Manipur: Caught in a lethal crossfire of historical animosities and modern weaponry

At the peak of counter-insurgency operations in Manipur in the mid-2000s, banned Meitei insurgent groups such as the United National Liberation Front (UNLF), the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), the Kanglei Yawol Kanna Lup (KYKL), and the People’s Revolutionary Party of Kangleipak (PREPAK) were driven out of Imphal Valley into the surrounding hill districts. As they built havens in the hills, the security forces were set on their trail. By 2005, Naga and Kuki-Zo groups had either signed or were on the verge of signing ceasefire agreements with the government. Talks with the Meitei groups, however, were ruled out since their political aspiration was liberation from India.

For the Army and paramilitary forces, heading into the hills in pursuit of the insurgents was not easy. What was new terrain for them was all too familiar for the insurgent groups. In an altercation in December of 2004, a 120-strong party of Central security forces was ambushed by 10 UNLF insurgents along the NH-2 in Manipur’s Churachandpur district and held down by an exchange of fire for four hours. The insurgents propped themselves against the edge of a hill overlooking the highway on which the party was travelling, which gave them a great attack advantage while allowing them to remain hidden.

The weapons they used varied from automatic guns, which by then had become the most common firearms across insurgent groups, to different kinds of grenade launchers. To ambush and engage a fully armed group of 120 personnel showed the insurgents’ training levels and access to ammunition.

Fast forward to September 2024. At least 11 people have been killed in a renewal of violence. The State government has accused suspected Kuki militants of using drones in West Imphal and rockets in Bishnupur to conduct attacks. One of the deaths was of 31-year-old N. Surbala in the Meitei periphery village of Koutruk. While reports suggested that she was killed by a “drone-bomb”, her 11-year-old daughter, Rojiya, who was also injured, told Frontline that her mother was shot dead. While Koutruk was bombed, security agencies told this writer that drones were not used to drop explosives.

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About 50 km away, at the Kuki village of Thangbuh, CRPF personnel told Frontline that 30 Meitei insurgents surrounded the village on September 8 and launched an attack. An FIR registered by the Manipur Police notes that bombs and guns were used in the attack. Shells recovered from the village reveal the use of automatic weapons and of bombs fired through an under-barrel grenade launcher.

Banned groups and deadly weapons

Manipur has now been caught in a violent conflict for over 16 months, with the most prominent feature of the conflict being the proliferation of deadly weapons that is taking place in plain sight, with both the Central and the State government seemingly helpless to curb it. There have been repeated news reports since May 2023—when Manipur first erupted with deadly clashes between the Meitei in the Imphal Valley and the Kuki-Zo in the hill regions of Manipur—that insurgents and mobs have looted the armouries of the police and the paramilitary and taken away sophisticated weapons.

In one such incident, 30 militants are alleged to have entered villages in Tengnoupal wearing costumes identical to police commando uniforms. After the raid, they were seen being escorted out of the district by the Manipur Police. Wearing uniforms resembling those of security personnel has become common among insurgent groups in Manipur. One such group is the Arambai Tenggol, whose members are often seen openly carrying arms in Imphal Valley. The group is said to enjoy the support of Chief Minister N. Biren Singh and other legislators and projects itself as a Meitei cultural group.

In May, The Hindu reported that the National Investigation Agency (NIA) had filed a charge sheet accusing a “China-Myanmar module” of the Isak-Muivah faction of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN-IM) of supporting two banned Meitei outfits, whose members were found with prohibited arms and ammunition. The NIA also noted the use of camouflage attire “to evade detection by security personnel”. While the NIA and the Army have repeatedly claimed that such groups are moving about freely in Imphal, many insurgents are now protected under the label of the UNLF (Pambei), a unit that signed a peace agreement in November 2023. A faction of the banned UNLF, the UNLF (Pambei) has been openly recruiting in Imphal Valley since its return. It was allegedly at the centre of the violence in Jiribam, the relatively peaceful district in Manipur that was plunged into violence in early September 2024. There has been no action against the UNLF (Pambei) or the Arambai Tenggol yet. Some security officers told Frontline that the UNLF (Pambei) serves as a front for insurgents of banned organisations.

Vehicles belonging to the UNLF (Pambei), flanked by armed Quick Reaction Teams, identical to the convoys of security forces, were spotted by this writer in both Imphal East and West. “I had to give way to one such convoy, bringing my own convoy to a halt,” a senior Army official told Frontline, underlining the ease with which such groups move about in Manipur. It brings to the fore the grim reality that the highly weaponised State now faces, with the presence of such armed groups taking Manipur back to the 1990s and 2000s, when the State saw a peak in insurgency, extortions, and extrajudicial killings.

Firearms and explosives did not walk into Manipur on May 3, 2023. It is important to understand the long and intimate history the region has had with weapons. Operation Blue Bird, for instance, dates back to 1987, when Assam Rifles, a paramilitary force, carried out an operation to recover arms from the NSCN. The Naga group had attacked an AR post, looting weapons and ammunition. In addition, the NSCN was also regularly transporting weapons from across the golden triangle into India. Operation Blue Bird, spread across two years, led to the recovery of many weapons but was also blamed for multiple human rights violations by AR personnel. In 2002, R.K. Meghen, the founder of UNLF, was arrested by the Burmese Army with another huge cache of weapons and bombs. The UNLF had to pay the Burmese Army millions of rupees to secure his release, as reported by the Swedish journalist Bertil Lintner in his book Great Game East. The money was raised by means of extortion and “taxing” the people of Manipur. The book also has detailed accounts of how insurgent groups from Manipur tried to access weapons through China and had bases spread across Myanmar.

The entry of firearms into the north-eastern region

Historically, firearms have found their way into India’s north-eastern region through modern-day Burma and Bangladesh or through the East India Company, as reported in various British archives. The Meitei kings of Manipur, faced with continuous attacks by Burmese kings, sought help from the British. Manipur here has to be understood as the Imphal Valley, along with Kabaw Valley, at the time. The British support to the Meitei from 1721 onwards included a supply of firearms. In 1824, an army called the Manipur Levy was raised by the British to regain Manipur from Burmese control. This brought more modern weapons into the armoury of the Manipur kings. The hills surrounding Manipur saw tribal village chiefs also procuring weapons, either from neighbouring markets or as gifts from the British to barter for peace since some of these tribes, referred to as the Lushai, would regularly mount attacks on British areas and their peripheries along the Imphal Valley.

To counter such attacks, some tribes that the British identified as “Kuki” were moved from the hills to the peripheries around the British-controlled areas as protection. The Kuki were armed and expected to defend the area from their sister tribes, be it the Lushai, Naga, or others. After the two World Wars, the exit of the Axis forces, and the departure of the British, the weapons left behind made their way into post-Independence Manipur as well.

The decades after Independence saw insurgency affect almost every tribal community in Manipur. The Nagas plunged into it from the start, followed by some Kuki-Zo tribes through the Mizo National Front (MNF), and the eventual birth of the Meitei separatist movement. Each had a tryst with weapons training, whether in Kachin in Myanmar, China, or East Pakistan. Compared with some of these groups, the present-day Kuki-Zo insurgent groups are new, although they carry the formative influence of the MNF.

A violent war

When the Naga-Kuki war hit Manipur in 1993, what started off as a resistance to Naga taxation in Kuki-Zo villages blew up into a violent war, with incidents such as the Joupi massacre. On September 13, 1993, as many as 110 Kukis, including women and children, were publicly massacred in and around Joupi village by the NSCN-IM. The following year, cadres of the Kuki National Front (KNF) pushed a bus down a gorge in Sinam Khul, assuming that all the travellers were Naga. Of the 37 killed, 30 were Naga, 5 were Meitei, and 2 were non-Manipuri. Such incidents continued until 1998 before eventually fizzling out. At this time the NSCN(IM) had a steady supply of weapons and trained cadres. The KNF and the Kuki National Army, formed later in 1988, were smaller and not as well armed.

Elders of the Kuki-Zo community told this writer how their villages used indigenous weapons, and often improvised upon them, to defend themselves. Pumpi, for example, a weapon unique to the Kuki-Zo, is an explosive made with pipes using a simple detonation technique. Gunpowder was made from extracts of nitrate and ammonia collected by segregating it from the soil where human or animal excreta had been disposed of.

Tongthang Haokip, who survived the Kuki-Paite war of 1997, said the traditional pumpi was improvised by introducing a trigger mechanism and a concealed trap to set it off. Pumpis would then be set up at village entrances as a defence mechanism. One such device was fired at a Meitei locality earlier this month, killing one and injuring six others. From such primitive weapons used since the 1990s to the present day, when the Kuki-Zo are alleged to have far more evolved weapons, there has been a marked shift in access to weapons for all sides in the bitter conflict.

A 2007 report of the Ministry of Home Affairs notes that “the location at the edge of the ‘golden triangle’ facilitates the unrestricted and illegal flow of drugs into India…. It is reported that the local insurgent groups are actively involved in drugs and arms trafficking. The smuggling of arms and ammunition, precious stones, and Chinese-made consumer items finds its way into India illegally.” By the 2000s, Manipur’s insurgent groups were using drug money to support their armed activities, much like their counterparts in Burma.

By end-2000, there was a pushback against Meitei separatists from the Manipur State government, and Operation All Clear was launched, which resulted in many “encounter” deaths and alleged police and paramilitary excesses. While Meitei insurgency was finally suppressed, the trade in drugs, arms, and various illegal substances remained unaffected in Manipur, facilitated by other insurgent groups, be it Naga or Kuki-Zo.

With the onset of the civil war in May 2023, all groups have gone back across the border and tapped into their old markets for weapons. The NSCN(IM) even acted as a reseller, supplying weapons to Meitei insurgent groups, as an NIA charge sheet alleged in May. The links of kinship and race complicate the issue further, reiterating the close ties that some of these groups share with the ethnic armed organisations in Myanmar. These complicated dynamics shroud the groups in confusion, but the State government and the Centre appear more interested in taking advantage of the confusion rather than stopping the influx and proliferation of arms. Armed groups in Manipur have often livestreamed their use of weapons and yet faced no action.

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Chief Minister Biren Singh has quite openly ranged himself on the Meitei side, calling the Kuki-Zo “illegal immigrants from Myanmar”, “drug peddlers”, and “poppy cultivators”. While successive arrests have been made by Central agencies in the hill districts, the same has not happened in the Imphal Valley, barring a few exceptions. A few months after police officer Moirangthem Amit Singh, an additional superintendent, was assaulted and almost killed by the Arambai Tenggol, Biren Singh referred to the group as social workers trying to “protect the territorial integrity of Manipur”. He has called the Central security forces ineffective and biased, even demanding that he be made head of the Unified Command, which has been coordinating the work of the security forces in Manipur and is headed by former bureaucrat and CRPF Director General Kuldiep Singh.

On September 16, the Chief Minister’s Office issued an advisory stating that 900 trained Kuki militants had infiltrated Manipur from Myanmar to carry out coordinated attacks on Meitei villages. On September 25, Kuldiep Singh and DGP Rajiv Singh issued a joint statement refuting the advisory. “The input was verified from different quarters, but it could not be substantiated on ground,” their statement read.

The spreading of unsubstantiated rumours has deepened the divide between the two ethnic groups and prevented peace or healing. The Chief Minister has not visited the hill districts since the onset of the violence, underscoring the deep rift, just as the Prime Minister has not visited Manipur since May 2023. Such an approach enforces a stalemate, which can only entrench the violence-protests-silence-violence cycle in Manipur.

Greeshma Kuthar is an independent journalist and lawyer from Tamil Nadu. Her primary focus is on investigating the evolving methods of the far right, their use of cultural nationalism regionally, and their attempts to assimilate caste identities into the RSS fold.