Perhaps May 3 2023 would be remembered as the day that reshaped the political imagination of Manipur. The events of that fateful day made us question about the state’s territory and population, and our relationship as one imagined political community. I vividly remember three things that happened of that day. In the morning, my friend under the rush to join the tribal solidarity march in Churachandpur updated her WhatsApp status as ‘solitary march.’
When I got home in the evening, I saw a video wherein a man was screaming bloody murder that his community was attacked. The horrific scene invoked the horror within humans and unleashed the bestiality and the savagery that civilization has thinly veiled. Hours later, I called my uncle in Imphal unbeknownst to the scale in which the violence had spread. In a grave tone he we might be under attack.
The mobs on either side burned the night into an inferno and although we were not harmed the ghost of this ethnic violence gives us anxiety as the apparition continues.
The anxiety to be a Naga in Manipur stems first from the denial of our humaneness and the chauvinism of a certain community. After the violence broke out, a community involved in the conflict informed the Nagas to not assist and reach out the other community who was fleeing.
We were told stay indoors and not step out of the colony after dark. Although we were not warned, the implication is clear, any act or conduct that goes against the interest of the warning community would be construed as an act against them, thus instilling a feeling of fear, worry and uneasiness within us.
In the opening vignette of this article, I referred to the solidarity march where all the tribal communities of Manipur demonstrated against the scheduling of the dominant community in the Scheduled Tribes list of India.
This solidarity developed cracks in the days that followed owing to the selective nature of the violence. Often friends from the aggrieved tribe questioned why their community was only targeted when all the tribes protested together as one.
The rationale behind the question is not wrong or imagined but such questioning also roused within the bewildered Nagas the imposter anxiety, the apprehension of being considered a fraud, phony or even co-conspirator.
It is true that the Nagas might have been passively involved by being mute spectators but the fault lies not within us. The answer to the question lies in historical revisionism and how the history of Manipur is envisioned and narrated in the recent years.
Apart from the behavioral and cognitive changes that triggered social anxieties, there were also corporeal and material instances that set the adrenaline rushing. One of the first instances was when a group of Tanghkul Naga women were assaulted on their way to Imphal Airport. The latest instance was when a Liangmai Naga house was vandalized and torched. The intent of such acts whether to provoke violence or a random act of senseless violence is for the public jury to decide.
But such instances make the Naga fearful that the violence has spread beyond the two communities, thus suspend them in the space between disorder and insecurity. The social and physical anxieties are coupled with economic existential crisis.
Here, the case of Gaikulung, an indigenous Rongmei Naga from Churachandpur, is particularly revealing. Gaikulung said, “Before the Meitei-Kuki conflict, my daily routine as an auto driver was to drop vegetables at five in the morning from the hills to the nearest local market in the foothills. After that I would return home, eat my food, and then drop school students. During the school hours, I provide auto service to the general public. And when the school is over, I would drop the students to their homes. That was very much my daily routine before the conflict. Then I made some money and had a life. But now I am just surviving. Markets and schools are closed, and people in the foothills are climbing up the hills in search for vegetables. We cannot stop them, they are our own people. With all the economic and work activities put on hold because of the conflict, they have a lot of time but no means to live on. So they climb up to the hills to search for leaves and roots that the forests provide to eat. Such is life, and living in such times is hard, difficult and painful.”
The degree of loss is not the same compared to the two conflicting communities, but the take away from here is that all the communities suffered losses to life, property and livelihood.
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In the heat and dust of this conflict, the narrative of anti-state is pitched in the political discourse. The distress signal code ‘SOS’ is recoded as ‘Separation Only Solution’ by the Kuki and Zo groups. Such a demand for either a separate state or separate administration within in the state is perceived as anti-state by the Meitei community because it is designed to disintegrate the historical state of Manipur.
The demand for separate administration is legitimate in a democracy regardless of the population and geographical divide. But the idea of separation has been always catastrophic as evident in the events that followed the cease fire agreement between the Bharat Janata Party led Central Government and the Nationalist Socialist Council of Nagaland (IM) in 2001. The discourse of separation could stoke up the old acrimonious relationship that had taken years to subside. Giving an audience to a community would mean bypassing the aspirations of other communities.
We are anxious that such a discourse could play off the three communities against each other. Thus the idea of separation should be deliberated henceforth keeping this possible backlash.
In the last eight years, we have witnessed three historical events: demonetization, pandemic and civil war. These events filled us with all kinds of anxiety. And these kinds of event are what we read about in schools and colleges as parts of history lessons. What made humankind navigate through the instability and uncertainty like our times was the good ethics of self-examination and disciplining. Perhaps we need this lesson from history again to find the middle path. May be it is time we realize that we don’t want a Manipur where a community constitute the majority in the state assembly or where certain communities have access to the major geographical land. Such an idea of a state wherein politics are driven to accommodate only one community is narrow and shallow.
We need to break away this narrowness and shallowness, and seek land reform and delimitation because the root causes of the present conflict lie in land and underrepresentation that enabled one community to assert dominance and the other community to counter-act. Anxiety is not a positive emotion but it alerts us and prepares us to deal with dangers and threats that lie ahead.
Views expressed are personal. Dr. Boniface Gaiguilung Kamei teaches English literature at Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University University.
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The tortoise is slowly crawling ahead……..