A land in trouble

 

An overview of Manipur's three-way ethnic conflict between Meitei, Naga and Kuki groups, which started since the era of British rule and the Anglo-Kuki war of 1917-19 during World War I

One regularly sees headlines describing the clashes in Manipur as ‘attacks on Christians’ because more than 100 churches and some temples have been attacked. That gives a communal colour to what is a decades-old ethnic conflict resulting from complex ethnic relations and land management systems of Manipur. The state has three main ethnic families — the predominantly Christian Naga and Kuki tribals and the mostly Hindu, non-tribal Meitei who form 53% of the 2.86 million population (2011 census) living on 10% of Manipur’s land in the valley. The tribes comprise 40% of the population living on 90% of the land in the hills. However, tribal land includes most forests that are 67% of the state’s landmass. The Meiteis complain that they cannot own land in the hill areas while tribals can own land in the valley; they thus call this arrangement unjust. The tribes rebut by saying that the Meiteis monopolise jobs as well as economic and political power in the state and that they cannot claim land over and above of what they have. In reality, some poor Meitei families live in the hills and some well-off tribal families live in the valley. The valley-based leaders do not necessarily represent the poor but land remains central to this conflict.

Legal measures have been attempted to change the nature of land-ownership in the hills. The tribes have resisted these attempts. They have been demanding the Sixth Schedule and have been granted some concessions under Article 371C. The conflict has continued, but till now it had taken the form of highway blockades, strikes and shutdowns. Moreover, it is a three-way conflict. The Nagas and the Kukis join hands to oppose moves of the State that they perceive to be pro-Meitei but they, too, have a conflict centred on land. During World War I, the Kukis refused to go to Europe as porters for the British army; the British army then attacked them. After the defeat of the Kukis in the Anglo-Kuki war of 1917-19, the British regime evicted them from their land, dispersed them all over the Northeast, and justified its actions by creating the myth that the Kukis were nomads who went around occupying land belonging to other tribes. Most people accept that myth today and treat Kukis as refugees with no right over land. The refusal of other communities to recognise the Kukis’ rights over land further complicates ethnic relations.

Some Meitei leaders decided recently that the only way of gaining access to tribal land was to include their community in the tribal schedule. They approached the Manipur High Court with a plea to act on this demand. A single bench judge ordered the government of Manipur to consider recommending tribal status for the Meitei to the Union government. On April 26, the state government used a 1966 boundary notification to evict some Kuki families in Churachandpur district from their land on the plea that it was forest land. For good measure, it added that the Kukis were growing poppy; they do so, but only as bit players. The State has not touched the masterminds. These events combined to light the fuse. The violence began on May 3 when the joint Naga-Kuki demonstration against the high court judgment was attacked. The Supreme Court has since reprimanded the Manipur High Court. But the damage had been done.

Three features distinguish the present conflict from past ones. First, although the Nagas and the Kukis joined hands to oppose the move on tribal status for Meiteis, the Kukis were singled out for attacks. Attempts seem to have been made to provoke the Nagas and turn it into a Naga-Kuki conflict but they failed. Second, for the first time, religious places were attacked in order to give the conflict a communal turn. Third, eyewitness accounts state that gangs of young men came on motorbikes from Imphal to places around 50 kilometres away to attack churches. Unfounded rumours were spread that some Meitei women had been raped in Churachandpur to justify the raping of Kuki women in retaliation.

One would be justified in concluding from these events that the conflict was well-planned, funded, and executed with precision by people in power. In most cases, the security forces remained mute spectators. Significantly, the chief of the defence staff has stated that Kuki militants were not involved in the conflict. But if the situation continues, it can encourage the militants to intervene. For many years, civil society organisations of all three communities have attempted to facilitate dialogue among the ethnic groups. But they have been sidelined in the last few years. Violent groups have taken their place and seem to play a major role in intensifying ethnic divisions. There evidently is a link among the court case, evictions, the conflict, and the break-up of dialogue.

There are, however, some signs of hope. Not all Meiteis are involved in the conflict. Many of their leaders and thinkers have come out against it. Houses of some of them have been attacked in retaliation and they are in hiding. In Churachandpur, when some Kuki men were planning to attack Meiteis, Kuki women formed a human chain to prevent these attacks. In neighbouring Moirang, Meitei parents and students stood near the gate of a Jesuit school to prevent attacks on it by an armed group. These are among many instances that suggest that a beginning can be made towards reconciliation. Even as the organisers of the conflict tried to turn the Nagas against the Kukis, a few Naga outfits and some political leaders based in Nagaland visited Kuki villages with relief material to express their solidarity with them. The chief minister of Nagaland sent a massive consignment of relief to the Kuki-majority Kangpokpi district. Naga outfits based in Manipur are yet to show similar solidarity with the Kukis but they have not opposed them. These actions offer the ray of hope that the Nagas and the Kukis can be brought together and, then, bridges can be built by beginning a dialogue with the Meiteis.

Walter Fernandes is Director, North Eastern Social Research Centre, Guwahati

Source: The Telegraph, 25/06/23

Worsening conflict

 The military junta clearly faces its toughest challenge in the strategic provinces where long-running ethnic insurgencies have intensified and the Tatmadaw has increasingly lost territorial control

Myanmar’s military junta has clearly bitten more than it can chew. Apart from a massive surge in multiple armed insurgencies in border provinces dominated by ethnic minorities, the generals are now faced with armed resistance in the Burman heartland, where an initially peaceful movement for the restoration of democracy has turned violent following brutal repression. Nothing illustrated this better than a former Miss Myanmar, dressed in military fatigues with a rifle, announcing her decision to join the People’s Defence Force, the armed wing of the National Unity Government.  

The military junta clearly faces its toughest challenge in the strategic provinces where long-running ethnic insurgencies have intensified and the Tatmadaw has increasingly lost territorial control. In desperation, the generals have ordered air strikes on rebel targets but these have caused much collateral damage and a hardening of positions. On October 23, the Burmese air force bombed the anniversary celebration of the Kachin Independence Organisation, killing at least 60 people and injuring around 400 others.

Intense fighting between Burmese troops and the separatist Arakan Army since the breakdown of a tenuous ceasefire in July has led to a dramatic loss of effective control by Myanmar’s military junta over Rakhine. In September, the AA’s deputy commander, Nyo Twan Awng, called for “a final decisive war for building the state of the Arakan”.  This was no hollow publicity stunt: the AA now boasts of effective  control over two-thirds of Rakhine and a substantial portion of neighbouring Chin state. Founded in 2009, the AA now has nearly 30,000 well-armed troops, including at least 6,000 in areas controlled by its allies in Kayin, Kachin, and Shan provinces. More than 100 Burmese troops have died and sixty of their camps overrun since fresh fighting erupted. But the Tatmadaw has failed to retake lost ground despite additional deployment of land forces and airpower. Besides Kachin and Rakhine, the Tatmadaw has lost control over territories in Karen and Shan states. The United Wa State Army controls a huge area in eastern Shan. The military junta has avoided a confrontation with the UWSA that has more than 20,000 fighters and even the latest anti-aircraft batteries. 

The AA has taken over, partly or fully, a number of smaller townships and could even take control of Maungdaw. If that happens, the Arakan Army United League of Arakan will control the trade route to Bangladesh. The rebel group appears keen to deal directly with Bangladesh to settle the issue of the return of Rohingya Muslims. The AA-ULA is willing to support the repatriation process not just to gain the support of the Rohingya but also to earn international goodwill. Can Dhaka, upset with Burmese shelling on border villages, afford to turn its back on the AA-ULA overtures?

Similarly, India may find it difficult to operationalise the Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport project without the support of the AA-ULA. Work on the KMMT was frequently disrupted by the AA-ULA in retaliation against Indian military operations against the AA’s covert bases in Mizoram. But now it appears that the AA-ULA are inclined to deal with India. The Narendra Modi government, which has preferred to wait and watch in Myanmar for fear of driving the military junta into Chinese embrace, will have to rethink its Myanmar policy that has avoided direct support or covert engagement with non-State actors since 1997.Prior to that, India not only supported rebel groups like the Kachin Independence Army with weapons but also backed the movement for democracy.

But neither can India afford a fresh influx of refugees into Mizoram and Manipur; nor can it wait endlessly to operationalise the KMMT corridor.  China  has the Burmese military junta under its control. Beijing has played its cards well with the AA-ULA. India will be left playing catch-up, as in Afghanistan, unless it recognises the changing ground realities in Myanmar. 

Subir Bhaumik is a former BBC correspondent

Source: The Telegraph, 15/11/22

Violence and communalism: South Asia’s disturbing commonality

 

Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes: Fundamentalists, even as they create walls between communities, recognise that South Asia has a connected destiny: They bank on it to achieve their ends

The violence against the Hindu minority in Bangladesh is an ominous development. But it is also a reminder of one cardinal truth: All of South Asia is “tied together in a single garment of destiny,” to borrow Martin Luther King’s phrase from a different context. Violence in one place will spill over to another; freedom endangered in one place will inevitably corrode the freedom of others. We have tried to act as if this was not true. But that modus vivendi has been unravelling for a while.

Anti-Hindu violence in Bangladesh is not new. The current violence is strategically timed. It is surely not a coincidence that the violence coincides with targeted attacks on Hindus in Kashmir. The intent is not just local ethnic terror, but a deepening of the communal divide in India. It is tempting to say that this violence is a strategic act by particular organised groups, perhaps with transnational links. It is not organically embedded in society. This is a comforting thought, and can empower us to the extent that it is still important to recognise forces that do not condone such violence. But in South Asia the link between strategic communal violence and organic embeddedness is always a tricky one. Such violence inevitably transforms the fabric of social relationships itself. It is fanciful to think that Kashmiriyat survived terrorism, or that remnants of Bangladeshi pluralism will survive this violence, or that blasphemy laws in Punjab will not play into hands of violent reactionaries, any more than Indian secularism survived the violence of so-called fringe groups. Over time, everywhere in South Asia, violence has fundamentally transformed politics. It is a tiger you ride at your own peril.

The Partition of India could work as a modus vivendi, if three conditions were in place. The first is that the internal conflicts in each of the states would not radically spill over into the other states. This assumption was never literally true. But it was shaken to its core by 1971. Pakistan’s horrendous internal conflicts spilled over, and Indian intervention helped the breaking up of Pakistan, creating a syndrome of deep Pakistani insecurity that still haunts the subcontinent. The second assumption was that the successor states behaved, as much as possible, like normal states in relation to each other: Pacifying violence, trading with each other, leveraging the advantages of their geographical proximity. They would, like all states, worry about the power of their neighbours. But the fact that they were states would give them enough confidence to deal with each other. Most states in South Asia, however, want to run away from each other. In Pakistan we got a state whose elites were ready to cut off its nose to spite its face, becoming an epicentre of transnational violence from Afghanistan to Bangladesh, and changing its own social character in the process.

But even the absence of these two conditions could, with some difficulty, be managed, if India remained a bulwark against spillover effects. Spillover effects don’t just work through retaliatory violence. They work by transforming the ideological climate in other states. The persecution of Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh is a pivotal strand in the mentality that India must be, if not a Hindu state, at least a “Hindus First” state. India could also remain a bulwark against these effects if in response to communalism elsewhere, it reaffirmed its own secularism more deeply. The assumption was that India is large enough to absorb a few pin pricks. Throwing cold water domestically over what our neighbours were doing, even as we tried to contain them internationally, was not a sign of weakness, it was smart strategy. The fact that Hindus are being targeted is not a creation of Hindu nationalism. The targeting of Hindus also has elements of sui generis logic. But the ascendancy of Hindu nationalism has profoundly changed how the dynamics of attacks play out. Hindu nationalism looks for pretexts to target Muslims, deepen internal divisions, and construct a seamless spectre of Muslim threat. The official response of the government of India to the violence in Bangladesh may be conventional. But this incident will have deep communal effects. Even if there is no immediate retaliatory violence, the cumulative communal undertones in India will erupt. Which is exactly what those groups who foment violence in Afghanistan, Pakistan or Bangladesh would like.

The spillover effects cannot be contained because, despite differences in political cultures, the ethnic fundamentalisms of these countries now feed off each other. They will give each other victories. All of these countries, including India, now have hegemonic ideologies at the level of civil society that revel in a vicious coarsening of discourse, are deeply committed to violence, and frankly don’t mind disorder if it increases support for society’s authoritarian instincts.

This is also of great strategic consequence. Some of Delhi’s macho strategic mandarins used to loudly thump their chests and say India can do without South Asia: It was too big and had too much legitimacy capital to have to worry about its neighbours. India’s legitimacy capital is slowly eroding as its democracy and secularism corrode. But, strategically, not placing South Asia front and centre was always a myopic view. It was also a mistake in a much deeper sense. The geopolitics of South Asia is not a conventional international relations problem; it is a deep, and increasingly traumatic, psychodrama in a long civilisational history. The international de-hyphenation of India and Pakistan may be considered a big diplomatic victory. But the de-hyphenation we are proud of is practically meaningless when even the ideological currents in most South Asian countries are now so deeply hyphenated.

In a twisted dialectic, fundamentalists, even as they create walls between communities, seem to recognise that South Asia has a connected ideological destiny: They are banking on it to achieve their ends. There are three ways of thinking about that destiny. The first is the current modus vivendi. But the historical conditions for its success are increasingly doubtful. What is replacing it is an intensification of the logic of 1947: Attempts at a deepening communal divide, ethnic cleansing and subordination in different keys, and a cult of violence. Is there a third option — a South Asia with states that reimagine the region not as joined by a murderous competition over community identity but as a new zone of freedom? This is a pie in the sky. But the thought that the only political language that unites South Asia is the deepening of the violence of 1947 is too dreadful to contemplate.

Source: Indian Express, 20/10/21

Where does all our hatred come from?

 

Harsh Mander writes: The violence in Assam, like that inflicted by lynch mobs, shows normalisation of hatred against communities. It cannot be ascribed to social anomalies.

I am haunted by the lament of two young researchers from Assam, Suraj Gogoi and Nazimuddin Siddique. “We are shaken and frozen”, they say. “Is this the last sky?” The majority of the Indian people have become so inured to brutal public displays of hate violence that when we consume video images of lynching, gangrape and killing of Dalit women, and the flaunting of bigotry by our leaders, we just turn our faces away. What was it then about the recent images from Darrang in Assam — of a man with a lathi shot in his chest trying to defend his home against hundreds of armed security men, and of a young civilian jumping on and kicking the man’s body even as his last breaths cease — that has stirred public outrage?

A local activist likened the scene of the Assam village to one “from a war”. There were at least 1,500 armed police and paramilitary soldiers, he said. Eight hundred homes were rapidly razed. A 28-year-old man in a lungi with a stick in his hand ran towards the soldiers in anguish about being rendered landless and homeless. He could easily have been overpowered without firing even a shot. And even if compelled to shoot, the forces are trained to shoot below the waist, so as to temporarily disable but not kill the protester. Instead, they choose to shoot him in the chest.

The village, Dholpur, is one amongst hundreds of riverine islands and riverbanks, vulnerable to erosion every year. On one side is the mighty Brahmaputra and on the other its tributary Nonoi. Landless peasants, mostly of Bengali Muslim origin, have settled here for decades. These are families displaced both by riverine erosion and periodic targeted violence — the most violent incidents took place during the Assam agitation.

Sabita Goswami in Along the Red River describes how in 1983, along with the forgotten massacre of Nellie — the largest post-Independence communal massacre for which not a single person has even been tried, let alone punished — an uncounted number of people were slaughtered in Chaolkhowa Chapori, close to Dholpur.

In the intensely flood-vulnerable riverine islands and banks, large numbers of landless peasants cultivate, under conditions of immense hardship and insecurity, tracts of land for which they have not been issued papers by the state administration. These lands get washed away by floods every few years, and the peasants shift to a new island or river bank each time. In Dholpur, they cultivated three crops every year — corn, jute and peanut — and vegetables like cabbage, brinjal and cauliflower. To call them encroachers is dangerous official fiction.

Almost immediately after assuming office, Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma announced the resolve of his government to remove these “encroachments”. He has not explained why only the settlements populated largely by Muslims of Bengali origin were chosen for demolition. At the Dholpur site, Sarma announced that the land reclaimed from these encroachers would be used to settle “indigenous” Assamese for collective farming. It may seem mystifying why the state chose to replace one set of landless peasants with another. But when it’s about replacing “Bangladeshis” (read Assamese Muslims of Bengali origin) with “indigenous” people (read Assamese Hindus), the unashamedly communal political character of the project becomes evident.

Sarma has announced, after criticism, that the landless people displaced would be resettled elsewhere. The humane administrative response would then have been to resettle the displaced people before displacing them. Instead, local people told me that they got notices one night, and early the next morning, the forces began demolishing their homes. They asked for time to at least collect their housing materials and belongings, but instead, these were wrecked and often set on fire by the police forces.

Finally stands the question of this man who vented his hate with such malevolence on the man shot by police bullets. We know now that he was a photographer often engaged by the district administration, charged with filming the police action against the “encroachers”. To understand the photographer’s actions, we need first to see the dark hole into which we — the people in Assam and rest of India — have fallen. The perversity of hate of the photographer, indeed of lynch mobs in many parts of the country, cannot be dismissed as individual social anomalies. These public displays of violent hate targeting India’s Muslims and sometimes Dalits have increasingly become normalised, and public resistance to it is increasingly rare.

I speak from the experience of 30 journeys of solidarity and atonement of the Karwan e Mohabbat to families of those felled by hate violence. Families would tell us, “We wish they had just shot him or stabbed him to death. Why did they torture him so much?”

Do we need to ask ourselves where this hate comes from? There is no doubt today that we are being tutored into hate from above, from those in positions of power. It is they who have valorised hate against the “termites”, the “infiltrators”, the “cow-killers”, the “temple-breakers”, the “love jihadis”.

To people from dominant communities, I ask: Is it that you don’t care because you think this hate will only damage the hated “other”? Look at the photographer in Darrang, look at the faces of young men in innumerable videos of lynch mobs or gang-rapists. Don’t imagine that hate would leave you untouched. Do you want your children also to grow so savagely damaged by hate?

This column first appeared in the print edition on September 26, 2021 under the title ‘The doctrine of hate’. Mander is a Richard von Weizsacker Fellow and a peace and human rights worker and writer

Source: Indian Express, 28/09/21