Kakching/Kangpokpi/Churachandpur (Manipur) and New Delhi: With violence in Manipur still on the boil, people at the Imphal International Airport too are not feeling safe. Worse, the lone Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) woman officer belonging to one of the two warring factions in Manipur was advised on Wednesday to leave the airport for her security by her superiors. The CISF guards all the civilian airports in India.
On Thursday, June 15, the woman officer took a flight to Aizawl, capital of the neighbouring Mizoram state. Along with her flew two more people – a pastor, Hencha Kipgen, and his wife – belonging to the Kuki community who had been stuck at the airport for three days till June 14.
Kipgen is a pastor at Moreh Baptist Church, located in Manipur’s Moreh town. He and his wife had flown to Chennai from Imphal on June 9. Three days later, they landed back in Imphal to go to Moreh, which is 107 km away. They were informed by friends that it would be unsafe to travel by road. “Besides airport authorities, a friend also strictly told us that we would be frisked by Meiteis on the way and will not be able to make it to the destination, on any pretext,” Kipgen told The Wire on the phone on June 14 from the airport.
Watch: How a Church in Manipur’s Churachandpur Has Become the Only Source of Support for Kukis
The couple tried to take a helicopter service the very first day it landed in Imphal – the cost per seat being Rs 2,000. However, midway into the flight, the pilot told them that it would not be possible to land due to inclement weather and they ended up back at the airport again. There was no way they could have gone out of the airport. “And the airport authorities told us we could not stay there also. We were stranded,” his wife said.
The airport authorities, then, introduced the couple to the woman CISF officer of their community whose home was on the airport premises. She gave them shelter on June 12. The next morning the couple was told that due to bad weather, the helicopter services would remain suspended for a week.
“While we continued to stay put at the CISF officer’s house on June 13, at night we heard commotion from a group which wanted to storm the airport premises. Somehow, it was shooed away,” Kipgen said.
Entrance to Imphal airport. Photo: Yaqut Ali/The Wire.
But the couple and the woman officer were asked to leave the airport premises as early as they could. Consequently, on June 15, they flew to Aizawl.
The woman officer was not ready to speak on the record, citing duty rules. While the couple narrated her story, the airport authorities also confirmed that the woman officer was asked to proceed on leave for security reasons.
In the first part of this series, The Wire narrated the stories of villagers who are now in relief camps after having lost their lives and livelihoods, and are completely uncertain about their future.
Essential services like travel, hospitals and education are badly hit. A senior official of the district hospital at Churachandpur – a Kuki dominated area – said that all 13 Meitei doctors there have been transferred to districts where the latter community is dominant. The Meitei doctors had requested transfers citing security reasons. This has resulted in a shortage of doctors at the hospital, which currently has 49 Kuki doctors. Even the four Naga doctors have fled. This is the condition of many hospitals in the state, where healthcare workers don’t want to work in an area where their community is a minority.
When The Wire went to Churachandpur in the last week of May after a fresh escalation of violence, a surgery department doctor said that they had to put elective surgeries on hold due to shortages of medicine and equipment. On June 14, the administrator of the hospital mentioned above said, “We have now received two consignments from Imphal, but it’s limited.”
The surgical ward at Churachandpur district hospital. Photo: Yaqut Ali/The Wire.
“We are asking for more but they [the state health department] are not sending on the pretext that the medicine might be looted by mobs on the way to Churachandpur,” she added. This did not come as a surprise to us because when we travelled to the district, we saw blockades built by Meitei communities on the national highway, who said they would ‘inspect’ every vehicle and ask where it was going and why.
Such blockades have been built by both communities, depending on which one dominates a given area.
“Since there is limited supply of medicines for our department, especially anaesthesia drugs, for example, we are rationing their use even now,” the surgery department doctor of the Churachandpur hospital told me over the phone on June 14.
It is just not the doctors who are fearful. A middle-aged Meitei woman, who is with the state government’s revenue department and works in Churachandpur, told The Wire that she is scared to go back. She is the wife of a senior IPS officer of the state.
“Worse, I fear how the awkwardness in our minds towards colleagues of the other community would get resolved even when the violence ceases,” she said and wondered if their interaction would ever be the same again. The identities of these government officials have been withheld at their request.
Also Read: Manipur: Amidst Fresh Rounds of Violence, Security Forces Battle Deep Distrust
Going a step further, some said they prefer a wall in place between the two communities – literally. Forty-five-year-old Usha Rani is a Meitei woman from Napat village in Manipur’s Bishnupur district. Her house was burnt on the night of May 28. The Wire met her at a school-turned camp at Kakching district four days after the incident. Her village borders a Kuki one and the communities used to visit each other’s homes on various festivals till the violence began. When I asked her if she would restart the practice once the violence ceases, she said, “Forget about talking to them. We don’t even want to live anywhere close.”
“It would be best if a wall is constructed between the two villages that no one is able to cross,” Rani hastened to add.
But there are some who still see a glimmer of hope. Kim Khongsai, a 60-year-old man, had a house in Imphal till it was torched in the first week of May. After many detours and punctuations, Khongsai reached another school-turned-camp at Model Government School in Kangpokpi, where The Wire met him.
When a Kuki pastor, whose house was also burnt and who was telling us that he would never be friends with Meiteis again, Khongsai interrupted him. “Friends are friends! They are not the ones who wronged us,” he said.
Khongsai said his Meitei friends called him to know about his well-being after he fled home. “I told my friend that he should have controlled his men who came as a mob. It was his duty. He said sorry in reply,” Khongsai said, adding that his friend also said he had no control over the mob – just like Khongsai himself didn’t have control over the Kuki mob that was burning Meitei homes.
Women gathered to create a road blockade in Manipur. Photo: Yaqut Ali/The Wire.
This conversation was much in contrast to an environment where the two communities are neither ready to talk nor venture into each other’s areas at all, fearing arson.
Similar loss, but a different tale
Annie Gangte, a second-year undergraduate student at Imphal’s D.M. College and a Kuki, lost her father to a mob after he went to the police station for help when they attacked his home. Gangte was at an army relief camp when her father was guarding their home in the village before the mob came.
The death of her father came as a shock to her because the elders of her family had hidden the news from her for several hours, saying he was safe. He was beaten and later burned to death. “When I got the news I hesitated to cry – because I am shy, and also I didn’t want to cry in front of my mother,” Gangte says while bursting into tears – this time, right in front of her mother at a camp in Kangpokpi’s district community hall, where they reached on May 16.
She says she had some Meitei friends. “The Meiteis have killed my dad. I can never think of talking to any of them again in my life,” she says in a teary but angry voice. The Wire could not confirm the circumstances leading to her father’s death.
But her anger also germinates from the fact that along with her father, her dream to study was also gone. “I have a younger sister (16 years old) and a brother (11 years old). How are they going to study if I don’t find a job,” she wondered. Besides her mother, there are grandparents in the family as well.
Annie Gangte. Photo: Yaqut Ali/The Wire.
Like Gangte, Nigan Oilliam is also a student, albeit studying in Class 11. “If I don’t continue my studies then my parents’ hope is finished. And my future is in the dark (sic),” she said in English. Nigan has two younger siblings and her father is a carpenter. Her grandparents also live with her mother and father in a village, while she used to study at a government school in Imphal, staying with her aunt, who used to work as a domestic worker.
They have lost their home in the violence and her father has no earnings as of now. Therefore, she fears she won’t be able to continue her studies. She was talking to The Wire at S. Molnom Village School Camp in Kangpokpi district on May 30.
Asked if she considers her Meitei friends to be responsible for her plight as Gangte does, she replied, “As a human being there will be sometime war, and sometime problem (sic).”
“But, for now, if I can go there [back to her school] I think I will talk to her [Meitei friend]. They are my friends. They are my bench-mates,” she added, but worried that her parents might stop her from talking to her Meitei friends.
“Some Meiteis might be bad but not the ones who are my friends,” she said.
While the stories of Annie and Nigan tell us about the conflict’s long-term social and mental impacts even on children and teenagers, they also present a picture of uncertainty about the future of education in the state.
Watch: Weapons in the Shadows: A Glimpse Into Violence in Manipur
Nengneibah, a 31-year-old research scholar at Manipur University’s history department, fled the women’s hostel after a mob suddenly entered her room on the fateful night on May 3. “When the mob was banging at my door, I switched off the lights and hid in the washroom. Ultimately they broke the door of my room,” she said while talking to The Wire from Guwahati, where she fled to after that night.
“I was sweating and soaking in fear till the time the boys stayed in my room looking for me … Those 15 minutes are still a nightmare for me and I don’t think I will ever be able to go back, whatever be the fate of my research,” she said.
If educational institutes have not been spared, how could religious places be? According to various Kuki civil society organisations, more than 200 churches and 20 temples have been burnt.