Attempt to seize ancestral Meetei land
- The People's Chronicle Editorial :: May 18, 2023 -

IT'S not surprising that the memorandum submitted by the 10 Kuki legislators to Union Home Minister Amit Shah made no mention of either the fact that the torching of Meetei houses in Torbung areas after the May 3 trib-al solidarity march triggered the communal clashes or that more Meetei families than the Kuki tribe are affected by the violence and dis-placed from their ancestral homes.

Torching of entire or maximum number of Meetei houses in Churachandpur, Moreh, Motbung and Saikul towns and its outskirts also brings to the fore the hidden agenda of the Kuki mobs, proba-bly orchestrated by the political elite, to seize homestead land and commercial establishment of the Meetei people who had been settling in these towns since time immemorial.

Whereas in Imphal, where agitated people started to troop out to the streets after video clippings of the Torbung attacks went viral, the mob mainly targeted private buildings of handful of wealthy Kuki political figures, that too abstaining from setting fire to many houses as they were locat-ed in densely populated pockets.

Of course vehicles and Kuki civilians were also among the targets of the mob but the attacks were on lesser intensity compared to the diabolic and systematic destruction caused to the Meetei community in Kuki-populated districts.

Thus, the memorandum of the 10 MLAs mentioning only damages suffered by the Kuki community do not reflect the ground reality but is simply an attempt to draw sympathy of the Union government towards materialisation of the Kuki homeland demand under the guise of separate administration for Kuki and its kindred tribes.

Moreover, the demand for granting Scheduled Caste status to the Meetei/Meitei community seem unrelated with the communal clashes as there were no unwanted incidents in areas dominated by the Nagas, who are also fiercely opposed to recognition of Meeteis as ST.

Like it or not, the crackdown on poppy cultivation in and around Kuki villages and eviction drive launched by the government to preserve re-served and protected forests appear to be some main reasons for the Kuki mobs selectively targeting the Meetei people.

Even before the communal clashes broke official records point to destruction of Forest offices while as many as 16 such offices in Kuki inhabited areas were targeted and burnt on a single day on May 3, the day ATSUM organised tribal solidarity march.

Targeting of the forest offices, not to mention about incidents of setting ablaze forests nurtured by the Meetei villages, tes-tify that the government's move to prevent encroachment in reserved forest areas derailed plan to expand settlements of Kuki people.

Official reports of forest offices damaged or torched in Kuki-dominated Churachandpur, Kangpokpi and Tengnoupal districts apart from complete destruction of files, documents, maps, etc., in these offices make is crystal clear that the Meetei's ST demand is just a cover-up of the bigger agenda to increase the number of Kuki villages as well as keep the government machinery preoccupied in dealing with the law and order problem so to continue with poppy plantation.

Involvement of Kuki armed outfits in the violence and attacks on Meetei villages could also be part of the ploy to discourage law enforcement agencies from venturing into poppy cultivation areas.