How the BJP is enabling ethnic cleansing in Manipur

Greeshma Kuthar

“I DIDN’T shut up. I asked them how they can behave like this with another woman,” an 18-year-old Kuki woman told me, recalling her abduction and assault, in which Meira Paibis had played a major part. The Meira Paibis—the name translates to “torch-bearing women”—are a Meitei civil-society movement that rose to prominence through their protests against the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, which grants the military sweeping powers. In the ethnic violence that has engulfed Manipur over the past three months, pitting the majority Meitei community against members of Kuki tribes, who constitute a quarter of the population, the Meira Paibis have helped Meitei mobs target Kukis throughout the Imphal Valley and its surrounding foothills.

The 18-year-old woman’s family belonged to Churachandpur, a Kuki-majority district to the south of the valley, but had been living in the state capital for years. “Imphal has been my home all my life,” she said. When the violence broke out, on 3 May, her family, like most Kukis in Imphal, fled to the hills. The woman, who was enrolled in a cosmetology course, decided to wait out the carnage, expecting that the state government would soon restore order. She began living with a Kuki friend who was married to a member of the Pangal community—Meitei Muslims, who make up about eight percent of the state’s population.

Things did not get better. Mobs led by Arambai Tenggol—a Meitei militia that enjoyed the patronage of senior Bharatiya Janata Party leaders, including the chief minister, Biren Singh, and Manipur’s titular king and Rajya Sabha MP, Leishemba Sanajaoba—were scouring the city, looking for Kukis in passing cars, in houses and in hostels. The woman decided that, although the Pangals were hiding her, she would be safer among her own people. Her parents transferred some money to her account, which she was to use to pay a Pangal driver to take her to Kangpokpi, a Kuki-majority district to the north where they had found shelter.

On the evening of 15 May, she went to Imphal’s New Checkon market to withdraw the money. Outside an ATM, she was accosted by four men, who asked her to show them her Aadhaar card. She told them that she did not have it, but they gathered from her accent that she was Kuki. They forced her into their car and took her to Wangkhei Ayangpali, a Meitei neighbourhood around two kilometres away, where they handed her over to a group of Meira Paibis, who beat her with sticks, despite her protestations. The Meira Paibis asked the men to kill her. After one of them made a phone call, an SUV arrived with four armed men wearing the black shirts with red insignias that make up the Arambai Tenggol uniform.

According to a police complaint she later filed, these men drove around, looking for a suitable place to kill her. Along the way, they repeatedly slapped her and hit her with the butt of a gun. They eventually reached a remote hilltop, in Bishnupur district, south-west of Imphal, where they dragged her out of the car and beat her until she passed out. When she regained consciousness, three of the four men raped her. The men began arguing over whether to kill her, in the midst of which one of them accidentally hit her with their car. She rolled down the hill until she reached a road at the bottom.

There, she told me, she was found by a Pangal autorickshaw driver who was transporting vegetables to the market. He helped her onto his vehicle and hid her under the vegetables. As the four men gave chase and fired at them, he drove her to the Bishnupur Police Station, which they reached around 4 am. They told the police personnel on duty that they were being chased. When the police attempted to stop and search the SUV, however, it sped away. The constables at the police station asked them to wait there until the senior officers arrived in the morning. Since they were all Meiteis, the autorickshaw driver told the woman that it might not be safe and offered to drive her back to Imphal. Her assailants had taken her phone and all her money, but he told her she did not need to pay him anything. He dropped her off at New Checkon and did not leave until he was sure she was safe.

At New Checkon, Kuki volunteers took her to the house of TT Haokip, a former state legislator who lived nearby. She was too afraid to go to a hospital, so Haokip’s wife, Mary, administered first aid and took care of her for the next two days. They were eventually able to secure transport to take her to the relief camp where her parents were staying. She was admitted to a hospital in Kangpokpi district, which referred her to a hospital in Kohima, where a medical officer recorded her diagnosis, on 24 May, as an “alleged case of assault and rape.” 

Her parents thought about filing a complaint but decided against it, fearing reprisals. The woman told me that, when the Arambai Tenggol men were considering whether to let her go, they warned her that they would kill her if she went to the police. She was emboldened to do so, on 21 July, soon after a video of two Kuki women being paraded naked circulated on social media, drawing worldwide condemnation and renewed attention to the situation in Manipur. The incident had taken place on 4 May, after Meiteis burned down the village of B Phainom, in Kangpokpi district. The women had been part of a group of five people who were being taken in a police vehicle to Thoubal, around twenty kilometres away. (The first-information report that was registered about the incident said that they had fled B Phainom and sought police protection, but one of the women told me that the police had been part of the mob that burned their village and had picked them up from near their homes.) A Meitei mob stopped the vehicle, killed the two men in the group, stripped the three women and gang raped the youngest of them, who was 21 years old.

By all accounts, the police left the three women to their fate. The Saikul Police Station, in Kangpokpi district, registered an FIR on 18 May—Thoubal district, where the incident took place, is under Meitei control—but the officer-in-charge was reportedly transferred two days later. No arrests were made for over two months, before the outrage over the video spurred the police into action. Seven people, including the man who shot the video, have been arrested so far. On 28 July, Meira Paibis in Thoubal organised a rally to protest the arrests.

No arrests have been made in the 18-year-old woman’s case. When I met her, in early June, it was evident that she was traumatised and scared that the men would make good on their threats to find and kill her. “When I close my eyes, I can see their faces,” she told me. Her friend had also been targeted but was still safe, she said. Another Kuki–Pangal couple she knew was not as fortunate—a Meitei mob attacked them and killed their son.

AT A PROTEST organised by the Meitei Pangal Intellectual Forum on 10 July, at Kwakta in Bishnupur district, the primary demand from the speakers was to stop the violence. There have been a few instances of firing between Meiteis and Kukis in Kwakta, and an IED explosion on 21 June injured four people, including three children. On 8 July, another bombing in Kwakta injured at least one person.

Some speakers at the MPIF protest maintained the neutrality of the community, which has had an uneasy relationship with Hindu Meiteis. Thirty years before the current conflict began, between 3 and 5 May 1993, Meitei mobs killed over a hundred Pangals across the state following a reported clash between a Muslim arms dealer and members of a Meitei separatist group. Meiteis have often stereotyped them as criminals and illegal immigrants, and accused them of encroaching in the state’s forests. In 2018, the Biren Singh government demolished the homes of around four hundred Pangals in a forest where they had been living since the 1970s. The government also sought to evict Pangals living on agricultural land where it wanted to construct housing for state legislators, invoking the Manipur Conservation of Paddy Land and Wetland Act—even though Meitei settlements on paddy land have largely remained untouched.

Nevertheless, when the violence broke out this year, the Pangals of Kwakta were active in sheltering Meiteis fleeing the neighbouring Churachandpur district. This has not protected them from being attacked. A Muslim resident of Kwakta, whose mother housed around a hundred Meiteis, told Al Jazeera that, when he went to Imphal to help retrieve a Kuki colleague’s car, he was assaulted by a group of Meiteis who accused Pangals of aiding Kukis. “When the media is biased and provocative in favour of the Meitei, and the powerful politicians of the valley are hand in glove, how will this be brought to an end?” Rafi Shah, the MPIF general secretary, said at the protest. “We are caught in between, told by the Meitei that we are supporting Kukis, and vice versa. It has been 67 days since this madness started. When will we see its end?”

There was a method to the madness. Although the violence had been precipitated by the Manipur High Court directing the state government to expedite the longstanding Meitei demand for Scheduled Tribe status, the order came amid an escalation in the Biren Singh government’s concerted campaign to stir up majoritarian sentiments against Kukis, using the same tactics it had employed against the Pangals. The scale of this campaign, however, is exponentially higher.

In fact, the carnage in Manipur can justifiably be referred to as ethnic cleansing, which was defined by a United Nations committee of experts as “a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas.” In the course of my reporting in Manipur, over the last two months, I found the Biren Singh government and the Meitei mobs it enables using most of the coercive practices listed by the committee, including murder, torture, arbitrary arrest, extrajudicial executions, sexual assault, displacement of civilians, attacks on civilian areas, the use of civilians as human shields, and the destruction and theft of personal property. The result was a state caught in a humanitarian crisis of the BJP government’s own making, with the demonisation of a community being followed by wanton violence against it, leaving it facing an uncertain future of starvation, permanent displacement and possible expulsion from the state. (The chief minister’s office did not respond to a questionnaire I sent.)….

Read more: https://caravanmagazine.in/conflict/how-bjp-enabling-ethnic-cleansing-manipur