The politics and profits behind Manipur’s Kuki-Naga violence

The hills of Manipur are burning again, but the script has flipped into an even darker, more tragic shadow conflict. While outside observers are still looking at the state through the lens of the older Meitei-Kuki clashes, the gravity of the crisis has shifted to the high altitudes.

The secondary, tragic front that opened up earlier this year is now violently boiling over, pitting the Kuki-Zo against the Naga tribes.

In over 24 hours on Friday and Saturday, October 9 and 10, at least nine people, including a Kuki woman, were killed, and at least fourteen homes were reduced to ashes across Kamjong, Ukhrul, and Kangpokpi districts. The sudden spike in violence forced authorities to impose restrictions on parts of Kamjong. 

This is the second major incident since the United Naga Council (UNC) agreed on 26 September to temporarily lift its more than three-month economic blockade of Manipur’s highways after a high-level tripartite meeting with the Centre and the Manipur government in Assam.

On October 4, an elderly Kuki man, Hemjang Haokip, was found dead after being abducted at gunpoint a day before in Manipur’s Kangpokpi district.

Outsiders will look at this and shrug it off as another inevitable explosion of “ancient tribal blood feuds.” But that explanation is lazy, and frankly, it is a lie that protects the people actually pulling the strings.

Take what happened to Domkhonei Touthang, a forty-two-year-old Kuki woman shot dead during a stand-off over village guard posts in Kamjong district on Friday night. Her tragic death did not result in a pause for justice.

Instead, it was instantly hijacked. Within hours, heavy gunfire broke out, localised armed factions mobilised, and miles away in Ukhrul, an innocent Gorkha farmer named Sandeep Rai was shot dead while simply driving down the Mahadev-Talui road.

Rai, who was reportedly heading to his leased farmland in the Chepu Yaolen area, had absolutely no stake in this ethnic territorial war. Yet, his death reveals the grim reality of the hills today: civilian neutrality no longer exists.

The Colonial Map and Manufactured Panic

To understand why bystanders or innocent civilians keep dying in these endless cycles of revenge, we have to look past culture and identity. The violence in Manipur isn’t an accidental byproduct of different tribes living together; it is a calculated, resource-driven game run by political elites, insurgent bosses, and those who profit from conflict.

Ethnic identity isn’t the root cause here; it is just the currency these leaders use to buy power, territory, and legal immunity, while ordinary people are used as disposable foot soldiers.

To look at the hills today is to see a landscape heavily shaped by colonial-era engineering. Both the Kuki-Zo and the Naga tribes have deep, long-standing roots in these hills, but the modern disputes over land are largely a legacy of how the British administration managed the region.

Colonial policies often created administrative boundaries and encouraged shifts in settlement patterns that placed the two communities in close proximity within the same districts. By drawing lines through areas where both groups had historical claims, the colonial system left behind a messy map of overlapping boundaries.

Today, the people in power know exactly how to use these old wounds to their advantage. To keep their grip on power, leaders on both sides keep their communities trapped in a constant state of fear. They systematically convince their communities that the neighbouring tribe is actively plotting their total erasure. 

This clinical manipulation is precisely what Paul Brass termed Instrumentalism. Brass argued that ethnic wars do not just explode because neighbours suddenly start hating each other out of the blue. It is an inside job.

The leadership at the top intentionally digs up old cultural symbols and uses them as weapons to chase their own goals. Identity is not the spark; it is just the tool. The bosses manufacture panic because terrified people are incredibly easy to control.

Once people are terrified enough, they turn to these exact same elites- the politicians and wealthy businessmen watching safely from secure urban enclaves and view them as their only protectors.

It is a cynical loop where the politicians trigger the fire, play the hero who puts it out, and lock down their grip on power while watching the chaos unfold from the safety of their own homes.

The Economy of Conflict

But this control is not just about political power; it is about protecting a highly profitable business model.

The young men in the trenches are told they are defending their ancestral soil and the survival of their people, but the hidden prize is money. The border districts next to Myanmar are incredibly lucrative corridors for both legal and smuggling routes. Insurgent factions and local warlords make massive revenue by “taxing” these highways.

For them, true peace would ruin their bottom line. By fuelling local skirmishes, these leaders can justify economic blockades on critical lifelines like National Highway-2, National Highway 37 and National Highway-202.

However, these blockades don’t hurt the elites; they cut off regular families from basic medicines and food. The armed groups can leverage this chaos as a perfect excuse to set up new checkpoints, choke rival trade, and lock down a monopoly on transit fees. 

The Tragedy of the Front Lines

The institutionalisation of “Village Volunteer Forces” also represents a deeper, more structural tragedy. While desperate, unemployed youth take up arms out of a genuine, deeply felt desire to protect their families and ancestral soil, they are the ones left to bear the physical and legal brunt of the front lines.

The wealthy strategists and political architects who fuel these mobilisations remain safely insulated from the chaos. When violence erupts, the responsibility is easily deflected onto the raw emotions of local volunteers, shielding the actual orchestrators from accountability.

Meanwhile, traditional, unarmed civil society- the village elders and church leaders who historically settled these disputes through customary law has been systematically sidelined by the rule of the gun.

The real tragedy is that regular Kuki and Naga citizens genuinely believe they are fighting an existential war for survival. They cannot see that their grief is being mined to protect the wealth and immunity of a tiny circle of leaders who never get their hands dirty.

The cycle of killings and revenge will only break when ordinary citizens and the church look past the ethnic flags, see how they are being used, and demand real accountability from their own leaders.

Concurrently, the Central government must do its part by actively working to find a permanent and amicable solution for the region’s overlapping administrative and security crises.

Views expressed are that of the author and do not reflect EastMojo’s stance on this or any other issue.

Also Read: What a Naga moment of regret teaches us about reconciliation