On 20 January 2024, Meitei MLAs in Manipur were made to answer the ‘summons’ of the Arambai Tenggol in Kangla Fort.
To the outside observer, it probably comes as a shock that the group that has been the prime accused for inciting and leading mob violence against the hapless Kuki-Zomi masses in Imphal continues to roam free in the state capital.
What may be even more disheartening is the Meitei MLAs' answer to their summons in Kangla, a symbol of Meitei cultural heritage. The Manipur Legislative Assembly session that followed the next month reflects the diktats of the Arambai Tenggol, breaking down any remaining facade of state neutrality.
On the other hand, such a development seems hardly shocking for the residents of the state, be they Meitei, Naga, or the afflicted Kuki-Zomi people who have voiced their cries against the complicity of the state. Sequentially increased acts of alienation by the state have come to shape the experience of the Kuki-Zomi tribes over the past decade.
This has ranged from the selective use of rubber bullets against protestors in the valley vis-a-vis live bullets against protestors in the hills during the three bills protests in 2015, the construction of highly controversial and culturally Meitei monuments in largely Kuki (Koubru) and Zomi (Chivu-Chandrakirti) inhabited areas (lacking a sensitive approach), increasing frequency of blatantly racist rhetoric by leading state figures like Chief Minister Biren Singh or the titular Meitei King and inner MP Sanajaoba ( especially in their social media accounts), and the untoward arrests and incarceration of activists.
Since 2021, the state’s hyping of narratives like ‘illegal immigration’, and ‘forest encroachment’, and its bulldozing of institutional processes created a pre-conflict situation of alienation and pent-up sentiments.
The Arambai Tenggol had grown under the patronage of the CM and the titular king since before the conflict. Its ascendance to power negates the possibilities of any sizable dissent from within the Meitei community.
Images, videos and survivor testimonials that have emerged since the start of the conflict point towards their proactive instigations and mobilisation, as well as the complicity of major branches of the state. This includes the incidents when mobs bludgeoned innocent people to death, cases of custodial deaths, the wearing of police and commando uniforms by members of Arambai Tenggol and the Meitei Leepun, the free ‘looting’ (handing over’?) of thousands of guns and bullets to them, and the latest one being the CM’s reference to the Kuki-Zomis as ‘monkeys’ that need to be ‘chased away’.
Appropriation of the State’s ‘Legitimising’ Authority
The ‘Kangla’ oath-taking epitomises the discarding of constitutional duties of those within the Legislative Assembly. The allegedly ‘unanimous’ resolution to abrogate the Suspension of Operation (SOO) with the KNO-UPF (the Kuki National Organisation and the United People's Front) reflects this totalised communal appropriation of the state. On the other hand, the 10 Kuki-Zomi-Hmar MLAs have pointed out the resolution as being devoid of actual base as per reports given by the Joint Monitoring Group, and thus being based entirely on an “overwhelming sense of animosity and hatred”.
This renewed and ‘legitimised’ appropriation of state legislation has been made explicit in the passing and rationalisation of the “Manipur Name of Places Bill, 2024” and the resolution to ‘enforce’ the “Manipur Hill Areas (Acquisition of Chiefs’ Rights) Act, 1967” in the subsequent days.
Taking an instance of when the Chief Minister moved the first bill, he based the rationale of the Name of Places bill on the need to “protect and preserve the sacred land and resources left by the forefathers of the land.” While the protection of land is an anti-colonial sentiment shared by all residents of the state, the CM’s statement on the name of particular districts like ‘Churachandpur’ after Churachand Maharaj to ‘save Manipur’s integrity’ by launching the Lushai Expedition is factually and historically wrong.
This is alarmingly telling of the attempt to negate any indigenous history of the Kukis and Zomis that goes against the populist narrative of the current political incumbency. This follows a precedent of the whitewashing of history set by earlier radical Meitei groups like the MEELAL (Meetei Erol Eyek Loinasillon Apunba Lup) when the Manipur state library was burnt in April 2005. This time, however, the radical groups have appropriated state ‘legitimacy’, making the situation much more dire.
Notwithstanding the fact that Churachand wasn’t born during the Lushai Expedition of 1871, the CM mulls over the fact that tribal areas within the current Churachandpur district had remained outside of Manipur’s administration through the 1870s and 80s, as is visible from Sir James Johnstone’s map (political agent of Manipur, 1877-1886). These districts had been consolidated under the Manipur administration after the end of the Zogal (also known as the Anglo-Kuki War) in 1919, with the establishment of an administrative office in Songpi (about 6 km from the present Lamka, i.e., Churachandpur town).
The name Churachandpur was assigned to Songpi in 1921 when labour corp recruits returned from France, by B C Gasper, the then Sub-divisional Officer, in flattery to the then king Churachand who was placed on the throne as a five-year-old boy in 1891 by the British. In the 1940s, this administrative office post was moved to Lamka, but it retained the name Churachandpur.
The post-independence period has seen several protests held by the indigenous tribes to rechristen the district to its original name, especially due to the persistent connotation of colonialism it signifies, in contrast to the tribal resistance to labour corp recruitment at the time.
In a similar vein, the resolution to ‘enforce’ the Acquisition of Chief’s Rights Act was based on the argument that the chief’s rights had been removed in nearby states like Mizoram. This again mulls over the fact that the removal of chieftainship in these states had been based on movements within the indigenous chieftainship practising Mizo people, not imposed from external power holders.
As in the Mizo case, the removal of chieftainship in Mizoram went alongside the constitutional protection of the Sixth Schedule which assured self-governance and a mechanism for social self-reformation while preserving tribal culture and identity. All demands made by the tribal people in Manipur up until the present for the Sixth Schedule have been rejected, while the Hill Areas Committee (HAC) remains effectively toothless in making autonomous decisions for the hill areas. The passing of the Chiefs Rights Acquisition Act in 1967 in itself had happened despite the objections of the Hill Areas Committee in the first place.
Flawed Impulses and Rationales Causing Constitutional Decay
The successful ‘appropriation’ of the state by utilising groups like the Arambai Tenggol, has enabled proponents of Meitei supremacism to ‘legitimise’ a selective history of Manipur, in a stance that terms itself ‘post-colonial’. But this rules out the fact that the current state of Manipur in itself is a colonial creation. For example, the seven-year occupation of Manipur by the Burmese ended in 1826 with the British help in raising the Manipur Levies. So, are we then to consider even the very rebirth of Manipur as a kingdom, then as a princely state, and then as a state in the Indian Union, as a colonial creation since it had already been conquered by the Burmese, and would have faded into memory, had it not been for the British?
The prevailing ‘interpretation’ and justifications that underlie the Assembly’s resolutions mull over the complex and multifaceted history of colonial interactions and power dynamics that shaped the state. Beneath such resolutions lie impulses and rationales emerging from an imperial nostalgia that seeks to appropriate the crafted territory that is now Manipur, as covering an imagined, glorified past kingdom of Kangleipak.
These translate themselves into acts that continually erode the constitutional protections for tribal communities. A continuation down this path is only bound to escalate the conflict situation and diverge from the already slim possibilities of peaceable reconciliation in the state.
(Sangmuan Hangsing is a Public Policy student at the Kautilya School of Public Policy (https://muckrack.com/sangmuanhangsing). Tawna Valte is currently a PhD Scholar at the University of Hyderabad. He can be contacted at valtetawna@gmail.com. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)
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