Meitei Radicalization Upping the Ante with Renewed Involvement of Insurgents

Rocky Meitei. Chongtham Lamdainganba. Moirangthem Kingson Singh

These three men were among the 13 dead, newly-recruited PLA cadres found by security forces after a reported gunfight with unidentified gunmen on 4th December 2023 in a Kuki dominated hill district of Tengnoupal. What do they have in common apart from being from the same community? These three were all displaced persons affected by the ongoing Kuki-Meitei conflict in Manipur, a full scale civil war occurring in a sensitive border state of the Indian nation that the top political leaders in Delhi seem to either be ignoring, or are acutely inept at handling. The three of them had been living in relief camps across the state after their homes were part of the loss that Manipur is currently going through. The online news portal Scroll.in had reported in a news article published on their website on 11 December 2023 that these men, among many others, form the pool of a new wave of recruits for the resurgent Meitei insurgency in the state. And they died in a place foreign to their native place, far away from their relief camps in hilly areas that they had no right to be at this point in the conflict.

“These people were recruited recently,” said an Assam Rifles official who spoke to Scroll.in. “Many of them are displaced people and they were brainwashed.” These findings are not surprising to those on the ground in Manipur. The ethnic conflict had created a strong sense of nationalism on each side of the warring party. Youths, both displaced and not, from each side of the war came out in huge numbers as part of the necessity to form ‘volunteer’ groups to defend from each other’s attacks. While the volunteers from the Kuki-Zo community side have been confined to their own frontlines, staunchly defending their borderlands from any Meitei attack and intrusion and never wandering past the ‘buffer zones’, the stories relating to the Meitei ‘village volunteers’ are in stark contrast. While most deaths from the Kuki-Zo community have come from Imphal during the initial days of the violence when innocent civilians – men, women, children, youths, senior citizens - were hunted and killed in the city, caught unaware at the scale and intensity of the Meiteis’ planned pogrom, most Meitei deaths have come from these so-called ‘village volunteers’ as they attack Kuki villages and buffer zones long after the initial few days of violence, and comprise mostly of men or youth of fighting age.

This points to the fact that the ideology driving the ‘village volunteers’ from the two communities are complete opposites. While Kuki-Zo village volunteers came out to defend, those from the Meitei community have been ‘brainwashed’, as the AR official puts it, to carry out attacks on Kuki areas. The Scroll’s article mentions Chongtham Lamdainganba, a man who had been “guarding the village with a licenced gun”. Had he stayed there, he would have been alive today as Meitei villages have hardly come under attack from the Kukis. Instead, he left the relief camp where he was staying and died in a place deep inside a Kuki area where none of them had any right to be. In the last week of June, a merchant navy officer Waikhom Nilakamal was among the dead who were part of an armed Meitei radical group carrying out an attack on a Kuki village in Kangpokpi district. How a navy officer on holiday came to die in a Kuki district, while trying to kill more Kukis far away from the safety of his home tells its own story. Had he stuck to his holiday and stayed home during his leave, he would still be alive today.

The radicalisation of men from the Meitei community, brainwashed with hatred and a bloodlust for Kukis, is encouraged by the state machinery. The state, with its dishonourable habit of giving away arms and ammunition from the state armouries to feed the hands of such radicalised men and its policy of turning a blind eye to such groups of men freely roaming around the valley area openly with sophisticated arms, has made it easy for the Meitei youth to want to pick up arms and join these radicalised groups. For them, being a part of the Arambai Tenggol is now seen as a badge of honour and they flaunt this openly with pride. But the Arambai Tenggol, a group that has come up just recently prior to the civil war and is the most publicly involved in the ethnic-cleansing campaign, is just one group among many that attracts such radicalised men.

In the initial days and a few months following the start of the war, it was this group along with the Meitei Leepun that attracted the most foot soldiers. They came in the hundreds to attack Kuki areas and died in hordes. That was when they changed tactics. From large-scale attacks led by enthusiastic Arambai Tenggols that were easy targets for the Kuki village defenders, they came in much smaller numbers. From open attacks they resorted to small scale, guerrilla style attacks carried out by a small team of specially trained operatives. This was a turning point in the style of warfare carried out by the Meiteis. Such tactics needed experienced, specialised, trained men. Where did such men come from? They were picked from former militants who had surrendered and had been living in Manipur for a while. The war found a new purpose for them. The state had their names on record, and they were called up for duty. And to lead them in this new tactic, on 28 August the state created a new post, a Senior Superintendent of Police (Combat) and appointed Nectar Sanjenbam, a retired Colonel of the Indian Army’s elite 21 Para Special Force to fill it. This was a man who took part in the 2015 operations undertaken by the Army against insurgents based in Myanmar. He knew how to get the job done. As such, he was pulled out of retirement and called up for duty once more.

Soon after he was appointed, the war shifted its focus to Tengnoupal and Chandel, two districts on the border with Myanmar where cadres of the valley-based insurgent groups had been in hiding ever since they went out of favour in Manipur. These cadres started pouring into Manipur – overground as surrenderees welcomed and accepted by the state and underground through the porous Indo-Myanmar border. Some cadres of these militants had always been in the ranks of the Arambai Tenggols and probably Meitei Leepun too but the change in tactics brought them in in large numbers. The recent “Peace Agreement” between the UNLF (Pambei) and the Centre facilitated by the state is an openly known secret to bring in more of these militants from across the border and give them free movement within the valley to wage a war against the Kukis in the hills. The fact that some of these newly surrendered militants were among the 13 dead in the December 4 incident on their way into the hills exposes this façade. And as the Scroll article points out in its title, the renewed involvement of long-dormant Meitei insurgency in the current conflict is seeing a revival of militancy in the fragile border state of India. The Ministry of Home Affairs is either a participant in this enabling of renewal of this threat to the nation itself, or is being played a fool by the Manipur state government. Either way, the chances of peace in this region has been diminished greatly by such a foolhardy act which may have been penned in haste by the centre to score political points and by the state in a willful attempt to scale up its war on the Kukis.