Manipur: Playing with fire

The Manipur crisis, complex as it is, has a cause, a trigger, and a history. In theory, it can be explained in the light of events in the immediate. Put simplistically, the cause is the long-standing divide between the Meitei (a little over 50% of the population, concentrated in Imphal and the Valley districts occupying some 10% of land area) and the Kuki people (some 25%, many of them practicing Christianity, spread across the majority hilly regions of Manipur). The trigger, in part, is the judgment of the single judge of the High Court of Manipur at Imphal, Justice MV Murlidharan. The judge ordered the government to take a decision within four weeks on granting the Scheduled Tribe status to the Meiteis, who have been demanding this in the face of opposition by Kuki tribes. The High Court order has since been called “factually wrong” by the Supreme Court and is under appeal. The trigger is also in part the action by the Meitei-dominated government against those illegally occupying forest land, action against illegal migrants from neighbouring Myanmar and a drive against poppy cultivation in the hilly regions, feeding into new anxieties among the Kukis who occupy the hilly terrains.

Manipur is burning and the government knows not what to do next

Yet, the immediate causes and triggers and history may not tell the full story, which lies more in an overall approach and an attitude that can breed anxiety, stoke hatred and lead to a breakdown of the kind being witnessed in Manipur right now. Bitterness in the heart, building bit by bit, cannot be easily understood or measured. Its outpouring into violence against the State and against fellow citizens carries the potential of a nasty surprise that we see today – Manipur is burning and the government knows not what to do next. This is a sensitive State in a sensitive region with not very friendly neighbours. The collapse of State machinery here should be a cause for alarm.

The extent of the trouble can be seen from the fact that a series of meetings and actions by the Home Minister Amit Shah, who was in the State for four days from 29 May to 1 June, and the visit by the Chief of Army Staff General Manoj Pande around the same time, have not brought calm. There will be much discussion in the coming days on how the BJP, which is ruling in the State for the first time, has brought the situation to this sorry pass, and the series of actions or mis-actions that have led to an atmosphere in which the Meitei-Kuki conflict has gone out of hand.

Yet, such is the burden of geographical distance and being cut off from the mainstream, that it has taken time for the burning of Manipur and the disaster that this portends for the nation to sink into the collective conscience of the rest of India.

Now, civil society groups have spoken up with a strong statement that calls out the Centre and the State governments, the BJP’s so-called “double engine” in the State and at the Centre. “In the present scenario,” the civil society groups put it, “the worst of the violence against the Kukis has been perpetuated by armed Meitei majoritarian groups … accompanied by genocidal hate-speech and supremacist displays of impunity.” Two Congress MPs visiting the State say they had to go incognito to study the violence “in a land where identity and ideology have overshadowed humanity and triggered hatred, violence, bloodshed and death …”

As many as 10 opposition parties have come together to question the silence of the Prime Minister on Manipur. Even the RSS has woken up to the unfolding misery and mayhem. The RSS General Secretary Dattatreya Hosabale noted over the weekend that the “continuous violence that is going on in Manipur for the last 45 days is extremely worrisome”.

The situation is truly worrisome. It comes in a State that has been marked out for coming out the weakest in terms of good governance, according to the Good Governance Index (GGI) report for 2020-2021 by the Union Government’s Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances. To quote the report, “On the other hand, Manipur with the highest decline of - 11.2% tops the list of North Eastern States that have registered negative growth over 2019.” The direction has clearly been lost. All efforts must be made at this critical time to bring calm, to check the spiral of violence and offer all the support and inputs that may be required to bring peace to the State. With more than 100 lives lost, the focus has to be on lowering the temperature.

While this will take time, Manipur must alert us to the unpredictable consequences of policy slants that antagonise sections of the people in the belief that State power will prevail to order change in accordance with a predetermined agenda. The mistaken belief that instruments of the State can be used to deliver on ideas and policy that go against the grain of a nation built on foundations of democratic debate, of give-and-take, or accommodating and making space rather than seizing it for a preferred and narrower agenda, is a recipe for disaster.

It is easy to stoke hatred. Not all actions or statements will draw an immediate response. Some responses will come in the form of protests that will be easy to put down. Bigger protests can be crushed with force. But while this drama is playing out, and a government with an overwhelming majority thinks it is driving in its chosen direction, there is a slow rising of a counter current that can begin to take root. This wave of discontent is often unseen, unheard, building up silently to strike with the force and suddenness of a killer tsunami. It can bring wild disruptions that this nation can ill-afford. We think we are on a road to a better future but we may be driving up the wrong alley, leaving the nation more divided and ungovernable.

In the book ‘The Black Swan’, Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes: ”What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it. This is all the more worrisome when we engage in deadly conflicts … Owing to this misunderstanding of the causal chains between policy and actions, we can easily trigger Black Swans thanks to aggressive ignorance—like a child playing with a chemistry kit.” There may be an important message in that for the current context in India.

(The writer is a journalist and faculty member at SPJIMR. Views are personal)