Your Chanakya, our Chanakya
In the ethnic-mojo enhanced Manipur of today, it seems to be the complaint of choice
Your Chanakya is bigger than my Chanakya. In the ethnic-mojo enhanced Manipur of today, it seems to be the complaint of choice.
This sense was reinforced in an article in Hindustan Times headlined Imphal’s ‘conspiracy’ theory: Delhi behind tribal unity, unrest. The article dated 9 September highlighted the surprise of a Congress legislator from Manipur, and a local, politically-inclined human rights activist, that people of the hills of Manipur, home to the Naga, Kuki and Zomi tribes, had seemingly come together against the Meitei-dominated plains.
Particularly the Naga and Kuki communities, by virtue of Kuki leaders maintaining a studied silence since the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Isak-Muivah), or NSCN-IM, signed a framework peace agreement with the government of India on 3 August. Especially since the Kuki community hasn’t formally forgiven the NSCN-IM for the genocide it triggered against Kukis in Manipur in the early 1990s.
Conspiracy, New Delhi and its Chanakyas were, according to the article, behind escalating tensions in the hills since three bills—for an inner line permit system, and amendments to land ownership norms and registration of businesses—were passed by Manipur’s legislature on 1 September. Nine citizens in Churachandpur district have since died in police action against those protesting the bills as being detrimental to the hills.
Is it only about New Delhi, for all its machinations in pitting one rebel group against another, as it did with the NSCN (IM) and its arch foes of the Khaplang faction—and dozens of other plays, including the encouraging of Kuki nationalism against the NSCN (IM)—on this chessboard of competing, overlapping national interests?
The short answer: no.
Last week (A political cure for Manipur, 4 September) I suggested there was nothing surprising or sudden about it. Meitei nationalists and politicians are reaping the crop of underpowered administration and development in the hills they have for long sowed.
As to hill folk uniting, the three hastily drafted bills pushed through with no consultation with hill citizenry may have been a spark, but an outreach is hardly new.
During a visit to Manipur’s hilly Ukhrul district in 2009, I was told by a young Naga of the Tangkhul tribe with ties to NSCN (IM) leadership of how he and his colleagues were reaching out to
Kuki-Chin-Mizo people of Manipur. “The hills have a common future,” he told me. It was part of a concerted effort by a group of Nagas in Manipur to engineer a coalition of tribal hill people against the administrative stranglehold of Imphal.
For all its ruthlessness, the NSCN (IM) did the near-unthinkable in 2010.
At the NSCN (IM)’s ceasefire headquarters at Camp Hebron near Dimapur in Nagaland, the outfit’s general secretary Thuingaleng Muivah was diplomacy personified in late-March 2010. This was just weeks after he arrived in India for talks. He received a host of visitors: including elders from several Naga tribes, and a visiting team of Quakers—along with Baptists, long-time interventionists for Nagas. Muivah even met representatives of the apex Kuki Tribal Union.
A statement from Muivah attempted to assure Kukis: “Nagas and Kukis were living together and will live together as our fathers had worked in NNC time”—when rebellion was scripted by the Naga National Council in the 1950s. The implication was that the wedge had since been imposed between the two communities—neighbours in the hills of Manipur—by vested interests. Take your pick as to India or Manipur government interests. Late on 25 March 2010, Muivah even met a top functionary of the Khaplang faction at the time, Kitovi Zhimomi—now co-leader of the breakaway
Khole-Kitovi faction of the NSCN—for a tête-à-tête. It was a play with an eye to the future.
As much of a play, facilitated by several of Imphal’s civil society worthies, to suggest to Meitei—non-tribal—rebel groups to consider uniting. “We told them as far back as mid-2000s to consider coming together,” the head of an Imphal-based non-governmental organization (NGO) told me recently. “Pressure would be building up against them. It was inevitable: the situation was changing in Bangladesh and Myanmar”—where such groups received refuge. “They realized it later.”
In 2012, seven Meitei rebel groups—one was soon ejected—formed the Coordination Committee. “By coming together, they would be in a better position to defend (themselves), but more importantly, negotiate with the government,” the NGO chief said. “We told them negotiations were inevitable.”
Were that to happen, it would prove yet again that there are enough Chanakyas right here in Manipur.
Sudeep Chakravarti’s latest book is Clear.Hold.Build: Hard Lessons of Business. His previous books include Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country and Highway 39: Journeys through a Fractured Land. This column, which focuses on conflict situations in South Asia that directly affect business, runs on Fridays.
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First Published:11 Sep 2015, 12:38 AM IST
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