- Lokendra Arambam
Northeast India in the past hundred years has seen major shifts in its ethnic landscape and polity. Post-independent India in the region has moved from ethnic harmony and organic geo-political body to fractured polity and antagonistic ethnic identity claims largely created by the Indian State's struggle to retain its territorial integrity.
The challenge before the ethnogenes is to device ways of responding to both the militaristic framework as well as the newly devised "development" mantra of the Indian State.
INTRODUCTION
In the month of June this year, at Moreh, about 120 miles to the Southeast of Imphal at the international border adjoining Myanmar, marked yet another rupture in the chequered history of pluralism in Manipur. For the first time, two ethnic communities - the Meetei and Kuki - who shared an age-old history of friendship and amity were locked in armed violence.
Eleven people were killed during those events. Moreh, incidentally, became a centre of human activity since international trade and commerce had been formally opened between the Govt of India (GoI) and Myanmar in 1994-95. This small hill township has a diverse population including Tamils, Malayalees along with Manipur's ethnic indigenes, notably Nagas, Kukis and Meeteis.
There had been political movement based on ethno-national ideologies. For example, the Nagas claimed the district of Tengnoupal, wherein Moreh was a major economic and political centre, as the ancestral domain of the Nagas.
On the other side of the ideological spectrum, the Kuki ethnic communities, ranging from various clans of the indigenous variety to kith and kin from across the border in Myanmar, had been actively pursuing the political goal of Zalen-gam, the abode of the Kukis which includes Moreh. A significant number of Meetei settled in Moreh completes the overall ethnic balance of this border town.
The incident at Moreh which nearly sparked off a communal bloodbath between the Meetei and Kuki communities has been assuaged temporarily through the combined efforts of various civil societies and the Government. But the enmity between two militant outfits, the UNLF (United National Liberation Front) and the KNA/KNO (Kuki National Army/Kuki National Organization), which lies at the root of the incident continues to simmer in the backdrop.
The press releases of the two militant outfits remind us of conflictual perceptions on issues of land and territory. The KNO believes that the unfortunate events of June 9, 2007 at Moreh, in which 11 people died, were a direct consequence of UNLF's "intrusive presence in Kuki territory," and urged "the UNLF to confine their revolutionary activities, ideologically and physically, to the valley called Manipur, which had been their abode from time immemorial."
The UNLF, on the other hand, charged the KNA of targeting the Meetei people indiscriminately with the sole agenda of whipping up communal tension in Moreh. The UNLF also reiterated that it has nothing against the Kukis but it will deal with the KNA/KNO firmly for allowing itself to be used as a weapon by the Indian Army against the liberation struggle and against the UNLF.
Incidentally, the Naga civil society groups who support the implicit claims of Naga ancestral domain which includes Moreh proffered friendship to the Kuki community. Incidentally, the Nagas and Kukis were involved in a noholds-barred mutual ethnic cleansing campaign in 1992-93, which began from the struggle to control Moreh and its economic under-belly.
NAGA LEBENSRAUM AND THE MEETEI
Since the late 1960s, the Naga ethno-national movement had been propagating integration of contiguous portions of Manipur, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh into Greater Nagalim. They also had been insinuating that the Meetei independence struggle against the Indian Union is that of and for the valley (consisting of some 700 square miles) alone.
The KNA/KNO also claims that the Meetei independence struggle is of the Meeteis alone for the valley. The Meetei non-State actors in the valley, however, have a spatial imagination of their independence encompassing the organic topography of the hills and the valley along with ethnic populations as in pre-colonial times which gave formal shape and features to the polity of Manipur.
Ethnic insurgencies in the Northeast in the course of their prolonged struggle against the powerful Indian State seem to be losing their original character of ethnic unity and harmony. Ethnicity, as an element of group affiliation and "subjective, symbolic and emblematic use of their own cultures in order to differentiate themselves from other groups," had been accentuated during the course of the struggle.
Amongst the major ethnic communities of Meetei, Naga and Kuki, only the Meetei remain as armed contestants to the Indian State, when the other communities of Naga and Kuki are in varying levels of ceasefire and political understanding with Government of India.
It is hard to say whether the heightening tensions and sharper accentuation of social boundaries between/among these communities are caused by the internal dynamic of struggle for power and resources in conflictual growth processes, or these relationships are being manipulated by exogenous factors like the counter-insurgent forces, or that these symptoms are the surface manifestation of internal intrigue and behindthe-scene maneuvers of elite stakeholders in the identity project. At the present moment, the attitude of the highlander civil societies sympathetic to their respective armed groups no longer reflects the pluralities of the pre-colonial order.
The issue of distance mentalities amidst civil society groups and hardening perceptions of the divide between the "we-self' and the "other" are portents of latent social conflict. The formulation of separate entities and the spatial dichotomisation of the imaginative geographies between the hills and plains in terms of ethnicity and ethnicisation of social relations and networks are deeper issues afflicting the plural order in the era of insurgency.
The politics of insurgency and counter-insurgency, and variegated responses by the awakened ethnicities in the changing dynamics of life, and the development of selfconsciousness and subjectivity in ethnic formations in the emerging discourse on land and territoriality are matters of deep import.
How does the issue of land and territoriality then inflect the changing dimensions of ethnic strife?
Or are these proclamations and media handouts reflections of the self-appropriation of peoples voice in the subaltern margins of visibility by strident political elites in the stream of insurgent history?
What is the reality behind insurgency and counter-insurgency which form conflicting discourses?
A brief history of contemporary insurgency would throw light on the patterns of political and social violence afflicting ethnic relations in the state. We are all aware that the assertion of Naga nationhood has "legitimate" claims to territorialisation of substantial portions of Northeast India's geography through claims of land-people relationship and concepts of the ancestral domain.
Territoriality is not a simple occupation of a sizable piece of the earth's surface. Territoriality, according to Robert D Sack, "is the attempt by an individual or group to affect, influence or control people, phenomena and relationships, by delimiting and asserting control over geographic area.... It is not an instinct or drive, but rather a complex strategy... and the device through which people construct and maintain spatial organisation."
The Nagalim concept also features ardent pursuance of a geographic boundary which is linear where vertical interfaces between "state sovereignty" intersect the surface of the earth. As vertical interfaces, boundaries have no horizontal extent.
This modem concept of territorialisation therefore is being processed as against the non-boundedness of the human geography of precolonial times. The old order is sought to be transformed since Mr. Th. Muivah, who happened to be a Tangkhul Naga from Manipur, is regarded as the main protagonist of the political project of Nagalim.
In the words of Winnichakul, territoriality involves three basic human behaviours - a form of classification by area, a form of communication by boundary and an attempt at "enforcing." The third factor was what forced the use of aggressive spate of hate Meetei campaigns and various democratic agitations, economic blockades and all other forms to effect enforcement.
The event of June 18, 2001 where eighteen valley people lost their lives was a result of such profound measures to officialise the enforcement. As the NSCN (1M) stated over and over again that it does not believe in Manipur's integrity, that the present Manipur State is a temporary phenomenon, and that the NSCN (1M) is "not greedy about land and will never take even an inch of Meetei's territory, nor will it part with what is theirs."
On the other hand, the Meetei national movement that surfaced in the valley of Manipur professed relations of respect and mutual support to the Naga insurgency in the late seventies and early eighties. When the NNC was in deep throes of mutual recrimination and violence as a result of the Shillong Accord, the Meetei insurgent outfits were giving shelter and sustenance to many underground Naga cadres in Meetei homes in suburban Imphal.
It was learnt that in the tumultuous periods of division and split amongst the NSCN cadres in 1988, Meetei insurgent leaders were at pains to effect compromise amongst the Naga leaders. The chapter of ethnic unity and collective efforts against the Indian state earlier is now dead and gone.
Ethnicity and ethnic bias in the wielding of power and influence in the so-called democratic institutions like the legislature seem to have a diluted presence, though ethnicity was the main plank for political mobilization by the hill tribes.
The Meeteis in the plains, who had experienced deep traditions of polity governance and maintenance of community equilibrium in their erstwhile history, had been ruthlessly exposed to the gradual crumbling of their national life through rapid ethnicization in the overall counter-insurgency designs.
In the course of the armed conflict between instruments of Indian state and non-state Meetei actors, we have witnessed a critical stage of armed strike by the valley insurgents in the late seventies and the resultant counter-insurgency operations by the Indian state with intensive intrusions into the domestic lives of the citizens.
The public sphere in Manipur was reeling in the processes of coping with violence, disappearances of sons and relations and raping of women by the military. Incidents of violations of dignity of women in the hills were rapidly responded to by civil society in the plains.
Though the Meetei population was rather slow in owning up the narratives of collective suffering in the hands of the "oppressive" Indian state, mutual respect and intensive relationships were forged which countered ethnic divide. During the eighties, the violent engagements of armed conflict were rather confined to major geographical locations in the villages of the plains where the Indian military had a distinctive advantage.
Even though the urban insurgency started by the PLA (People's Liberation Army) was one of the finest in Asia - second only to that of Saigon (presently Ho Chi Minh City), as observed by Yambem Laba - the spatial organization of military engagements was however effectively controlled by the superior military power of the Indian state.
It was only when the surrounding hills became an active site of military confrontation between the Meetei non-state actors and the Indian army in the nineties; urgent policy shifts became essential in counter-insurgency operations. Ethnicity became an ardent ploy as the best and effective means of using the hill populations against the Meetei non-state actors who had substantial control of major spaces in the hill terrain.
The art of mountain warfare cultivated by the Meetei nationalists could be countered by strategic, methodical approaches for military presence in the hills and unprecedented civic action programmes to "convert" the local populations. The Assam Rifles became a friend of the hill people in the post-nineties when the mother of all insurgencies, the NSCN (1M), agreed to sit on the negotiating table in 1997 and enter into political dialogue with the Centre.
The prolongation of armed resistance by the Meetei armed opposition groups could be countered by meticulous weaning of tribal groups and communities from the logic of ethnic unity. For, contemporary developmental interventions by systems of predation cultivated by politicians, bureaucrats, police and tribal elites lent itself to manipulation as an overall picture of discrimination and exploitation of the marginal hill regions.
The twenty-first century saw the emergence of India as a strong Asiatic power vis-a-vis China. And the Look-East Policy which was propelled by the logic of globalization would have induced a culture of de-territorialization in the civic processes of intense economic interaction.
But realistic statecraft emphasized the permanent "occupation" of the development frontier by the defence establishments in view of the fragile national security scenario. For, significant populations of Mongoloid racial categories were still un-assimilated into the pan-Indian nationhood and active presence of armed opposition groups in the difficult mountain terrain should have to be permanently neutralized.
This could only be achieved through meticulous cultivation of ethnic jealousies, prejudices and primordial passions through a system of calculated interventions by predatory capitalism and pitting of ethnic leaderships in the partaking of pleasure and profit from the relationship with the Indian state.
Those who have abjured the principle of armed violence could now be projected as genuine leaders of the people. And people like Zoramthanga, the Chief Minister of Mizoram, and Thuingaleng Muivah, the protagonist of Nagalim, are now icons of peace-loving people of the Northeast!
Zale'n-Gam or Kuki Homeland
The issue of the Kuki Zale'n-gam movement, however, draws less attention in the Indian media than that of Nagalim. Because of intrinsic migratory habits of the slash-and-burn cultivators of yore, these cognate Kuki-Chin communities straddled across various regional habitats in Myanmar, Manipur, North Cachar Hills (Assam), Mizoram, Tripura, Bangladesh, etc.
A stable resource base which would facilitate development of a modern political movement was therefore lacking amongst these tribes. The concept of Zale'n-gam or the Kuki nation also seem to have had certain anomalies regarding united political aspirations amongst the Kuki clans and other cognate tribes.
The Chin tribes in Myanmar envisaged freedom from the political domination of the Myanmarese, while their brethren in India sought a "Homeland" or Kuki state within the Indian Union. Though not much information is available about their political activities in the neighbouring Chin Hills of Myanmar, the national imageries of these people in India were developed from the intense experiences of sacrifices and defeat at the hands of the British imperial forces in the Anglo-Kuki war of 19l7-l9.
The sacrifices and exemplary activities of chieftains like Chenjapao Doungel, Lhukhomang Haokip, Tintong Haokip, Enjakhup Kholhou and Khotingthang Sitlhou in the above war provided inspiring memories for the development of narratives of the Kuki independence struggle.
In fact, tales of their experiences of migration and settlement amidst other communities, and confrontations with the British imperial forces since the middle of the nineteenth century, as well as the stories of their participation in the Indian National Army of Netaji Subhas Chan-dra Bose during the World War II offered vivid testimony to the freedom loving spirit of the Kuki people.
The confrontation with the Naga "national" movement and tragic experiences of the "ethnic-cleansing" in 1992-93 made the Kukis in Manipur dependent on the Indian political and military establishment for succour and help. This violent engagement within ethnic communities of Manipur led to progressive militarization of ethnic relations and development of ultra-militant ambitions amongst younger generations.
Overall, armed movements in the Northeast were also fuelled by the Indian state, which extended support of arms and money to mutually contentious groups for defence of the ethnic selves from violent aggressions from the ethnic "other." The recent rise and spread of the Kuki National Army, hitherto confined to Myanmar, in Manipur and other neighbouring regions was an outcome of militarization of ethnicity in the Northeast, where the Indian state played a vital role.
Kuki-Chin aspirations for identities, though varied and diverse due to clan and group loyalties, were however strident since the end of the World War II as the 1950s ushered in a completely changed environment for ethnic self-consciousness, assertion and mobilization, where propagation of Homeland with armed resources was an inevitable result.
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.
This aspect of prolonged resistance, the perpetuation of political conflict, the intense hit and run engagements in the valley, and stubborn confrontation with India's military might in the Indo-Myanmar borderlands had been suppressed in the contemporary discourse of political conflict. Nor do they seem to inform the structures and dynamic of the ethnic societies' painful ascent to modernity.
The overall militarisation of the Northeast as part of the objective of crushing Manipur's armed opposition groups since 2003-04 (subsequent to the Bhutan operation against ULFAinAssam) and increase of resistant violence by non-State actors, progressive increase in suffering of the civilian population, women and children had so far failed to rivet attention in the public sphere.
Yet the qualitative and quantitative enhancement of the Vairengte style counterinsurgency schools which had trained more than three and half lakh counterinsurgent forces over the last thirty years, establishment of such schools in Diphu in North Cachar Hills of Assam, Somsai in Ukhrul district and lwalamukhi in Senapati district, unheralded presence of military camps in schools, colleges in rural areas and foothills, occupation of churches or complexes of sacred deities, deployment of security forces at the ratio of 1:16 over the Manipur population etc. are indicators to the magnitude of the armed confrontations in the State.
Over the last three or four years, the military engagements of the Indian security forces with the Meetei non-State armed opposition groups had revealed a pattern of progressive linkages between armed conflict and politics of ethnicity. Since the end of 2003, the thrust to secure the Manipur hills to restore civil administration and exercise area domination over the western ranges of the Manipur state, there were slow, periodic, inch-by-inch, yard-by yard occupation of strategic mountain villages, flushing out of Meetei insurgent outfits who had earlier entrenched themselves in the rugged mountain terrains, mingling with the "neglected" and "marginalised" hill people.
Earlier stories of mutual support between the ethnic populations of the hills and the valley, stories of help in arms and equipment, and training of ethnic brothers by valley insurgents, stories of development interventions by militant cadres in areas where state presence were negligible - all these were suddenly transformed into chapters of spite and hate campaigns over the valley people by the hill civil society organisations.
The turmoil in the lives of ethnic populations caused by these unfortunate incidents of armed conflict between the instruments of state and non-State actors were suddenly catapulted into chaotic disequilibrium and massive uprooting of life's rhythm.
Stories of displacement, collective exodus into neighbouring hill townships and villages, incidents of physical harm and de-capacitation in landmine explosion, charges of rape and criminal assaults over the bodies of tribal women - all these concomitant agonies were brought into the public sphere in a confusing amalgam of doubt, distrust and heightening ethnic differences over perceptions on truth and reality.
The earlier balance between ethnic brotherhood were substantially damaged as a result of the military engagement of the Indian security forces with the Manipur nationalists in the rugged hill terrains of Manipur.
For the Indian State, the operations against the Manipur militants in Operation All Clear (2004), Operation Tornado (2005), Operation Dragnet (2006), etc. were meant to clear the western ranges of the Manipur Hills for restoration of civil administration as well as the destruction of "Meetei hegemony over the hill people." The highland ethnic psyche was thus aroused to see the lowlander valley people as oppressive others.
The valley Meetei as indigenous community therefore stands at a critical thresh-hold of the state's modern history. Though there are quotidinian complexes of grass root relationship, and natural historical equilibrium amidst these ethnic societies, the heavy politicisation of ethnicity and ethnic differences signal unease, anxiety and instabilities which portend ruptures, fissures and unimagined arousals over its contemporary status as a distinct civilisational entity inherited from the past.
The uncertain future of ethnic negotiations, which modem India continues to play with, pervades the premodern imaginations of the indigenes of the State. The developmental interventions of sheer global economic processes, ruthless violence over the natural geographies - on roads, rivers, waters, forests, etc - portend a system of life where territoriality and exclusivity of ownership of the earth's surface through ethnic rights may even be forced to wither away.
The NorthEast is now inevitably drawn into a vortex of intense geo-economic and geo-strategic compulsions of the Indian state which ethnic indigenes should either challenge with newer insights of trans-ethnic NorthEastern nationalism or consociational imagination of the native peoples capable of over-riding the marginalizing tendencies of "racial others" ofIndia'sAsian ambitions.
The placid, pre-modem, tribalistic self-centredness which had withstood the forces of change shall not stand the test of times.
• Lokendra Arambam (Courtesy: Eastern Quarterly) wrote this article for The Sangai Express. He is a historian, critic, theatre director and social activist. A former Visiting Professorial Fellow at the School of Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. He is currently Visiting Faculty at the Department of History, Manipur University (MU), Imphal. He served as Director, Audio-Visual Research Centre, MU.
Source: http://www.e-pao.net
Northeast India in the past hundred years has seen major shifts in its ethnic landscape and polity. Post-independent India in the region has moved from ethnic harmony and organic geo-political body to fractured polity and antagonistic ethnic identity claims largely created by the Indian State's struggle to retain its territorial integrity.
The challenge before the ethnogenes is to device ways of responding to both the militaristic framework as well as the newly devised "development" mantra of the Indian State.
INTRODUCTION
In the month of June this year, at Moreh, about 120 miles to the Southeast of Imphal at the international border adjoining Myanmar, marked yet another rupture in the chequered history of pluralism in Manipur. For the first time, two ethnic communities - the Meetei and Kuki - who shared an age-old history of friendship and amity were locked in armed violence.
Eleven people were killed during those events. Moreh, incidentally, became a centre of human activity since international trade and commerce had been formally opened between the Govt of India (GoI) and Myanmar in 1994-95. This small hill township has a diverse population including Tamils, Malayalees along with Manipur's ethnic indigenes, notably Nagas, Kukis and Meeteis.
There had been political movement based on ethno-national ideologies. For example, the Nagas claimed the district of Tengnoupal, wherein Moreh was a major economic and political centre, as the ancestral domain of the Nagas.
On the other side of the ideological spectrum, the Kuki ethnic communities, ranging from various clans of the indigenous variety to kith and kin from across the border in Myanmar, had been actively pursuing the political goal of Zalen-gam, the abode of the Kukis which includes Moreh. A significant number of Meetei settled in Moreh completes the overall ethnic balance of this border town.
The incident at Moreh which nearly sparked off a communal bloodbath between the Meetei and Kuki communities has been assuaged temporarily through the combined efforts of various civil societies and the Government. But the enmity between two militant outfits, the UNLF (United National Liberation Front) and the KNA/KNO (Kuki National Army/Kuki National Organization), which lies at the root of the incident continues to simmer in the backdrop.
The press releases of the two militant outfits remind us of conflictual perceptions on issues of land and territory. The KNO believes that the unfortunate events of June 9, 2007 at Moreh, in which 11 people died, were a direct consequence of UNLF's "intrusive presence in Kuki territory," and urged "the UNLF to confine their revolutionary activities, ideologically and physically, to the valley called Manipur, which had been their abode from time immemorial."
The UNLF, on the other hand, charged the KNA of targeting the Meetei people indiscriminately with the sole agenda of whipping up communal tension in Moreh. The UNLF also reiterated that it has nothing against the Kukis but it will deal with the KNA/KNO firmly for allowing itself to be used as a weapon by the Indian Army against the liberation struggle and against the UNLF.
Incidentally, the Naga civil society groups who support the implicit claims of Naga ancestral domain which includes Moreh proffered friendship to the Kuki community. Incidentally, the Nagas and Kukis were involved in a noholds-barred mutual ethnic cleansing campaign in 1992-93, which began from the struggle to control Moreh and its economic under-belly.
NAGA LEBENSRAUM AND THE MEETEI
Since the late 1960s, the Naga ethno-national movement had been propagating integration of contiguous portions of Manipur, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh into Greater Nagalim. They also had been insinuating that the Meetei independence struggle against the Indian Union is that of and for the valley (consisting of some 700 square miles) alone.
The KNA/KNO also claims that the Meetei independence struggle is of the Meeteis alone for the valley. The Meetei non-State actors in the valley, however, have a spatial imagination of their independence encompassing the organic topography of the hills and the valley along with ethnic populations as in pre-colonial times which gave formal shape and features to the polity of Manipur.
Ethnic insurgencies in the Northeast in the course of their prolonged struggle against the powerful Indian State seem to be losing their original character of ethnic unity and harmony. Ethnicity, as an element of group affiliation and "subjective, symbolic and emblematic use of their own cultures in order to differentiate themselves from other groups," had been accentuated during the course of the struggle.
Amongst the major ethnic communities of Meetei, Naga and Kuki, only the Meetei remain as armed contestants to the Indian State, when the other communities of Naga and Kuki are in varying levels of ceasefire and political understanding with Government of India.
It is hard to say whether the heightening tensions and sharper accentuation of social boundaries between/among these communities are caused by the internal dynamic of struggle for power and resources in conflictual growth processes, or these relationships are being manipulated by exogenous factors like the counter-insurgent forces, or that these symptoms are the surface manifestation of internal intrigue and behindthe-scene maneuvers of elite stakeholders in the identity project. At the present moment, the attitude of the highlander civil societies sympathetic to their respective armed groups no longer reflects the pluralities of the pre-colonial order.
The issue of distance mentalities amidst civil society groups and hardening perceptions of the divide between the "we-self' and the "other" are portents of latent social conflict. The formulation of separate entities and the spatial dichotomisation of the imaginative geographies between the hills and plains in terms of ethnicity and ethnicisation of social relations and networks are deeper issues afflicting the plural order in the era of insurgency.
The politics of insurgency and counter-insurgency, and variegated responses by the awakened ethnicities in the changing dynamics of life, and the development of selfconsciousness and subjectivity in ethnic formations in the emerging discourse on land and territoriality are matters of deep import.
How does the issue of land and territoriality then inflect the changing dimensions of ethnic strife?
Or are these proclamations and media handouts reflections of the self-appropriation of peoples voice in the subaltern margins of visibility by strident political elites in the stream of insurgent history?
What is the reality behind insurgency and counter-insurgency which form conflicting discourses?
A brief history of contemporary insurgency would throw light on the patterns of political and social violence afflicting ethnic relations in the state. We are all aware that the assertion of Naga nationhood has "legitimate" claims to territorialisation of substantial portions of Northeast India's geography through claims of land-people relationship and concepts of the ancestral domain.
Territoriality is not a simple occupation of a sizable piece of the earth's surface. Territoriality, according to Robert D Sack, "is the attempt by an individual or group to affect, influence or control people, phenomena and relationships, by delimiting and asserting control over geographic area.... It is not an instinct or drive, but rather a complex strategy... and the device through which people construct and maintain spatial organisation."
The Nagalim concept also features ardent pursuance of a geographic boundary which is linear where vertical interfaces between "state sovereignty" intersect the surface of the earth. As vertical interfaces, boundaries have no horizontal extent.
This modem concept of territorialisation therefore is being processed as against the non-boundedness of the human geography of precolonial times. The old order is sought to be transformed since Mr. Th. Muivah, who happened to be a Tangkhul Naga from Manipur, is regarded as the main protagonist of the political project of Nagalim.
In the words of Winnichakul, territoriality involves three basic human behaviours - a form of classification by area, a form of communication by boundary and an attempt at "enforcing." The third factor was what forced the use of aggressive spate of hate Meetei campaigns and various democratic agitations, economic blockades and all other forms to effect enforcement.
The event of June 18, 2001 where eighteen valley people lost their lives was a result of such profound measures to officialise the enforcement. As the NSCN (1M) stated over and over again that it does not believe in Manipur's integrity, that the present Manipur State is a temporary phenomenon, and that the NSCN (1M) is "not greedy about land and will never take even an inch of Meetei's territory, nor will it part with what is theirs."
On the other hand, the Meetei national movement that surfaced in the valley of Manipur professed relations of respect and mutual support to the Naga insurgency in the late seventies and early eighties. When the NNC was in deep throes of mutual recrimination and violence as a result of the Shillong Accord, the Meetei insurgent outfits were giving shelter and sustenance to many underground Naga cadres in Meetei homes in suburban Imphal.
It was learnt that in the tumultuous periods of division and split amongst the NSCN cadres in 1988, Meetei insurgent leaders were at pains to effect compromise amongst the Naga leaders. The chapter of ethnic unity and collective efforts against the Indian state earlier is now dead and gone.
Ethnicity and ethnic bias in the wielding of power and influence in the so-called democratic institutions like the legislature seem to have a diluted presence, though ethnicity was the main plank for political mobilization by the hill tribes.
The Meeteis in the plains, who had experienced deep traditions of polity governance and maintenance of community equilibrium in their erstwhile history, had been ruthlessly exposed to the gradual crumbling of their national life through rapid ethnicization in the overall counter-insurgency designs.
In the course of the armed conflict between instruments of Indian state and non-state Meetei actors, we have witnessed a critical stage of armed strike by the valley insurgents in the late seventies and the resultant counter-insurgency operations by the Indian state with intensive intrusions into the domestic lives of the citizens.
The public sphere in Manipur was reeling in the processes of coping with violence, disappearances of sons and relations and raping of women by the military. Incidents of violations of dignity of women in the hills were rapidly responded to by civil society in the plains.
Though the Meetei population was rather slow in owning up the narratives of collective suffering in the hands of the "oppressive" Indian state, mutual respect and intensive relationships were forged which countered ethnic divide. During the eighties, the violent engagements of armed conflict were rather confined to major geographical locations in the villages of the plains where the Indian military had a distinctive advantage.
Even though the urban insurgency started by the PLA (People's Liberation Army) was one of the finest in Asia - second only to that of Saigon (presently Ho Chi Minh City), as observed by Yambem Laba - the spatial organization of military engagements was however effectively controlled by the superior military power of the Indian state.
It was only when the surrounding hills became an active site of military confrontation between the Meetei non-state actors and the Indian army in the nineties; urgent policy shifts became essential in counter-insurgency operations. Ethnicity became an ardent ploy as the best and effective means of using the hill populations against the Meetei non-state actors who had substantial control of major spaces in the hill terrain.
The art of mountain warfare cultivated by the Meetei nationalists could be countered by strategic, methodical approaches for military presence in the hills and unprecedented civic action programmes to "convert" the local populations. The Assam Rifles became a friend of the hill people in the post-nineties when the mother of all insurgencies, the NSCN (1M), agreed to sit on the negotiating table in 1997 and enter into political dialogue with the Centre.
The prolongation of armed resistance by the Meetei armed opposition groups could be countered by meticulous weaning of tribal groups and communities from the logic of ethnic unity. For, contemporary developmental interventions by systems of predation cultivated by politicians, bureaucrats, police and tribal elites lent itself to manipulation as an overall picture of discrimination and exploitation of the marginal hill regions.
The twenty-first century saw the emergence of India as a strong Asiatic power vis-a-vis China. And the Look-East Policy which was propelled by the logic of globalization would have induced a culture of de-territorialization in the civic processes of intense economic interaction.
But realistic statecraft emphasized the permanent "occupation" of the development frontier by the defence establishments in view of the fragile national security scenario. For, significant populations of Mongoloid racial categories were still un-assimilated into the pan-Indian nationhood and active presence of armed opposition groups in the difficult mountain terrain should have to be permanently neutralized.
This could only be achieved through meticulous cultivation of ethnic jealousies, prejudices and primordial passions through a system of calculated interventions by predatory capitalism and pitting of ethnic leaderships in the partaking of pleasure and profit from the relationship with the Indian state.
Those who have abjured the principle of armed violence could now be projected as genuine leaders of the people. And people like Zoramthanga, the Chief Minister of Mizoram, and Thuingaleng Muivah, the protagonist of Nagalim, are now icons of peace-loving people of the Northeast!
Zale'n-Gam or Kuki Homeland
The issue of the Kuki Zale'n-gam movement, however, draws less attention in the Indian media than that of Nagalim. Because of intrinsic migratory habits of the slash-and-burn cultivators of yore, these cognate Kuki-Chin communities straddled across various regional habitats in Myanmar, Manipur, North Cachar Hills (Assam), Mizoram, Tripura, Bangladesh, etc.
A stable resource base which would facilitate development of a modern political movement was therefore lacking amongst these tribes. The concept of Zale'n-gam or the Kuki nation also seem to have had certain anomalies regarding united political aspirations amongst the Kuki clans and other cognate tribes.
The Chin tribes in Myanmar envisaged freedom from the political domination of the Myanmarese, while their brethren in India sought a "Homeland" or Kuki state within the Indian Union. Though not much information is available about their political activities in the neighbouring Chin Hills of Myanmar, the national imageries of these people in India were developed from the intense experiences of sacrifices and defeat at the hands of the British imperial forces in the Anglo-Kuki war of 19l7-l9.
The sacrifices and exemplary activities of chieftains like Chenjapao Doungel, Lhukhomang Haokip, Tintong Haokip, Enjakhup Kholhou and Khotingthang Sitlhou in the above war provided inspiring memories for the development of narratives of the Kuki independence struggle.
In fact, tales of their experiences of migration and settlement amidst other communities, and confrontations with the British imperial forces since the middle of the nineteenth century, as well as the stories of their participation in the Indian National Army of Netaji Subhas Chan-dra Bose during the World War II offered vivid testimony to the freedom loving spirit of the Kuki people.
The confrontation with the Naga "national" movement and tragic experiences of the "ethnic-cleansing" in 1992-93 made the Kukis in Manipur dependent on the Indian political and military establishment for succour and help. This violent engagement within ethnic communities of Manipur led to progressive militarization of ethnic relations and development of ultra-militant ambitions amongst younger generations.
Overall, armed movements in the Northeast were also fuelled by the Indian state, which extended support of arms and money to mutually contentious groups for defence of the ethnic selves from violent aggressions from the ethnic "other." The recent rise and spread of the Kuki National Army, hitherto confined to Myanmar, in Manipur and other neighbouring regions was an outcome of militarization of ethnicity in the Northeast, where the Indian state played a vital role.
Kuki-Chin aspirations for identities, though varied and diverse due to clan and group loyalties, were however strident since the end of the World War II as the 1950s ushered in a completely changed environment for ethnic self-consciousness, assertion and mobilization, where propagation of Homeland with armed resources was an inevitable result.
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.
This aspect of prolonged resistance, the perpetuation of political conflict, the intense hit and run engagements in the valley, and stubborn confrontation with India's military might in the Indo-Myanmar borderlands had been suppressed in the contemporary discourse of political conflict. Nor do they seem to inform the structures and dynamic of the ethnic societies' painful ascent to modernity.
The overall militarisation of the Northeast as part of the objective of crushing Manipur's armed opposition groups since 2003-04 (subsequent to the Bhutan operation against ULFAinAssam) and increase of resistant violence by non-State actors, progressive increase in suffering of the civilian population, women and children had so far failed to rivet attention in the public sphere.
Yet the qualitative and quantitative enhancement of the Vairengte style counterinsurgency schools which had trained more than three and half lakh counterinsurgent forces over the last thirty years, establishment of such schools in Diphu in North Cachar Hills of Assam, Somsai in Ukhrul district and lwalamukhi in Senapati district, unheralded presence of military camps in schools, colleges in rural areas and foothills, occupation of churches or complexes of sacred deities, deployment of security forces at the ratio of 1:16 over the Manipur population etc. are indicators to the magnitude of the armed confrontations in the State.
Over the last three or four years, the military engagements of the Indian security forces with the Meetei non-State armed opposition groups had revealed a pattern of progressive linkages between armed conflict and politics of ethnicity. Since the end of 2003, the thrust to secure the Manipur hills to restore civil administration and exercise area domination over the western ranges of the Manipur state, there were slow, periodic, inch-by-inch, yard-by yard occupation of strategic mountain villages, flushing out of Meetei insurgent outfits who had earlier entrenched themselves in the rugged mountain terrains, mingling with the "neglected" and "marginalised" hill people.
Earlier stories of mutual support between the ethnic populations of the hills and the valley, stories of help in arms and equipment, and training of ethnic brothers by valley insurgents, stories of development interventions by militant cadres in areas where state presence were negligible - all these were suddenly transformed into chapters of spite and hate campaigns over the valley people by the hill civil society organisations.
The turmoil in the lives of ethnic populations caused by these unfortunate incidents of armed conflict between the instruments of state and non-State actors were suddenly catapulted into chaotic disequilibrium and massive uprooting of life's rhythm.
Stories of displacement, collective exodus into neighbouring hill townships and villages, incidents of physical harm and de-capacitation in landmine explosion, charges of rape and criminal assaults over the bodies of tribal women - all these concomitant agonies were brought into the public sphere in a confusing amalgam of doubt, distrust and heightening ethnic differences over perceptions on truth and reality.
The earlier balance between ethnic brotherhood were substantially damaged as a result of the military engagement of the Indian security forces with the Manipur nationalists in the rugged hill terrains of Manipur.
For the Indian State, the operations against the Manipur militants in Operation All Clear (2004), Operation Tornado (2005), Operation Dragnet (2006), etc. were meant to clear the western ranges of the Manipur Hills for restoration of civil administration as well as the destruction of "Meetei hegemony over the hill people." The highland ethnic psyche was thus aroused to see the lowlander valley people as oppressive others.
The valley Meetei as indigenous community therefore stands at a critical thresh-hold of the state's modern history. Though there are quotidinian complexes of grass root relationship, and natural historical equilibrium amidst these ethnic societies, the heavy politicisation of ethnicity and ethnic differences signal unease, anxiety and instabilities which portend ruptures, fissures and unimagined arousals over its contemporary status as a distinct civilisational entity inherited from the past.
The uncertain future of ethnic negotiations, which modem India continues to play with, pervades the premodern imaginations of the indigenes of the State. The developmental interventions of sheer global economic processes, ruthless violence over the natural geographies - on roads, rivers, waters, forests, etc - portend a system of life where territoriality and exclusivity of ownership of the earth's surface through ethnic rights may even be forced to wither away.
The NorthEast is now inevitably drawn into a vortex of intense geo-economic and geo-strategic compulsions of the Indian state which ethnic indigenes should either challenge with newer insights of trans-ethnic NorthEastern nationalism or consociational imagination of the native peoples capable of over-riding the marginalizing tendencies of "racial others" ofIndia'sAsian ambitions.
The placid, pre-modem, tribalistic self-centredness which had withstood the forces of change shall not stand the test of times.
• Lokendra Arambam (Courtesy: Eastern Quarterly) wrote this article for The Sangai Express. He is a historian, critic, theatre director and social activist. A former Visiting Professorial Fellow at the School of Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. He is currently Visiting Faculty at the Department of History, Manipur University (MU), Imphal. He served as Director, Audio-Visual Research Centre, MU.
Source: http://www.e-pao.net
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