The drug trade has played a significant role in the political landscape as well as in heightening the conflict in Manipur.
Ratan Kumar Singh, a 58-year-old high school teacher, never imagined he would be happy to see armed fighters, or “revolutionaries” as he called them. But on May 28 last year, Singh welcomed them to his town of Sugnu in Manipur, a state in India’s northeast corner bordering Myanmar.
For nearly three weeks, the small town had managed to dodge the ethnic violence between the Meitei community and the Kuki-Zo tribespeople that had engulfed the rest of the state since May 3. But that day, four people were killed in the area and 12 injured as bullets found their way from surrounding hilly regions and from a camp dominated by the Kuki-Zo community.
“Then they started burning our houses. Our reinforcements, including the police and our civilian volunteers, started firing back. It was only when the revolutionaries came that we succeeded in overcoming the other side,” Singh told Al Jazeera.
“We were never for gun violence… but when we saw the revolutionaries and other Meitei volunteers come on that day, we cried [out of happiness] because we knew we would be safe.”
The fighters who came to defend Sugnu were, like him, ethnically Meitei.
Eleven months on, the conflict has killed 219 people, injured 1,100, displaced 60,000 and divided the state into ethnic territories. Armed groups have been fighting battles using sophisticated weapons and explosives in rural parts for territorial control even as more than 60,000 armed forces of the federal government and the state have so far failed to bring a durable end to the violence.
“From ‘blockade state’, Manipur is paving the way for international trade. Our government has launched… campaigns to bridge the gaps between the Hill and the Valley,” he said during the rally.
Modi was referring to the historical discrimination felt by tribal communities, including the Kukis, who live on the hillsides and feel that the Meitei community is economically more prosperous than them and are in the majority in the smaller valleys and the capital, Imphal. Modi said Chief Minister Singh’s policies had fostered a more integrated relationship between the hill and valley communities.
It appeared true at the time. In several parts of the hills, the civil society and the rebel groups of the Kuki-Zo community canvassed for Chief Minister Singh, and top politicians of the tribal community lined up for tickets from his party.
Chief Minister Singh swept the elections. In his second tenure beginning 2022, the BJP won five of the 10 state assembly seats from the Kuki-dominated hill constituencies. BJP legislators (MLAs) from these constituencies increased to seven after two of the Kuki MLAs who had won on Janata Dal United tickets defected to the governing party in September 2022. Two out of seven MLAs became ministers in his cabinet.
However, two years later, Modi and Singh’s claims bit dust, with Manipur witnessing unending ethnic violence between the Kuki and Meitei people, arguably, the longest-running ethnic conflict the country has witnessed in the 21st century.
Now, as the state prepares to vote in national elections on April 19 and April 26, those divisions have become entrenched, with a resurgence in armed groups formed along ethnic lines, as the first part of this series showed. It also revealed a presentation by the Assam Rifles that listed several factors that played a role in igniting the conflict: illegal immigrants from Myanmar, the demand for Kukiland, political authoritarianism and ambition of Chief Minister Singh and his war on drugs among others.
A joint force of Police, Forest & MR carried out a Poppy destruction drive at Tora Champhung Hill Range under Ukhrul district.
16 hectares of illicit poppy fields were destroyed, 20 huts burned, and other infrastructures such as pipeline connection, fertilizers, salt,… pic.twitter.com/8S2YE7MiZI
— N.Biren Singh (Modi Ka Parivar) (@NBirenSingh) November 15, 2023