Kangpokpi/Imphal, India – On Christmas Eve, it was eerily calm inside a makeshift bunker with piles of gunny baggage and a tin roof. Hunkered inside and clutching their single-barrelled rifles, 19-year-old Chonminlal Kipgen and 26-year-old Paolal Kipgen from the predominantly Christian Kuki-Zo neighborhood regarded out and scoured the hills of Kangpokpi district for armed fighters from the rival Meitei neighborhood.

They stated they had been village volunteers – civilians who had taken up arms to defend their properties.

Not so far-off in Manipur’s capital, Imphal, the majority-Meitei neighborhood had equally muted celebrations throughout their most cherished pageant, Ningol Chakouba, in early November.

For the previous 11 months, the 2 communities in India’s northeastern state of Manipur have been locked in what’s arguably the nation’s longest-running ethnic battle within the twenty first century underneath the watch of a federal authorities headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The battle has killed 219 folks, injured 1,100 and displaced 60,000. It has revived an array of armed teams, sweeping up males and boys as recruits from each communities. On Saturday, two Kuki-Zo “village volunteers” had been killed and their our bodies allegedly mutilated in Manipur’s Kangpokpi district. In their press launch, tribal teams accused “central security forces, who aided Meitei militants” of being behind the killings.

The battle is often oversimplified as a wrestle between the Hindu Meitei and Christian Kuki-Zo communities, mirroring the spiritual polarisation seen in communal conflicts and assaults on spiritual minorities in numerous elements of India. While the Kuki-Zo communities are nearly fully Christian, the Meitei neighborhood predominantly follows a syncretic type of Hinduism and their very own Indigenous religion system, known as Sanamahism. A smaller variety of Meitei folks additionally comply with Christianity and Islam.

But an evaluation ready by Assam Rifles officers in Manipur highlighted a distinct set of things which are distinctive to the battle in Manipur. The Assam Rifles is the federal authorities’s paramilitary drive with a protracted and controversial historical past within the state. It is the oldest paramilitary drive within the nation and shoulders the accountability of sustaining legislation and order within the northeast together with the military.

The Reporters’ Collective (TRC) reviewed the evaluation, made in a PowerPoint presentation, late in 2023. The officers who confirmed the presentation wished to stay nameless. They took me via the presentation, which was in sync with the views one of many officers shared with me whereas explaining the explanations behind the Manipur battle.

The presentation put a part of the blame on the state authorities, headed by Chief Minister N Biren Singh, a member of Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and his “political authoritarianism and ambition”.

It is the primary candid evaluation from a federal authorities company that has made it into the general public area.

It is critical as a result of Modi this month, within the run-up to a normal election, had asserted that the federal authorities’s well timed intervention had led to a “marked improvement in the situation” in Manipur. This was one of many few occasions that the prime minister had spoken of the battle. Meanwhile, the federal dwelling affairs minister has positioned his religion within the chief minister’s capability to carry peace, which to this point has not supplied a decision. The state’s two seats in India’s decrease home of parliament vote on April 19 and April 26, within the first two phases of the nationwide elections.

The evaluation by the Assam Rifles listed causes of the battle as decided by officers within the thick of the violence.

It highlighted the influence of “illegal immigrants” from neighbouring Myanmar, the ensuing demand for a nationwide register of residents to cut back migration and the demand for Kukiland.

Kukiland is a separate administrative unit that the political and armed Kuki management desires cleaved out of Manipur. The demand for Kukiland has been revived throughout the ethnic battle.

Additionally, the presentation asserted that armed teams from the Meitei neighborhood are equipping folks with weapons, and the Kuki neighborhood’s armed teams are backing “volunteers”.

All of this has intensified tensions and contradicted makes an attempt by each communities’ leaders to current the battle as frequent residents volunteering for self-defence towards the opposite neighborhood.

TRC couldn’t independently confirm if the views within the presentation are endorsed by the Assam Rifles as an organisation. Detailed questions had been despatched to the paramilitary drive’s official spokesperson.

Initially, a spokesperson stated the Assam Rifles wouldn’t be capable of reply to one thing that was “hearsay”.

In a follow-up e-mail, the Assam Rifles stated it might “respectfully decline to engage in discussions regarding speculative or unverified matters. As a professional institution, we focus on our core duties and responsibilities, and we have no further comments on this issue at this time.” Later, it requested for a duplicate of the presentation.

The Assam Rifles didn’t reply to TRC’s follow-up emails asking if it held the views mirrored within the presentation.

Queries to the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Manipur chief minister’s workplace stay unanswered.

The chief minister’s position

The quick set off for the violence was a requirement by the dominant Meitei neighborhood for Scheduled Tribe standing, a type of affirmative motion granting quotas of presidency jobs and school admissions. It was opposed by different tribal teams, together with these from the Kuki-Zo neighborhood.

But within the presentation, Assam Rifles officers pointed to insurance policies of the chief minister that they believed fed the animosity between the communities. It famous Singh’s “hard stance” on the “war on drugs” and “vocal social media dissent”, amongst different issues, for inflaming the battle.

The presentation accused Singh of making divisions between communities within the state’s marketing campaign to cease medicine from being manufactured, traded and bought in Manipur. His forceful drive towards the cultivation of poppies, grown in hilly areas of the state bordering Myanmar, drove dwelling the impression that he’s concentrating on Kukis.

The presentation additionally cited “state forces’ tacit support” of the violence and the “dismemberment of law-and-order machinery”.

Another issue within the battle, the presentation famous, is “Meitei Revivalism”. Revivalism refers back to the lengthy historical past of the Meitei neighborhood aspiring to revert to its identification earlier than the arrival of Hinduism within the 18th century and later the merger of Manipur into India in 1949. The marketing campaign led to a revival of Sanamahism within the Thirties and fuelled the armed actions subsequently.

The presentation lists Meitei Leepun and Arambai Tenggol, two Meitei organisations, as among the many components that has fuelled the battle.

Arambai Tenggol was shaped in 2020 “under the aegis of the titular king of Manipur and BJP Member of Parliament Leishemba Sanajaoba”, a police officer advised me.

The Tenggol was initially shaped as a sociocultural organisation targeted on the revival of Sanamahi tradition and later took up arms. It earned a extra vigilante-like status in April final yr after it broke into the home of a Meitei Christian pastor who had allegedly insulted the Sanamahism religion.

The Arambai Tenggol is helmed by Tyson Ngangbam, who goes by the pseudonym “Korounganba Khuman”. (Korounganba is a standard Meitei identify meaning “sunshine” whereas Khuman is the identify of a clan.)

TRC despatched inquiries to Ngangbam via his social media account, which he has used throughout the battle. The report shall be up to date if he responds.

In January, in a present of power, Arambai Tenggol summoned 37 members of Manipur’s Legislative Assembly and two members of parliament from the state, together with RK Ranjan Singh, the federal minister of state for exterior affairs and schooling, for a gathering at Kangla Fort, the palace of the Meitei kings within the coronary heart of Imphal. It included lawmakers from the Meitei neighborhood throughout social gathering strains.

Ngangbam spelled out the group’s calls for, together with updating the National Register of Citizens, a course of by which the Indian authorities hopes to determine and exclude undocumented migrants.

The group additionally demanded abrogation of the Suspension of Operation – a peace settlement – with the Kuki-Zo armed teams, the relocation of refugees from Myanmar to the neighbouring state of Mizoram, border fencing alongside the Indo-Myanmar border, the withdrawal of the Assam Rifles from Manipur and the delisting of “illegal migrants” from the Scheduled Tribes listing – a transfer that will exclude Kuki-Zo folks from Myanmar from accessing the Indian authorities’s affirmative motion insurance policies. The lawmakers dedicated to again the calls for.

Meitei Leepun, which can be of latest origin, is perceived as influenced by the ideology of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the fountainhead of a spectrum of hardline Hindu organisations, together with the BJP. The chief of Meitei Leepun overtly professes allegiance to the state’s chief minister and BJP chief Biren Singh, a Meitei.

Both Meitei Leepun and Arambai Tenggol face accusations from Kuki leaders of spearheading assaults by the Meitei neighborhood towards their folks. While Arambai Tenggol leans in the direction of a stronger Meitei nationalist stance distinct from Hinduism, Meitei Leepun aligns with the Hindutva marketing campaign led by the RSS and BJP.

A Meitei Leepun chief, Pramot Singh, advised me: “We [the Meiteis] are followers of sanatana dharma. … If Meitei becomes extinct, the last outpost of sanatana dharma in Manipur is gone in the same manner Kashmiri Pandits are gone.”

Pramot Singh was referring to an upper-caste Brahmin group that lived in Kashmir however was compelled to flee within the Nineties as they confronted persecution and threats of violence by Kashmiri armed teams.

The Revivalists, in distinction, see Meiteis as distinct from the remainder of India with their very own cultural and non secular identification and an erstwhile Manipuri kingdom known as Kangleipak, which was merged by coercion into India in 1949.

The Assam Rifles presentation was silent on the political and enterprise underpinnings of the battle, the position of the federal authorities – underneath the BJP – and the Assam Rifles’ personal failings and alleged bias.

According to the Assam Rifles presentation, the battle is split into three phases: “initiate”, “mutate” and “stalemate”. It laid out how the character and character of the violence have modified via these levels.

My reporting over six months helped draw out particulars of what the paramilitary drive’s presentation talked about and what it neglected.

The initiation

The embers of the present battle – Biren Singh’s alleged political authoritarianism, onerous stance on poppy cultivation, undocumented immigration, demand for Kukiland and Meitei Revivalism – have lengthy smouldered.

But in April final yr got here the spark that ignited the simmering stress. This interval was referred to by the Assam Rifles presentation as “initiate”.

That month, the Manipur High Court had requested the state authorities to think about petitions for together with the Meitei neighborhood within the listing of Scheduled Tribes – the constitutional provision that within the case of Manipur contains property possession within the hilly areas dominated by Kukis. The Manipur Land Revenue and Land Reforms Act of 1960 permits solely Scheduled Tribes to purchase land within the hill areas.

Heeding a name by the All Tribal Students’ Union Manipur, the main tribal civil society organisation in Manipur, for a “solidarity march” within the hill districts the place tribal communities dominate, rallies had been held on May 3 in Senapati, Ukhrul, Kangpokpi, Tamenglong, Churachandpur, Chandel and Tengnoupal.

As the march was winding up within the city of Churachandpur, information unfold {that a} tyre had been set on hearth in entrance of the Anglo-Kuki Centenary Gate, which was constructed to commemorate the 1917-1919 Kuki rebellion towards the British.

Subsequently, a gaggle of younger folks approached the gate wielding weapons. Soon, phrase unfold, suggesting that “militants” had been scary the gang, Outlook journal reported. Within a few hours, rumours unfold via the state that Kuki mobs had been vandalising Meitei homes.

The Assam Rifles officers’ presentation stated the interval of battle beginning May 3 was characterised by “high intensity riots”, “selective targeting” and it was “orchestrated and led by militias”.

Mobs ran amok within the cities, significantly in Imphal, situated within the valley with a predominantly Meitei inhabitants.

“On the night of May 3 at 8pm, people wearing black shirts attacked us. We fired blanks, which forced them to retreat but just for some time,” stated 43-year-old L Ngampao Khongsai, who had been residing in Imphal’s Khongsai Veng space, a predominantly Kuki-Zo space.

According to Khongsai, a Kuki-Zo, the mob continued to assault the neighbourhood regardless of pushback from the safety forces. “They would be saying that Kuki should be killed and threw stones.”

Khongsai fled together with his household and hid at a close-by college. Like hundreds of others from the valley, he ran and made his technique to the Kuki-Zo-dominated Churachandpur district.

In the hill areas and nearer to the foothills, mobs attacked Meitei neighbourhoods. A pregnant Warepam Rameshwori was compelled to flee her village. “Our village is at the foothills in Tronglaobi Maning Leikai [in Bishnupur district] surrounded by Kuki villages. On May 3, the firing started. … [The Kukis] had sophisticated weapons and started firing at us, and we didn’t have any weapons to defend, so we ran away from there and found shelter at a relative’s home,” she stated.

Seventy-nine Kuki-Zo and 18 Meitei people misplaced their lives from May 3 to May 23, based on an Assam Rifles estimate. This interval additionally recorded a wave of assaults and looting of arms from police stations. According to the Assam Rifle evaluation, 5,668 weapons had been looted.

“[The state government] allowed the looting of arms. I mean, it is obvious because it is impossible for people to just enter the police stations and take out arms,” a retired police officer acquainted with the safety and intelligence operations within the area advised me.

“So the Meitei civilians and the rebel groups had gotten weapons and started maintaining vigilance in the town. … In response, the other side felt that the SoO [Suspension of Operations] arms people should get out and distribute weapons amongst the Kukis,” he stated.

The Suspension of Operations is the peace settlement signed amongst Kuki-Zo armed teams, the federal authorities and the Manipur authorities. The SoO requires Kuki-Zo militias to remain in designated camps and all their weapons be saved within the camp’s central armoury underneath the supervision of the state.

“The divide was complete, and that was the stage in the beginning when the political leadership should have cracked down very, very heavily,” the officer stated.

That didn’t occur. The battle unfold and mutated, the Assam Rifles presentation famous.

More than 8,000 experiences

TRC tried to redraw the preliminary interval of the battle by analysing 8,169 first info experiences (FIRs) – 5,818 had been filed in May and a couple of,351 in June.

An FIR is the primary grievance filed both by residents or police, which the police then have to analyze to find out whether or not against the law has been dedicated.

On May 3, an FIR was filed recording the preliminary set off of the violence between the 2 communities. According to the FIR filed by the authorities: “A huge [number] of Kuki and Meitei youths numbering about 1,500 clashed among each other and vandalised and burned down many houses of both communities at Torbung Bangla. In that, many houses numbering about 300 houses and some private vehicles were also burnt down by the rioters. The police personnel fire[d] some rounds of tear gas smoke bombs and other ammunition to disperse the mob.”

The looting of weapons was reported as beginning on May 4 with the primary registered incident being reported at Manipur Police Training College in Imphal. According to the FIR, “The large mob overpowered the sentry and broke the lock of arm kote room and looted a large number of arms and ammunitions [sic],” together with computerized rifles – 157 INSAS rifles, 54 SLR rifles and AK-47 rifles, amongst others. The looting of weapons continued till May 31, as recorded in these 8,169 FIRs.

In the primary two months of the battle, 7,831 instances of vandalism and incidents during which residents had been compelled to flee had been reported. In addition, 189 instances of killings, assaults – together with sexual assault – bodily hurt and lacking individuals, and 79 instances of mass looting of weapons had been additionally recorded.

Multiple FIRs had been almost similar or related. For occasion, on May 10, 76 FIRs filed within the Sagolmang police station in Imphal East District included an analogous grievance: “Some unknown persons holding arms and deadly weapons numbering about 1,000 suspected to be Kuki Community from different villages entered at [name of place] and damaged the properties as well as burnt the house.” The solely variations within the experiences had been the place names and the lists of broken gadgets.

An analogous pattern was seen within the police complaints filed by the opposing Kuki-Zo aspect.

“If a village with 40 households was burnt, there would be 40 complaints,” a second police officer stated on the situation of anonymity. According to him, the “identical” instances had been all mixed to assist the inquiry being led by a particular investigative crew.

The second part

According to the Assam Rifles presentation, the character of the battle started to alter on the finish of May.

This is the time when federal Home Minister Amit Shah made a four-day journey to Manipur to sew up a truce. By then, the federal authorities, in an unprecedented transfer, had appointed a federal officer accountable for all safety and policing operations within the state, bringing the state police and the federal paramilitary and military underneath one command.

The federal authorities might dismiss a state authorities and take over management of the state’s features if it believes “the constitutional machinery” has failed. The structure additionally requires the federal authorities to guard a “state against external aggression and internal disturbance”.

But on this case, the federal authorities saved its religion within the state authorities and didn’t invoke both of those constitutional provisions.

Again unprecedented, the federal government sought to realize a truce by drawing up an ethnic boundary, calling it a buffer zone, dividing the Kuki-Zo from Meitei-dominated areas and implementing this boundary via its armed forces.

Shah’s go to and the technique to impose a unified federal policing command and the buffer zone failed.

The violence abated in the principle Kuki-Zo or Meitei-dominated cities, however it shifted to rural areas. These rural areas, stretching from the Imphal Valley to the Kuki-dominated hills, are made up of small hamlets, villages and townships the place Meitei and Kuki folks have historically lived subsequent to one another.

Now, the villages of each communities got here underneath assault from armed teams on each side. A battle to forcibly create ethnic territories had kicked off.

This part stretched from May 23 to June 15.

On a September evening, after I visited the Meitei village of Singda Kadangband, situated on the fringe of the Meitei-dominated Imphal West district, its residents spoke concerning the sleepless nights that they had spent for the six months of the battle.

About 170 males from 165 households had been taking round the clock shifts to face guard at 10 bunkers arrange on the periphery of the village.

In early June, the villagers had been approached by Meitei fighters. “They came forward to help us, but we didn’t allow them. We are afraid that later they will take advantage of us,” stated N Bobi Singh, who had been organising the surveillance.

This is when the Assam Rifles presentation acknowledged teams of fighters from each communities received concerned.

The state has a protracted and troubled historical past with greater than 30 armed teams from totally different ethnic communities that decision it dwelling. They have fought for calls for that vary from separate nation-states to the creation of latest states inside India based mostly on ethnic identities.

Many of them draw sources from and camp in Myanmar. The affect of the Meitei armed teams, which had been significantly focused by the federal government’s armed forces, had been waning because the 2000s. And a majority of the Kuki-Zo armed teams had signed the SoO settlement with the federal government.

Researchers famous experiences of how the Indian armed forces, with the assistance of Kuki militias, have strategically remoted militia factions from different ethnicities. This allegation, coupled with a observe document of human rights violations and illegal killings, has considerably tarnished the Assam Rifles’ standing inside the Meitei neighborhood. The paramilitary is perceived as biased whereas the state police have confronted accusations of bias towards Kuki communities.

This battle gave the Kuki and the Meitei armed teams a brand new lease on life, in addition to resulting in the emergence of latest Meitei militias.

On the Kuki-Zo aspect, the teams sure by the ceasefire had begun from the preliminary levels to assist civilians who had taken up arms.

“Some of the [cadres] of the Suspension of Operations groups helped us set up the bunkers because they have experience,” stated 35-year-old Mimin Sithlou, the joint secretary of the defence committee underneath the Committee on Tribal Unity, a conglomerate of civil society organisations functioning largely in Kangpokpi district, who oversaw the administration of the bunkers there.

The involvement of those cadres put the “VBIGs under pressure” to additionally be a part of the battle to battle on behalf of the Meitei neighborhood, the Assam Rifles doc famous. VBIGs are valley-based rebel teams, referring to the older Meitei-affiliated armed teams.

They started “providing arms and ammunition”, consolidating their base and “increasing recruitment and ideological support”, the presentation stated.

As militias on both aspect of the divide started amping up recruitment and coaching of younger folks, significantly from rural areas, the battle would generally ebb however then decide up once more. The stalemate got here into being.

The stalemate

In Haipi village, situated about 15km (10 miles) from the trenches dug on the border of Kangpokpi district, Christmas handed with none celebrations for Janggoulun Kipgen’s household.

I first met 19-year-old Kipgen in one of many bunkers in September. “We were trained for five to six days back in our village,” he advised me, holding a rifle.

On December 25, sitting inside her home in Haipi, Kipgen’s mom, Neinkhongah Kipgen, advised me: “Who won’t fear to send their son to the front lines? We can only pray that he’s safe.”

Meitei civilians in villages like Singda Kadangband additionally face an analogous dilemma. The nights appear infinite, and the times are spent with unceasing uncertainty.

“Except for the 60+-year-olds, everyone is expected to do 24-hour shifts,” a villager who didn’t want to be named, advised me again in September. “I have a one-year-old baby and work as a welder. I feel scared, but we don’t have much choice.”

“This will have a long-lasting impact, particularly on the young and future generations. They have guns to defend their community, but that is not exactly how it will pan out. The person might use it to solve personal enmity. Then some unemployed people might start extortion. Then there can be cases of mistaken identity killing and then revenge killing. It is going to become a vicious cycle,” retired Lieutenant General Konsam Himalay Singh advised me.

What Lieutenant General Singh stated had begun to play out by December after I final reported from Manipur. Videos of gun-toting males within the valley and the hills had proliferated on social media. The armed “volunteers” had been being valorised on social media whereas in private areas, many spoke of the concerns of younger males being lured or recruited by militias, spawning a endless cycle of assault, revenge and turf conflict.

This is regardless of greater than 60,000 armed personnel of the federal authorities’s paramilitary forces, the military and the state police implementing a buffer zone dividing a big a part of the state into two ethnic territories that every neighborhood fears crossing.

On April 19, Manipur will vote — together with a number of different elements of the nation — even because the battle rages on between the 2 communities.

“The chief minister should have been thrown out. He is the head of state, and if he can’t be trusted, … the army and police should have gone on overdrive and taken control over the area, … but eventually, it was allowed to continue because when it simmers, your voting aggregate increases,” stated the retired police officer acquainted with the safety and intelligence operations within the area.

The second a part of this sequence seems to be on the position of the drug commerce, politics and armed teams in holding Manipur on a boil.

Angana Chakrabarti is an affiliate member of The Reporters’ Collective.

(With inputs from Harshitha Manwani, Mohan Rajagopal, Aryan Chaudhary and Vedant Kottapalle)