Insurgency: BJP bluster belies ground reality in Manipur

Long before COVID-19 hit the world, masked men pulling rickshaws on the streets of Imphal was a common sight—their faces covered with handwoven khudei (cotton towels). The face covers though were not meant to ward off any virus, but to hide the rickshaw pullers’ identity from their acquaintances and avoid the embarrassment. For, most of them were educated youth who had taken up the menial job after failing to secure a decent means of livelihood.

Indeed, at least 25 per cent of Imphal’s 30,000-odd rickshaw pullers had completed school education, a study by Manipur University’s department of anthropology found a decade ago.

But the khudei wasn’t enough to hide the grim reality of a state where a lack of industrialisation and private enterprises as well as limited job opportunities in the government sector led to a high rate of unemployment — making it an ideal breeding ground for insurgency.

The khudei-covered rickshaw pullers though are no longer omnipresent on the streets of Imphal as several of the youth now work as delivery boys. “The job of a delivery boy is the only decent employment opportunity available since the state has not made much progress in terms of development and industrialisation to create ample employment avenues,” says S Rohan Meitei, a delivery boy with a food delivery aggregator.

Rohan’s disenchantment about the dismal job scenario is backed by the government’s own data. According to the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) data for 2019-20 provided by the Union Labour and Employment Ministry in the Lok Sabha in July this year, the proportion of workers in the state’s total population (15 years and above) is 45.5 per cent. This means the majority of the population is not actively contributing to the production of goods and services.

Manipur’s unemployment rate at 9.5 per cent in 2019-2020 is the second highest, only behind Nagaland (25.7 per cent), among all northeastern states, and is much higher than the national average of 4.8 per cent, as per the survey. In fact, the state’s unemployment rate slightly increased from the previous year’s (2018-19) figure of 9.4 per cent.

The poor unemployment rate only reflects the general governance deficiency in the state. A Bengaluru-based independent think tank, Public Affairs Centre, in its 2021 index has ranked Manipur as the worst-governed small state in the country.

Due to this high unemployment percentage coupled with overall underdevelopment, poor governance and general sense of isolation from ‘mainland’ India, militancy in the state has emerged as an alternate thriving means of livelihood.

Insurgency and unemployment

Driven by strong “economic motives”, the insurgency which began in the state based on seemingly genuine grievances and ideology with the formation of the United National Liberation Front (UNLF) under the leadership of Samrendra Singh in 1964, transformed into a cottage industry over the years driven by numerous competing groups.

There are around 13 major militant groups and more than 25 ragtag armed outfits operating in the state at present, running a parallel economy by collecting what they call “tax” from houses, businesses, commercial vehicles, government officials and at times even from government departments. Another major source of earning for these militant groups is siphoning off development funds.

The complex milieu becomes more complicated because of the strong sense of “otherness” prevailing among the state’s diverse ethnic population resulting in the sprouting of competing ethnicity-based militant outfits with Meitei groups controlling the valley and Nagas and Kukis the surrounding hills.

The rise of Meitei insurgency is largely attributed to two developments that took place immediately after India’s independence. First, the annexation of Manipur into the Indian Union on October 15, 1949 following a squalid drama that saw Maharaja Bodhchandra Singh being coerced to sign the Merger Agreement after being put under house arrest in Shillong where he was invited by the Government of India for talks.

The second development was the ceding of the Kabaw Valley, which had been under de facto control of Burma (now Myanmar) though it was regarded as an integral part of Manipur, to the neighbouring country by India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru during his Burmese counterpart U Nu’s visit to India in 1953.

The resentment over these developments snowballed into an armed insurrection with the formation of the UNLF in 1964. Since then the state remains a hotbed of insurgency with no peace overture so far succeeding in bringing any of the valley-based outfits to the negotiating table unlike in other northeastern states.

Currently, backchannel negotiations are on with some outfits in Manipur, but none among them has formally joined the peace process.

The tragic death of an Assam Rifles colonel, his wife, their eight-year-old son and four jawans of the paramilitary force in an ambush by militants in Churachandpur district on November 13 was another grim reminder of the grave law and order situation in the state and it belied the claim of normalcy by the BJP that rules the state where the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958, is in force (excluding the Imphal Municipal Council area).

Living in denial

In fact, BJP national president JP Nadda even last week claimed at a public meeting in Manipur’s Thoubal district that bloodshed and rule of insurgency in Manipur stopped after the BJP came to power.

The statistics, however, tell a different story. There were 261 terror-related incidents in the state in 2017, the year the BJP came to power in Manipur for the first time. Subsequently, there were 224 incidents in 2018, 250 in 2019, 113 in pandemic-hit 2020 and 163 incidents till November this year. Even the total terror-related casualties have seen a sharp rise this year taking the death toll to 25 from seven in 2020.

These figures certainly do not suggest that bloodshed and insurgency have stopped in Manipur as claimed by Nadda.

“Instead of creating a false sense of security, the ruling dispensation will do better if it wakes up to two hard realities that emerge from the November 13 ambush in Churachandpur,” said professor Khaba Kabi of the Rajiv Gandhi University, Arunachal Pradesh.

The ambush near India-Myanmar border was an indicator that the state’s insurgent groups are regrouping in Myanmar where the current military ruler is busy quelling the massive pro-democracy uprising following the February coup, said the professor.

The Myanmar Army, in coordination with its Indian counterpart, had launched Operation Sunrise in 2019 to flush out Indian insurgents operating from its soil. The last coordinated crackdown by the armed forces of the two countries against the rebels took place last winter.

“The situation has drastically changed since the coup. The junta is now too busy dousing the fire in its own house. There are also reports that to fight its opponents, Myanmar’s military regime is also taking help of the Indian militants, which is definitely a concern for Northeast India,” said an intelligence official based in Manipur.

He was referring to a recent statement issued by the Tamu Security Group (TSG), an outfit of civilian resistance fighters based in Myanmar’s bordering town of Tamu, near Moreh in Manipur. The TSG in a statement in September warned Meitei rebels against supporting Myanmar’s regime fighting the local People’s Defense Force.

The cooperation between Indian rebels and the Tatmadaw, the armed forces of Myanmar, would only aggravate the insurgency situation in the region in general and Manipur in particular, added Kabi.

Another significant development that the Indian security establishment should not lose sight of is that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and the Manipur Naga People’s Front (MNPF) have claimed responsibility for the November 13 attack, he said.

The PLA is the Meitei outfit and the MNPF is the Naga outfit. Such joint operations by two different ethnic militant groups are rare. It signals consolidation of diverse ethnic armed groups. Such consolidation will only give fillip to the insurgency in the state.

Meanwhile, youngsters like Rohan will continue to look for a way to wriggle out of the misery that decades of corruption, joblessness, insurgency and state excesses have brought upon Manipur.