Mayhem continues in Manipur

Lalrameng Hmar, 51, was unsure of what awaited her at M’s residence. All her nightmares since May 3, 2023, when ethnic violence began to engulf Manipur, had suddenly become a reality. Zairawn, her village, located 7 km from Jiribam market, had come under attack from armed men, who she referred to as the Arambai Tenggol (Meitei militia) and the UNLF (the insurgent group United National Liberation Front). “Though we’ve been living in fear, we never believed we would be attacked,” Lalrameng said, still grappling with the confusion about the attack on the night of November 7.

When the Arambai Tenggol and the UNLF (Pambei) attacked Zairawn, everyone except 31-year-old M managed to escape. Her husband, Sang, had come face to face with the armed men. “They were armed and in black, had bullet vests on, and a multicoloured flag on their sleeves. They warned us to leave immediately,” Sang recounted. The couple rounded up Sang’s ailing parents and their three children and stepped out of their home, just when gunfire rained on them. A bullet struck M, immediately restricting her mobility. Directing his parents to leave, Sang struggled to help his wife to her feet, amid her requests to get the children to safety. He decided to get his children to safety first, but by then it was too late for him to return for his wife.

Although a few villagers tried to rescue her, the number of armed men had swelled, Lalrameng said. They heard her pleas in English, as she could not speak Meiteilon, the language that the armed men were conversing in. The men left the village two hours later, burning down close to 20 houses and taking scooters and other valuables with them.

Lalrameng found what was left of M’s body buried beneath blankets, burnt and cut up beyond recognition. Parts of her body were strewn across the verandah of the house. An FIR was eventually registered by Sang, alleging that M was “raped and burnt alive” by “fully armed Meitei militants—Arambai Tenggol and MPA”. The Manipur People’s Army (MPA) is the armed wing of the UNLF (Pambei).

The post-mortem report noted the cause of M’s death as third-degree ante-mortem burns that covered 99 per cent of her body. It also stated that her skull, parts of her facial structure, and limbs were found separate from the body, burnt. “I just feel numb. I knew when I saw her body that nobody would care. When it comes to us, justice is dead,” Lalrameng said, disillusioned at the procedures that followed deaths like this in the country.

The gruesome killing set off a chain of events, with more than 20 people dying in the days that followed and Jiribam sinking into the annals of public memory as yet another district that had succumbed to the violence in the State.

Nineteen months into the violence in Manipur, every episode leaves the State more scarred, with new enmities and divisions emerging that can no longer be defined merely by the buffer zones created to separate the Meitei and the Kuki-Zo. With inaction and collusion by the State government, the fate of the people of Manipur remains uncertain.

Breakdown of constitutional safeguards

What remains constant, though, is the breakdown of almost every constitutional safeguard for citizens, along with the continuing failure on the part of media agencies to etch Manipur in the national psyche as a State desperately in need of sensible intervention.

What happened in Jiribam is crucial in understanding the role of the State administration in pulling the district over a year into the whirlpool of violence. During the mayhem in 2023, Jiribam, as a district, responded differently from the rest of Manipur. Elsewhere, Kuki-Zo and Meitei populations fled in opposite directions, with the Meitei displaced from all Kuki-Zo districts and the Kuki-Zo from Meitei districts.

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From the last week of May until September, many Kuki-Zo villages in the periphery areas were burnt down by mobs and armed men from various Meitei insurgent groups. Security forces created buffer zones to divide the warring factions and began to patrol the areas.

As the months passed by, the State saw a proliferation of weapons and sporadic incidents of crossfire by armed groups on both sides. Civilians rarely got caught in it except for attacks such as the one in Koutruk and Thangbuh in September in what were clear attempts to kill (see “Lethal crossfire”,Frontline, October 18, 2024). On such occasions and when armed men from either group got killed, tensions escalated in the buffer zones, with both sides rushing for combat. This would go on for a couple of days until the Central forces intervened.

Every wave of violence has followed the same pattern. There have also been instances where civilians from either side have ventured into the enemy territory and eventually gone missing or are found dead. On a few occasions some have returned alive.

Non-aggression agreement

However, Jiribam was relatively peaceful thanks to a non-aggression agreement reached upon after May 2023 by all communities living there. This was possible only because of Jiribam’s demographic peculiarity wherein Bengalis formed the majority community, not the Meitei or the Kuki.

In Jiribam town, the Meitei constitute the majority community, while in rural Jiribam, the predominant group is the Hmar tribe, belonging to the Kuki-Zo community. Thus, as the rest of Manipur raged, Jiribam remained calm, with people coexisting as before, albeit with apprehension.

Security forces posted in Jiribam told Frontline that other than minor incidents, the situation prevailed until the UNLF (Pambei) set up its base in the district, almost immediately after it signed a peace agreement with the government on November 29, 2023. Jiribam had been a stronghold of the UNLF before counterinsurgency operations in the 2000s flushed them out of India. With the return of the UNLF (Pambei) faction, its role in orchestrating many killings in Manipur has been reported; even the National Investigation Agency (NIA) has taken note of it. Yet, none of its members has been arrested, which critics say point to the State administration’s role in covertly protecting them. According to reports, the insurgents revived their former hideouts in Jiribam and carried out indiscriminate firing over the months.

In the second week of May this year, a Kuki man went missing. His body was found in a ditch a week later. Two weeks later, on June 6, a Meitei man was found dead. Within hours of his killing, the Assam Rifles is reported to have spotted the Arambai Tenggol and the UNLF (Pambei) burning down Kuki-Zo properties in Jiribam town. As all the residents fled, one Kuki-Zo man was abducted and is still missing. A group of the Arambai Tenggol even fired at the Assam Rifles personnel who were guarding the Kuki-Zo village of Rani Veng. The next day, armed Hmar insurgents set fire to a Meitei village, displacing all its residents.

Violence continued in June, but despite reports on the role of the UNLF (Pambei) and the Arambai Tenggol in steering the mob violence, the State government took no action. This reporter saw armed men belonging to both groups roaming freely in the Meitei area of Jiribam. The Arambai Tenggol’s office is situated inside a government institution.

Meanwhile, the Assam Police shot dead three unarmed Hmar men across the border. The Assam government alleged that these men were militants who tried to attack the police, even though videos state the contrary.

As instances of firing increased, in August, the State administration, curiously, summoned the Hmar tribe, leaving out other Kuki-Zo tribes, and asked them to sign a peace agreement with the Meitei. The then Superintendent of Police, Pradeep Singh, told this reporter that the Meitei do not have any enmity towards the Hmars. “But they won’t sit across the Kuki-Zo and talk peace,” he said.

Despite protests from Hmars, Chief Minister N. Biren Singh made a public relations exercise of this agreement signed behind closed doors and announced that peace was being restored in Jiribam under his initiative. This announcement by Biren coincided with the nth call for him to resign.

And it could not have been further from the truth. In the following months, instances of firing, kidnappings, violence, and extortion only increased in Jiribam, and people from both sides fled their homes either to relief camps or across to Assam.

While the displaced Meitei received state support in relief camps in Jiribam town, the displaced Kuki-Zo were left to fend for themselves in relief camps in Assam. Many of these camps have been shut down owing to lack of resources.

The Hmars had bought into the illusion created by the State administration that they would not be subject to any harm. Lalrameng’s shock reflects the initial response of the entire community.

“We just didn’t think this would happen. We didn’t even have armed men in our village doing regular duty as volunteers, we believed that the CRPF [Central Reserve Police Force], which has a camp in the middle of our village, was enough to protect us,” Joelthang Hmar, the chief of Zairawn, told Frontline.

Those who fled their homes on November 7 said that the CRPF did not come to their rescue in spite of the fact that its camp was nearby. During peace talks, Hmar residents, including those from Zairawn, who had fled to Assam in June were told to return, with the reassurance from the Manipur Police that they would be protected.

Senior leaders of the Hmar Inpui, the apex tribal body, explained that the shock of the attack and the brutal manner in which M was killed reminded them of their experience at the hands of the UNLF in the 1990s and 2000s. InJanuary2006, more than 400 Hmar men were beaten up and 15 girls were raped by insurgents belonging to the UNLF and the Kangleipak Communist Party in Pherzawl, the adjoining district.

David Theik, a Hmar, was burnt to death in August 2023. Even though photographs and videos surfaced on social media of his killers, prosecution is yet to be initiated. Joelthang said the State administration was apathetic to their plight. Many in the village initially thought even registering an FIR in the case of M’s killing was a futile exercise.

This partisan behaviour and a breakdown of the criminal justice system have driven many to take matters into their own hands in pursuit of what they call justice.

Over the next couple of days, according to information pieced together from the accounts of a few Hmar individuals, Hmar insurgents, who by then had increased in number, carried out patrols across rural Jiribam, which culminated in an attack on the Meitei settlements surrounding the Borobekra police station. The armed men had planned to burn down all Meitei settlements, but many Meiteis had already taken shelter within the precincts of the police station, venturing out only during the day.

The November 11 incident

On November 11, the Hmar men left in four “share-autos” for Jakhurdhor, a few hundred metres from the Borobekara police station. According to eyewitness accounts, on reaching the area at around 2:30 pm, they asked the Meiteis present there to leave. As the Meiteis fled, the Hmars started burning down the properties, in the presence of some CRPF personnel. The Hmars seemed to have told the CRPF personnel that they would leave after burning down all the properties.

After 15 minutes, the CRPF personnel apparently asked the Hmar men to lower their weapons and leave. A statement by the Hmar Inpui reads: “As the men were huddling together, a bullet proof vehicle of the CRPF came and suddenly opened fire that killed the Hmar Village Volunteers. The CRPF personnel also captured three injured volunteers and spaded them to death.”

The photographs of the bodies taken during post-mortem, which are available with Frontline, reveal deep gashes, suggesting that the 10 men killed were not just fired at but were also attacked with other weapons.

The CRPF has denied the Hmar Inpui’s allegations, but eyewitnesses told Frontline that the attack by the Hmars was directed at the Meitei properties located close to the CRPF post, not the post or the police station. Other than the CRPF and the Manipur Police, the Assam Rifles told Frontline that by the time they got to the area, which was 15 minutes after they were notified of the altercation, half the men were already dead. The Assam Rifles, which has a post 500 metres away, said it did not witness any crossfire.

A protest against the recent killing of three women and three children in Manipur’s Jiribam, in Kolkata on November 18.
| Photo Credit:
PTI

Subash Singh, a resident of Jakhurdhor who was living in a relief camp inside the police station campus, said all of the Meiteis present in and around the area ran in different directions and into the jungle out of fear of getting killed. He believes that the six of them (three women, two children, and one infant) were abducted in one of the autos that the Hmars had used earlier in the day.

A week-long search for the hostages turned futile. Later, the bodies of all six, one after the other, were found floating on the Jiri river. The dead have been identified as Yurambam Rani, 66; Laishram Heitombi, 25; her two young children, L. Chingkheinganba, 2, and L. Lanngamba, 10 months old; Telem Thoibi, 30; and T. Thajanganbi, 8.

With the news of the abduction and cold-blooded killings of Meiteis at Jiribam, Imphal erupted in protests. Mobs targeted properties of legislators, including that of the Chief Minister. Offices of the RSS and the BJP were also vandalised, while civil society organisations demanded immediate action against the insurgents.

Facing yet another demand for his resignation, Biren Singh issued a video statement promising that “everything necessary is being done to hunt down the Kuki terrorists who killed the six innocent Meiteis and they will be brought to justice”.

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Significantly, neither the ordeal of M, whose killing began this leg of violence, nor the arrest of her perpetrators found any mention in this message. A bureaucrat who formerly served in Manipur told Frontline that such partisan behaviour was there much before the violence began in the State. “This is how this CM functions.”

The Union Home Ministry has issued statements saying that more columns of the Central Armed Police Forces are being sent to Manipur, while three crucial cases pertaining to the violence at Jiribam have been transferred to the NIA. This when many crimes committed in 2023 are yet to see prosecution.

Movement of more troops does not mean much when the absence of political will is evident, often leading to tiffs between different forces. The CRPF and the Border Security Force have to act according to the instructions of the local Superintendent of Police, whereas the Assam Rifles acts on its own accord. There have been multiple instances where both have been at loggerheads with each other, thus making their presence counterproductive. In Jiribam, the Assam Rifles has stated this as the main reason for not being able to keep the district from sinking further into violence. With the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) reimposed in six regions, including Jiribam, it remains to be seen what the Assam Rifles can accomplish. Within two days of the six killings, a Meitei mob set many properties and churches of the Kuki-Zo on fire. This is after the AFSPA was reimposed.

With the continuing failure of the state, it seems the word justice has been replaced with revenge by armed men in Manipur, with women and children being the worst victims of violence. Critics lay the blame for every killing on the Centre, which has refused to intervene in the months gone by.

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.