The conflict between the Meiteis and the Kukis isn’t just two communities confronting each other. It is an asymmetrical confrontation, shaped by the majoritarianism that defines Indian politics today.
Meiteis make up more than half the population of Manipur. They see themselves as Manipur’s defining majority and their claim to Manipur is aboriginal. Their sacred geography claims the whole state, plains and hills alike, for the Meitei community. They feel hemmed in by tribal settlements in the hills, deprived of access to land to which they feel they are entitled. Their leaders, including the chief minister, N. Biren Singh, frequently describe Kukis as illegal migrants who have covertly encroached upon historically Meitei lands. Kukis are stigmatised as poppy-growing enablers of the Northeast’s drug trade.
Meiteis don’t like being pigeonholed as majoritarian bullies. They have their own history of insurgency against the Indian State and, like other communities in the region, their self-perception is shaped by their resistance to the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act. They see themselves as a beleaguered community marginalised by a lopsided policy of affirmative action and the indifference of a remote Central government, indifferent to their needs. They see Kukis as footloose aliens who have no organic connection to the Manipuri homeland. The fact that Kukis were converted to Christianity relatively recently (over roughly the last hundred years) feeds into the Meitei narrative of alien encroachment.
The aggrieved sincerity of the Meiteis does not materially alter their majoritarian positioning in this conflict. A comparison with similar conflicts in the neighbourhood is useful here. In neighbouring Myanmar, in the state of Rakhine, it was the Rohingya Muslims who were cast in the role of foreign encroachers of an alien faith. It was Rakhine’s Buddhists who played the part of an aboriginal population fighting an existential battle for its homeland. Like the Meiteis, Rakhine’s Buddhists had a complicated and historically hostile relationship with Myanmar’s Bamar Buddhist heartland. Despite these internal conflicts and complications, Rakhine’s Buddhists were fiercely aligned with Yangon’s majoritarians in the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya.
Closer home, the political leaders of Assamese Hindus see themselves as members of a suppressed group, first dominated by the Bengali bhadralok and, then, demographically threatened by Muslim migration from East Pakistan/Bangladesh. Their existential angst found bloody expression in the massacre of Bengali Muslims at Nellie in 1983. That slaughter created the template for republican India’s politically profitable pogroms. After 1983, 1984 and 2002, the political formations that connived at these pogroms won landslide election victories on the back of the violence. Today, Assam under Himanta Biswa Sarma is Hindutva’s laboratory where the recipes for Hindu supremacy like the National Register of Citizens and the Citizenship (Amendment) Act are tested.
Majoritarianism simplifies; it flattens out historical experience and nuance. However sincere and local their sense of historical injury might be, Assamese Hindus and Manipur’s Meiteis have been turned into stalking horses for Hindutva’s pan-Indian project. This is the promise of the double-engine sarkar: in return for voting in a Bharatiya Janata Party government, the Hindu majority in a province will receive the material and ideological patronage of the BJP government at the Centre. Radical Hindu groups will be given carte blanche to do anything that might turn a nominal Hindu majority into an actively majoritarian constituency, whether it is through love jihad campaigns, apartheid-style property laws, hate speech or violence.
Civil society violence is a useful weapon in the majoritarian arsenal because the notion of spontaneous violence springing from historical hurt gives both engines of the juggernaut an alibi: the people did it. But the ‘people’ in question do it because of the impunity that this two-headed State promises its Hindu clients in the states that it rules. Most often, this impunity means that the State looks away as radicalised students, obliging judges and feral mobs do the important work of harassing and herding the target minority to its proper place at the margins of civil society.
But in border states where the connection between allegedly fast-breeding minorities and foreign infiltration can be plausibly made, the prospect of successful ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya kind becomes a real temptation. It is in frontier provinces like Assam and Manipur that majoritarian violence tends towards extremism.
The violence in Manipur exhibits two symptoms of this. The first is the impunity with which Meitei mobs have been allowed to loot police armouries. This capitulation by the uniformed arms of the State is unprecedented in the history of the republic. The State in Manipur has, in effect, armed one side in a civil war. The second symptom is the instrumental use of rape to announce the de facto end of Kuki citizenship.
Rape is used as a boundary marker in majoritarian violence. The boundary it marks is the border between citizen and alien, civilised and savage, human and subhuman. The project of modern majoritarianism is to create through violence and discrimination a ring fence around ‘pretend-citizens’ to conveniently purge them from the body politic. In Manipur, they happen to be Kukis, in Assam and Rakhine, they are Bengali Muslims, in Sri Lanka they are Tamil-speaking Hindus.
Every majoritarian project is the same project, regardless of the ethnic or religious identity of its sponsors. Majoritarianism is a nationalism that sets out to exclude. Unchecked, it tends towards ethnic cleansing and exterminism. N. Biren Singh has created a narrative about illegal Kuki migrants squatting on lands belonging to the forest department, growing poppies on government land and trafficking in drugs. This prepares the ground for the state of Manipur to use uniformed forces to clear hill areas of ‘criminal’ encroachment.
Given that Singh has chosen to govern as a Meitei partisan, openly hostile towards the Kukis, it’s not surprising that his plans to disarm Kuki fighters while looking the other way when Meitei groups looted police armouries make Manipur’s hill communities fear the worst.
The violence directed at the Rohingya by Myanmar’s armed forces and the purging of more than a million Muslims by an ideologically majoritarian State are precedents we should pay attention to, simply because it shows us the scale of atrocity that’s possible in our neighbourhood. Demographically, the Rohingya in Rakhine were several times the size of the Kuki community in Manipur. Logistically, their ethnic cleansing demanded considerably more State capacity.
Ethnic conflict can be gruesome, but it becomes genocidal only when the State becomes a party to the dispute. In Manipur, the BJP’s chief minister and his government have explicitly taken sides, Central forces have not been given the political support necessary to quell the violence and the Union home minister has left N. Biren Singh in office despite the carnage on his watch. The prime minister chose to carry on as if Manipur and its horrors didn’t exist till the rape video went viral.
The men in the video, who are shown parading forcibly stripped women, feel free to do this because they (and their political patrons) class these women and the community they represent as alien, savage and subhuman. But it is the reports of women urging their menfolk on to rape Kuki women that should terrify us. A State where women abet the public rape and murder of other women is slouching towards a nightmare worse than mere anarchy.
