The number of bullets fired so far : Inexhaustible supply ?
- The Sangai Express Editorial :: June 09, 2023 -

A count on the number of body bags will be possible. A count on the number of missing persons will also be possible.

But how many guns are being used in the clashes since the evening of May 3 ? How many bullets have been fired by either side ?

An answer coming out with a figure on this will certainly be nil and here will lie one of the many unanswered questions.

No one also expects an answer on this from the Government, but the corollary question to this would be, from where have all these countless number of guns and bullets come from ?

No exact figure but the media has been made to understand that thousands of guns have been looted from police stations and armouries of the State forces in the midst of the clash and understandably Union Home Minister Amit Shah is understood to have given a standing instruction to recover the looted arms.

Unsaid but crystal clear in the instruction is the line, ‘Get back the arms or else heads will roll’.

This should answer the search operation that has been put into motion.

A departure from the earlier search operation, which every adult in Manipur would be familiar with, for here in the present context the search would not be so much about looking for the wanted man or the fugitive but an exercise to recover the looted arms.

This is fine and perfectly in line with what the Government of the day is expected to do, and one hopes adequate focus is also given on how bullets continue to rain on settlements located at the foothills of Manipur.

Where did the guns used from the hills and fired towards the settlement at the foothills come from ?

The answer should actually be as easy as calculating what makes two plus two, but if the Government wants to turn this on its head and asks what makes four, then the answer could be two plus two, one plus three, 1.5 plus 2.5 and so many other ways of calculating the same.

No one is a Maths expert here at the The Sangai Express but it should be clear that riddles can be added to a question to make it complicated, and this may just be what is being played out on the turf of Manipur.

And the interesting question is who is the master of this game right now ?

Where have the bullets come from ? This would be a natural question.

Has the Government ever given a thought to this, or is it just satisfied with recovering the arms looted from the police stations and armouries ?

Or is it a question of one side having such a huge reserve of ammunition that it can keep on firing and firing without ever running out of bullets ?

One expects a more professional approach to deal with the intermittent firing that has been going on ever since trouble erupted in the evening of May 3.

This is where one needs to go back to the news report of June 6, 2023 which told the story of a massive cache of ammunition being recovered from three Kuki-Chin militants at Mizoram.

The militants belong to the aptly named Kuki-Chin National Army, which is active at the Chittagong Hills Tract of Bangladesh and clearly here is a case of Kuki-Chin militants waging war at Manipur, Karbi-Anglong region of Assam, the Chittagong Hills Tract of Bangladesh and the Chin Defence Force or KNA (B) active and operating at neighbouring Myanmar.

Clearly the spread of the Kuki-Chin militants under different names and style is immense and this is something to be noted.

Given the situation here, where there has been intermittent firing from the hills at the settlements along the foothills of Manipur, one cannot help but question if the ammunition seized at Mizoram were bound for Manipur.

The search operation is on and one hopes the looted arms are recovered and returned to the Government, but yet at the same time, it is also important to take up adequate measures to ensure that the search operation is applied with the same vigour and intensity at both the hills and the valley.