New Delhi: On October 24, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) supremo Mohan Bhagwat squarely blamed ‘external forces’ for the Manipur violence.
Much as it matches the stand taken by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) governments at the Centre and in Manipur, it, nevertheless, comes off as a strident attempt at narrative correction by the top Hindutva leader – perhaps to garb the right-wing outfit’s own powerlessness in the Northeast.
Soon after the ongoing violence broke out in Manipur on May 3, the narrative in both local and national media was set. It broke out during a tribal solidarity march carried out in all hill districts of the state against the Manipur high court’s order to the state government that it should recommend the inclusion of the Meitei community in the Scheduled Tribes (ST) list.
In quick succession, we saw the line shifting to ‘narco-terrorism’, allegedly by “illegal” Kukis. It was particularly vented not just by the Meitei-faction of the BJP in the state but also the Sangh parivar across the country. Peddling of drugs within the state, and from outside the international border, has been a matter of concern not just in Manipur but in some other northeastern states too. However, in a state where the incumbent chief minister was once accused by a police officer in an affidavit in the high court for asking her to “go slow” on a drug kingpin (from the Kuki community), it was only a matter of time before that narrative lost steam.
Lo and behold, it did. None other than the chief minister, N. Biren Singh, began telling select local and national media outlets that ‘external forces’ infiltrating Manipur through the open border with strife-torn Myanmar piloted the violence that left hundreds dead and injured and displaced at least 70,000 people belonging to both Kuki and Meitei communities.
The same narrative was mouthed by Bhagwat at his annual Vijayadashami address to the cadres at the RSS headquarters in Nagpur. The Hindutva ideologue said:
“Why, and by whom, was an attempt made to give a communal tinge to this mutual conflict between the Manipuri Meitei and Kuki communities, who were apprehensive about the future of their existence? Who has a vested interest in trying to drag and besmirch an organisation like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which has been engaged in serving everyone without any bias for years, into this unfortunate incident without any reason? Which foreign powers may be interested in taking advantage of such unrest and instability in Manipur, located between Nagabhoomi and Mizoram in this border area? Does the geopolitics of Southeast Asia also have a role in these events?”
His utterance came across as an attempt to separate the RSS from the Manipur violence, perhaps because local rightwing outfits with alleged links to it – like the Arambai Tenggol and Meitei Leepun – were widely alleged to have a hand in the attack on the Kukis in the valley areas.
More importantly, Bhagwat’s words miss a peculiar element within societies across the Northeast, which organisations like the RSS, hinged on religious hegemony, find hard to crack.
Across large parts of the country, caste and religion can play a determining role in huddling a society under one umbrella. In the northeastern belt, what cements a group of people as one is the strong sense of community. Pluck out from recent history any bloody strife that rocked the region and you will find that fear of one community losing its power to another is at its root. Not religion or caste. It is this strong sense of community that gives agency to any grouping of people across the region, whether it is a majority or minority.
This factor was seen playing out in the Kuki-Meitei clashes too. Kukis may be a minority in Manipur but are certainly not voiceless; not cowering against a community which is in greater numbers in their state and also has in Biren Singh, a chief minister perceived as batting only for his Meitei community. The agency required to put up a fight was drawn from the neighbouring Mizos, their kindred tribe. Mizoram chief minister Zoramthanga soon acted as the equivalent of Biren Singh for the Kukis of Manipur.
It is this sense of community that also kicks up a peculiarity during a riot or violent situation in the Northeast. While Church and Hindutva leaders were going all out in the media, counting the number of churches and temples burnt respectively during the Manipur violence, on the ground, Meitei Christians were accusing the Kuki Christians of setting fire to their churches. Clearly, then, religion appears to have played a subservient role to the sense of community. If those accusations were true, Meitei Christians were lumped in by the Kukis with the Meities who are Vaishnavites and followers of Sanamahism. Ditto the case with some recent attacks against the Meitei Pangals or Muslims in the Kwakta area that borders the Kuki-dominated Churachandpur.
A protest in Manipur against the killing of a Meitei pangal man. Photo: By arrangement
A small section within the Kukis is Bnei Menashe, or Jewish. Wilson Hangshing, an MLA and co-founder of the Kuki People’s Alliance, who has been an important voice in the national media for the Kukis during the Manipur clash, belongs to that community. But religious identity was never a factor when it came to joining hands with the rest of the Kukis, who are mostly Christian. It is also this sense of community and kinship that pivots the Mizoram government’s refusal of orders from New Delhi to push back the Chin refugees into Myanmar.
In the run-up to the 1983 Nellie riots of Assam too, the sense of community played out. Multiple instances of violence were noted where villagers attacked villagers from other communities. E. Rammohan, who was an Assam police officer then, notes in his book Simply Khaki: A Policeman Remembers that a group of Assamese Muslims attacked Muslims of East Bengal origin in the state’s Darrang district. Clearly, then too, community was the pivot.
In the all-so-common insider-outsider conflicts that break out across the Northeast, religion more often than not takes a backseat when posed against the idea of community. Take the Chakmas of Arunachal Pradesh. They may be Buddhist, like a section of people in the state, but it is never a concession when it comes to counting who comes under the umbrella of Arunachalee as a whole. The BJP-RSS have a strong base in both the Chakma and Arunachalee communities, but have not been able to bring them under one umbrella even after years of work.
In recent times, when the National Register of Citizens (NRC) was being updated in Assam under the BJP, religious polarisation of the society was seen to be at its peak. That the state has a considerable population of Muslims of Bengali origin has helped matters for both Hindu and Islamic forces to blow their trumpets. However, by the time the Union government brought in the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), the old equations came to the fore. Firm lines of division were drawn not as per religion but community. Much as the BJP-RSS and chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma kept prodding the Assamese community to ‘identify the enemy’, the Bangladeshi Hindus found no acceptance. The religious card was thrown by the wayside when Guwahati saw a large crowd of anti-CAA protesters hitting the roads, mouthing the 17th century Sufi saint Azan Fakir’s Jikir, ‘Hindu or Muslim, we are the children of the same god…’
A protest in Guwahati against the CAA. Photo: Dr Vikramjit Kakati/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
The violence in Manipur has uncanny similarities with the ‘Assam problem’ of the 1980s – the bogey of ‘illegal immigrants’. Even then, there is a variation. In Assam, a sub-nationalist movement led by the majority Assamese community began tilting towards religion (read Hindu) in later decades (until the anti-CAA movement against accepting Hindu Bangladeshis in Assam broke that continuity). In Manipur though, it began as a religious assertion with the involvement of groups like Arambai Tenggol and Meitei Leepun but is now gradually leaning towards an assertion of Meitei sub-nationalism.
In other words, a sense of community overrides that of religion. For outfits structured around religious hegemony, Manipur may prove a puzzle hard to solve.
