across the nation, which helped highlight the non-binaristic complexity of the situation. In the meantime, the Modi[vii] and Biren[viii] dispensation were misleadingly and defensively claiming that some sort of peace has returned to Manipur, without concrete gains in breaking the non-communication impasse and political-level negotiations between the community stakeholders. Also, the decision to shift two battalions of Assam Rifles from Kuki-Zomi areas didn’t go down too well with the Kuki-Zomis’ political morale. And then, on 19 August[ix], The Wire “broke” a story about a leaked audio recording allegedly of Chief Minister N. Biren Singh, but this didn’t yield the desired outcome by the opposition as well as Kuki-Zomi groups of Biren Singh being made to step down.

For Biren, the stalemate works as long as the public pressure from the Meitei side is not on him to deflect any Kuki-Zomi political demand. The pattern till now has been that any significant surge in violence and attacks resulting in Meitei casualties is followed by a big pressure on Biren and BJP from the Meitei public, which doesn’t augur well for his political stability. The Inner Manipur MP election result is a clear indicator of the political consequence of inefficiency and inability to control violence for Biren and BJP. For the Kuki-Zomi political plank, a prolonged stalemate with no activity has a risk of their demand losing momentum. Lt. General Nishikanta Singh (retired)[x] had analysed the pattern of violence of 2023 and delineated two phases- the first phase was low-intensity gunfights between both sides, while the second phase being the highly coordinated attacks on May 27 and 28 last year when fringe Meitei villages in the Central Valley were fired upon almost simultaneously by Kuki militants from multiple directions. This happened right before Union Home Minister Amit Shah arrived in Manipur on 29 May and while the then Army Chief Manoj Pande was still stationed in Imphal. It had marked a significant escalation in the conflict like the September 1 attacks this year. So, a discernible pattern emerges, which smacks of political calculations being accounted for preceding any phase of violence by those who want and need to keep the pot boiling.

Horrible war crimes, many videos of which were circulated on social media, have been committed by both sides. The infamous ambulance burning by a mob[xi] in Imphal resulting in the death of a young Kuki boy and two other women including his Meitei mother, the murder of two captive young Meitei youths who had mistakenly ventured into Kuki areas on a bike, and armed fighters getting killed in exchange of fire and also under captivity have been seen. On the naked parading of two Kuki women by a mob, the Meitei mainstream civil society bodies[xii] had unanimously condemned it. As the conflict drags on, the nature of violence only gets murky. But, what has to be qualified is that, even though any violence is not justifiable, there has to be a clear analytical separation of violence done by a frenzied mob and violence done in a cold-blooded, planned and politically calculated manner. In criminal law, mens rea, i,e intent to commit an offence, and actus reus, i.e. the actual offense of a crime have to be considered in conjunction to determine the actuality of the intent and enabling circumstance of the crime committed, and the quantum of punishment to be inflicted according to the severity.

Regarding the drone attacks since 1st September and the 6th September long-range unguided rocket projectile attack, the defensive counters given by the apex Kuki-Zomi civil society bodies can be gauged in more than 10 press releases which they had released within the first six days of the first drone attack. The concerned apex civil bodies are Kuki Inpi Manipur, Kuki Students’ Organisation (KSO)-GHQ, World Kuki-Zo Intellectual Council (WKZIC), Indigenous Tribal Leaders’ Forum (ITLF), Sangaikot Sub-Divison Chiefs’ Association, Committee on Tribal Unity (COTU), Kuki Women Organisation for Human Rights (KWOHR) and Kuki Inpi-Sadar Hills besides also an important armed group Kuki National Organisation (KNO) under Suspension of Operations (SoO). Most of these press releases made ludicrous claims such as Meiteis “attacking their own territory”, while ITLF “hypothesised” that the Moirang victim may have been “ostensibly” killed by a knife lying near his dead body and not the actual rocket that landed nearby (the victim, an Arangpham or a ceremonial-religious event overseer, being in the process of preparing the offerings to be made for a ritual, was using the knife for the same).

The worrying pattern in these press releases is that they do not only deny the attacks, which is understandable, but flatly claim an illogical and implausible sequence of events that can be easily refuted by forensic analysis of the attack materials seized from the sites, the nature of injuries and deaths, and multiple testimonies of not only the Meitei victims but also the central forces on the ground. Also, on 2nd September, BJP MLA Paolienlal Haokip shared in his X account an unverified screenshot of a purported Facebook post of the controversial Arambai Tenggol chief Korounganba Khuman who, quite illogically, self-implicated his group’s role in the drone attacks. The only problem being the Facebook screenshot contains broken, atypical Manipuri that Meiteis do not use, and points to possible digital manipulation. The general indication of disinformation not just by trolls but by apex civil bodies is not an encouraging sign in the path towards conflict resolution, but proceeds more towards dehumanisation of civilian victims. This has to stop without exceptions by any side in this conflict.

Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, known for his stand against the State of Israel, has certain observations which remind of the similar gaslighting of Meitei victims and the circumstances of their deaths and injuries in the recent drone and rocket attacks in Manipur à la “Meiteis killed themselves due to misfiring” and so on. He recounts how Israeli historiography, regarding the Nakba of 1948, manufactured a story of a massive “voluntary” transfer of the huge number of Palestinians who had “decided temporarily to leave their homes and villages so as to make way for the invading Arab armies bent on destroying the fledgling Jewish state.” Here, too, the victims have been mockingly blamed for their own fate, that too illogically, at their own hands. Incidentally, the most influential Kuki SoO signatory armed group KNO’s Chief PS Haokip’s[xiii][xiv] affinity to the Jewish origin theory of Kukis is well documented.

In this conflict, binaries and oversimplification are themselves war crimes. They prevent any serious analyst and observer from looking at the manifestation of the conflict in its complex whole, where genuine grievances have been conflated with a dangerous concoction of dominant ethnic political aspirations in a constructed zero-sum context. But the most important takeaway is that politically motivated war crimes on civilians by any side should not be let off without accountability, and also a precedent that war crimes could help get one their desired political goal must not be allowed to be set. We cannot let similar political moves of the Israeli Jews, the former victims of Nazi genocide campaign and now themselves a perpetrator of genocidal war crimes, who adopt a Zionist tactic of narcissistic victimhood while themselves committing war crimes, be normalised in a liberal democracy like India.