Land and territoriality in the Northeast
- Part 3 -
- Politics of ethnicity and armed violence in Manipur -

Lokendra Arambam *

Not all political movements amongst the Kukis were associated with armed violence. In fact, democratic aspirations and practice was the path followed by the tribal elites during 1960s. In a momentous meeting at Thingkhanphai in Churachandpur district during January 19-22,1960, the elders of the erstwhile Kuki National Assembly (established in 1946), raised the issue of Kuki Homeland in Manipur.

Thereafter, Kuki Chiefs and elders submitted a memorandum to the then Prime Ministerm Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, on 24 March 1960. The memorandum pleaded for immediate establishment of Kuki State, and unification of all contiguous areas now under the habitation of the Kukis in India under the proposed Kuki State.

This democratic aspiration for a Homeland, consisting of spaces in Manipur's hill districts of Churachandpur, Senapati, Ukhrul and Tamenglong, were however mired in controversies, as the Kuki habitations were spread through mixed settlements with other communities, and the Nagas themselves nursed primordial grievances against them, since they regarded the Kukis as outsiders and migrants who were deliberately settled by the British authorities and Meetei rulers since the nineteenth century.

The desire for the Kuki people to raise the Sadar Hills in the Northern part of Manipur as a revenue district was strongly objected to by the Nagas, who claimed these areas as part of their ancestral domain. The Sadar Hills in the Senapati district continued to haunt ethnic relations for quite long, and the Naga national movement could however appropriate these areas as part of their future southern Nagalim.

Development frontier to disturbed area and economic bridgehead

To India, the Northeast as a region was a Development Frontier in the Nehruvian imagery. By the time his daughter Indira Gandhi came to power, the Northeast became a Disturbed Area, and by the time of Prime Ministers late Narasimha Rao to Manmohan Singh, the Northeast became an Economic Bridgehead, where predatory capitalism would have a field day.

The Look East Policy and drive towards global economic integration via the Northeast would be processed under the auspices of the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the Japanese Bank ofInternational Co-operation, etc.

The influence of speculative intrusion of financial capital in international economy which inhibits growth by creating an environment of low wages, low growth, and strangulation of simple innocent work forces had a disastrous impact in a cocrupt society like Manipur, where there were little opportunities for productive investment and honest returns.

The system of predation in which corrupt business, political, police and bureaucratic classes, or government officials entered into a wanton race for grabbing of plots/businesses in Imphal, Jiri or Moreh towns, parking of unaccounted wealth in the form of assets and/or bank accounts in Indian cities and elsewhere by the nouveau-riche politicians, contractors or other enriched classes, are all part of a general spectrum of cocruption.

The race for periodic control over Government purses therefore became a driver of the electoral processes for Government formation. All these activities were interlaced with rising insurgent violence as well, with its increasing propensity to devour its own children. Manipur had not witnessed a sane public life. Heavily politicised ethnic relations in the era of insurgency therefore are not perhaps the result of endogenous conflictual growth of vertical social boundaries alone, but rather an end product of intensification of networks of exogenous relationships able to create this effect.

Meeteis occupying major portions in the valley are now under a "siege" from aroused ambitions of ethnic assertion and territorialising ethno-national formations all around the once natural, and organic physiographic landscapes. This transformation of organic geographic spaces of hill and plains as alienated political entities is the product of intense dynamics of Manipur's post-merger history.

New historical responsibilify for the Meetei

How does the Meetei community as a whole see and interpret this "reality"? This community has its origins from intense interactions in blood and kin relationships with the surrounding ethnoses in its primal life.

The community itself has adapted faster to the vagaries of the acumen to form an organised political order, utilised its human and material resources to develop an original Asiatic civilisation, with collective memory of a once proud martial nation with a pluralistic social order.

The hills and plains were organic, vital limbs in the geo-body of the nation. Its boundaries in the pre-colonial periods as the State "Meckley" in the early nineteenth century reached as far as the banks of Brahmaputra in the North, the Kabaw valley in the East, and the Chandrapore Thana in Cachar in the West.

The concept of boundaries understood by the ethnogens was of an interaction of peoples, cultures and spaces, without interference in domestic life. Mutual economic and social relationship through an indigenous Ngai (bond) system prevailed.

All these quotidian complexes had altered drastically during "the hundred years of un freedom" experienced by colonised Manipur. Now, those who are struggling for the "restoration of Manipur's Independence" are as equally divided as other ethnogens of the State.

They seem as overwhelmed by predatory capital as the democratic representatives ofIndia's political order. Their dealings with society do not indicate any affinity with classical revolutionary movements of either the Chinese or the Vietnamese.

Their medieval passions and prejudices as are observed in their subterranean dealings with officials, institutional representatives or others in the social milieu reflect personal manifestations of desperation and/or wantonness in a hostile environment of corruption, distrust, intimidation and coercion.

Only the stubborn resistance of their armed cadres, exemplary engagements and sterling sacrifices of their comrades in the tense struggle with the Indian military and paramilitary forces seem to hold the attention of the people.

To be continued ....