Yesterday, reports on recent ethnic violence in Manipur revealed a troubling media pattern: national outlets, aligned with institutional powers, are labelling Zo (Kuki-Zomi-Hmar) Village Volunteers as ‘militants.’ This framing unfairly recasts defenders of ancestral lands as aggressors, erasing the power dynamics that shape their actions. By casting these Village Volunteers as threats, the narrative obscures their reality—ordinary people forced to protect their communities without state support.
Power operates both visibly and invisibly. Here, it operates through labelling, narratives, and frameworks that marginalise community protectors while strengthening state forces in their authority, even when they also fail to act. The national media, by labelling these Village Volunteers as “militants,” enter into the very system of rule that vilifies and undermines resistance led by the community. Power shapes not only the action but also manipulates perception to keep particular manifestations of its authority intact while erasing context—the self-defence measures taken by these communities.
The media’s role in state legitimacy
When state forces like the CRPF stand by as violence unfolds, they abandon their fundamental duty to protect citizens. This failure is not just a bureaucratic lapse; it leaves communities shattered and traumatised. On the 7th of November when around 9:00 PM peaceful evening turned to horror in Zairawn village in Jiribam, Meitei militants reportedly launched a brutal assault, setting ablaze 17 homes and killing Zosangkim Hmar, allegedly raped and burned alive by armed individuals, a 31-year-old mother of three. The unthinkable loss of Zosangkim Hmar—a mother of three who was reportedly shot, brutalised, and burned alive—has left a family and community engulfed in grief and fear. Her three young children are now motherless, left to grapple with trauma that will likely define their lives.
Yet, when Village Volunteers—those forced into defence—are killed, they’re instantly branded as ‘militants,’ while unprovoked assaults against their communities receive little scrutiny. This selective use of labels shows how institutional power shapes narratives, undermining grassroots defence efforts and deflecting attention from the state’s failure to safeguard vulnerable populations.
Labelling these Village Volunteers as “militants” is not a neutral categorization but, rather, a strategy in itself—a discursive strategy which legitimates state power and authority while delegitimizing those who challenged its perceived control. Such labelling corresponds to theories of power in which labelling is one means of maintaining quiescence and ensuring that acts of resistance—even those born of survival—fall outside the parameters of legitimate social action.
The State, through its monopolisation of legitimate violence, denies the right of self-defence to these Village Volunteers who have never searched for combat and struggle—and labels them as subversives. Their resistance is not ideologically driven but a survival response to oppression, lack of security, and abandonment by the very institutions designed to protect them. Labelling them as threats turns a blind eye and shifts blame away from their so-called violence onto state failures in a legitimising narrative of constructed public attention, safeguarding unparalleled state power in generally accepted authority in society.
“Neutralisation” as a mechanism of power
The term ‘neutralisation’ is a powerful tool that redefines Village Volunteers as security threats rather than defenders. However, to the families affected, nothing is neutral about the state’s language. For communities like Zairawn, where defenders risk their lives simply to protect loved ones, this framing distorts the reality of their trauma, legitimising the loss of young lives as if it were an abstract necessity. For the children left orphaned or families torn apart, ‘neutralisation’ conceals not just the defenders’ role but the human cost of this violence, reducing community grief to a statistic that is easier for the public to overlook. The language here becomes a weapon of control, twisting acts of survival into acts of aggression to bolster the state’s monopoly on security.
This is not a linguistically neutral choice; it is an act of power in itself, using terminology to reshape public perception and legitimise state violence. In this context, language is wielded as a tool of control, whereby the acts of self-defence get rebranded as aggression in order to legitimise the State monopoly on legitimate force.
It is not only words that are being manipulated but also extend to acts that are being justified by them. The “neutralisation” framework, framing such Village Volunteers as threats, legitimises state violence against them with impunity, thereby reducing the State to the only arbiter of security and delegitimizing any grassroots defence efforts.
This exemplifies how power subtly but efficiently structures public perception per the State’s interests, casting community-led self-defence as unlawful resistance. In this sense, the control of the language functions almost as an invisible barrier, binding public dissent and reinforcing the State’s narrative. Through these mechanisms, the State retains its authority unquestioned, fortifying a narrative that delegitimized grassroots resistance and blinded its failures to protect vulnerable communities.
The hidden power of resistance
In Manipur’s context of institutional neglect, where state forces are unable or unwilling to protect the vulnerable, grassroots resistance becomes a means of survival rather than aggression. For the families who have suffered unimaginable losses—like Zosangkim Hmar’s children, now deprived of a mother’s care—such resistance is not just self-preservation but a fight to hold onto their humanity amid chaos. The Village Volunteers’ actions are not a rebellion against the state’s authority but a last resort to safeguard what the state has repeatedly failed to protect. Their quiet resilience, rooted in the trauma of lives shattered and communities displaced, exposes the state’s failure to uphold even the most basic of protections for its citizens.
Yet, in labelling those Village Volunteers as ‘militants,’ the State erases this very difference, making acts of survival into acts of defiance—even though the criminal legal framework itself recognizes the right to use force, even deadly force, in self-defence. This narrative manipulation is not accidental but asserts power, reshaping public perception so that any form of autonomous defence is criminalised. Here, power operates not only through force but most divisively through “discursive formations”, wherein language and categorization become a modality through which the regulation and subordination of subaltern communities are performed.
This is a quiet but profound defiance, a “hidden transcript” that challenges the State’s constructed identity of these Village Volunteers as aggressors, and it exposes the inadequacy of state power while revealing the resilience, perseverance and agency of such a community in the face of structural abandonment. In particular, the State’s attempt to subsume these actions within a narrative of militancy reflects an effort to contain a far greater threat: that the community’s silent speech—its embodied challenge to its monopoly over security—is a powerful assertion of local autonomy and self-preserving action.
The cost of labelling: Erasing humanity
Labelling these Village Volunteers as ‘militants’ is more than a misnomer; it’s an act of control. By framing self-defence as militancy, the state exercises power to shape reality, stripping these defenders of their humanity and casting them as faceless threats. This label erases their struggles and silences their voices, turning survival into a criminal act.
It is a label that erases not only their struggles but also the collective trauma and suffering of these young men that has pushed them into taking up arms for the defence of their communities. Their actions, born of necessity and resilience, are reframed as illegitimate, silencing the voices and agency of those who dare to act outside the State’s framework of control.
The tragedy is thereby not in the defenders themselves but in the State’s abandonment of its protective role and, after that, a denial of the right of self-defence of these individuals. These young men constitute a “hidden transcript” of resistance, an unspoken reality of local autonomy, one standing as a quiet challenge to the state monopoly on security.
They step into the protective role that the State has abdicated, yet the State denies them even recognizing their role as Village Volunteers. Instead, captured in the State’s “public transcript,” their identities are recast as aggressors—a label that obscures the structural power dynamics and institutional failures that have forced these communities into self-reliance.
The central question is not whether the Village Volunteers’ actions are legitimate but who has the authority to define those actions and shape their consequences. The real threat may lie not in community defence but in the power to manipulate public perception to serve institutional agendas.
This naming and labelling of the Village Volunteers as “militants” is, in this sense, the ultimate silencing—rewriting narratives to obscure the very structures of power that drive communities to self-defence. The State’s power of labelling and defining, sustained by the media, is a form of power that stigmatises resistance and erases its causes.
Views expressed here are that of the author and do not reflect EastMojo’s stand on the issue in anyway whatsoever.
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