When Civilizational Nationalism Meets Subnationalism: The Crisis in Manipur

Abstract

The armed ethnic warfare that has been raging in Manipur since May of last year is unprecedented. It pits the state’s subnational majority Meiteis against Kukis—a subnational minority in the state. The ethnicization of law enforcement and the looting of arms from police stations by mobs have created a situation in the state that now resembles a civil war. There is ample evidence pointing to the fact that the state government bears the lion’s share of the responsibility for this violence. Proclaiming President’s Rule—dismissing the state government and assuming its functions—could have helped restore faith in the impartiality and integrity of state institutions. That New Delhi has chosen not to exercise this option provides important clues to what is at stake from the perspective of the ruling party and the Hindu nationalist establishment’s long-term political–ideological agenda. This political configuration has implications for the future of the Naga peace process.

The situation in Manipur has nothing to do with counterinsurgency and is primarily a clash between two ethnicities. It is a law-and-order kind of situation, and we are helping the state government with the problem. We (the Army) have done an excellent job and saved a large number of lives. (Hindustan Times, 2023)

This is how India’s Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) General Anil Chauhan characterized the eruption of ethnic violence in Manipur in May 2023. The context for this unusual public assessment of a domestic political crisis by the country’s top military leader is the long history of the Indian Army’s presence as a counterinsurgent force in the state and the sudden outbreak of lethal conflicts on its watch, which evidently took the general and his colleagues by surprise.

After battling ‘insurgencies’ for decades, the Indian Army finds itself in an uncomfortable and unfamiliar situation in Manipur. What General Chauhan calls a law-and-order situation created by ‘a clash between two ethnicities’ should not have taken India’s security establishment by surprise. It has long viewed Manipur’s non-state armed actors through ethnic lenses. It has been common practice to classify them into valley-based and hill-based groups—the former being ethnically Meitei—the state’s subnational majority—and the latter Kuki or Naga—the state’s two subnational minorities. ¹ The fault lines of the current schism are among Meiteis that are predominantly Hindu and/or followers of an indigenous faith tradition often called Sanamahism, and the predominantly Christian Kukis. The third group, Nagas—also predominantly Christian—are not a party to the current conflict. There is, however, a history of enmity between them and Meiteis, as between Naga and Kukis. Significantly, the non-state armed groups that Indian officials call ‘insurgents’ identifying with either Meiteis or Kukis, as well as newly formed such groups among Meiteis that are not designated as insurgents, have been playing an important and barely concealed role in these clashes.

But how are these ethnic clashes different from ‘insurgencies’ of Indian official discourse, which evidently puts them outside the army’s counterinsurgency remit? ² For one thing the violence is not directed against the Indian state. In fact, the tacit support to one side of the conflict by the Manipur state government has facilitated and exacerbated the violence. ³ But whatever the official label, even by the standards of this conflict-torn state, the ferocious outbreak of ethnic violence with non-state armed groups playing a leading role in it has few parallels. The death toll now stands at more than 200 people. There were many incidents of sexual violence against women and about 70,000 people have fled their homes to safer places (Scroll.in, 2024). The ethnicization of law enforcement and the looting of arms from police stations by mobs—critics charge that arms were simply given away by conniving police officials—created a situation that resembles a civil war.

The intervention by centrally controlled security forces has long been the traditional fix for ‘communal riots’ in India. But when Manipur erupted in communal violence, those forces were already stationed there—not for the purpose of riot control, but as a counterinsurgent force. The state also has the third-highest ratio of police personnel to civilians in India. The occurrence of unrelenting armed ethnic violence in a state where security forces have an exceptionally heavy presence is one of the ironies of the Manipur crisis.

The Manipur violence is at the extreme end of the ‘temporal and spatial dynamic’ of The Deadly Ethnic Riot. In his influential book with that title, Donald L. Horowitz noted that an ethnic riot might last anywhere from a few days to several weeks depending on several factors including the effectiveness of law enforcement agencies. It can be limited to one location or spread across an entire state. Once under control, it might stay that way; or it might smoulder and then pick up again at another opportunity (Horowitz, 2003, 1–2). In India communal riots as a form of political violence, as Kathinka Frøystad has emphasized, ‘despite their brutality constitute a remarkably short-lived though recurring from of political violence’ (Frøystad, 2009, 453–454). Anthropologist Stanley Tambiah made the same point two decades earlier. While ethnic riots occur repeatedly in South Asia, he said, ‘they are also mercifully short-lived, not only because the police and army, after initial chaos and paralysis, can assert their dominance but also because these riots as human outbursts per se have a short life cycle of orgasmic violence and spent energies’ (Tambiah, 1990, p. 744).

There are times when, as Horowitz observes, violence prompts public introspection and a desire to figure out what went wrong and work on repairing relationships. This has not happened in Manipur, thus far—at least not in any publicly discernible manner. Manipur today stands virtually divided into two territories separated by a buffer zone. In September 2023, a BBC reporter was surprised to find how common the language of war had become among the people she spoke to in Manipur. She found hardened bunkers manned by armed civilians defending each side of the territorial divide. ‘Front line’, ‘buffer zone’ and ‘no man’s land’ were among the commonly used terms to describe the space between the make-shift bunkers constructed by rival groups of armed civilians (Limaye, 2023).

There is ample evidence pointing to the fact that the state government of Manipur bears most of the responsibility for this violence. Some of its policies, and the rhetoric of the state’s Meitei chief minister Nongthombam Biren Singh, are widely seen as betraying a bias against Kukis. Two new Meitei revivalist non-state armed groups Arambai Tenggol and Meitei Leepun accused of orchestrating the violence—neither of them designated as insurgents—enjoy his support and protection (Saikia, 2023).

Arambai Tenggol’s legitimacy among the Meitei public and its influence over the highest echelons of the state government have only grown since the conflict began last May. From being a ‘shadowy group of young armed fundamentalists from which most Meitei people seemed to want to distance themselves’, the Arambai Tenggol that claims to be 60,000-strong, has now emerged as the most influential ‘civil society group’ of the Meiteis. This became amply evident on 24 January 2024 when nearly all of Manipur’s Meitei MLAs and MPs obeyed its ‘summons’ to attend an ‘oath-taking ceremony’. A team of India’s ministry of home affairs also flew down from Delhi to meet its leaders (Saikia, 2024). Over the same period—not surprisingly—Chief Minister, Singh, has completely lost the confidence of the Kuki community including those that are his fellow legislators in the state assembly.

Proclaiming President’s Rule—dismissing the state government and assuming its functions—could have helped restore faith in the impartiality and integrity of state institutions. That the Modi government has chosen not to exercise this option provides important clues to what is at stake from the perspective of the Hindu nationalist establishment’s long-term political–ideological agenda in Northeast India.

The genealogy of this conflict can be traced back far into Manipur’s history. However, what has obscured this reality is the tendency to put a territorial gloss over the non-state armed groups as examples of subnationalisms or ‘minority nationalisms’ discounting the fault lines that divide them. ⁴ Yet scholars with roots in Manipur’s subnational minorities have long raised questions on whether the peoples of the plains and the hills constitute a community of common destiny. Sociologist L. Lam Khan Piang says that the hill tribes of Manipur and the people of the Imphal Valley have been ‘living together separately’ (Piang, 2019). Thongkolal Haokip uses the model of ‘deeply divided societies’ to examine the political dynamics of Manipur’s hill–valley divide (Haokip, 2022). Writing soon after the outbreak of the recent riots, political scientist Kham Khan Suan Hausing wondered whether ‘the idea and the reality of Manipur’ can be salvaged (Hausing, 2023).

The Precipitating Event

The incident on 3 May 2023 that precipitated the current crisis was a protest march convened by the All-Tribal Students Union of Manipur that turned violent. ⁵ The march sought to showcase tribal opposition to a court order on the tribal recognition of the subnational majority, the Meiteis. The Meiteis have long dominated the state-level institutions of Manipur (Hassan, 2006, pp. 14–17). Article 342 of Indian Constitution provides for the president of India to specify the ‘tribes or tribal communities or parts of or groups within tribes or tribal communities’ which shall be deemed to be Scheduled Tribes (STs). They are defined, as Marc Galanter noted, ‘partly by habitat and geographic isolation, but even more on the basis of social, religious, linguistic and cultural distinctiveness—their “tribal characteristics”. Just where the line between ‘tribals’ and ‘non-tribals’ should be drawn has not always been free from doubt’ (Galanter, 1984, p. 150). The stakes in India’s protective discrimination or affirmative action system have grown exponentially in recent years. The number of STs now stand at about 730 and at least a thousand more groups are seeking recognition. The benefits of affirmative action and the pliable use of term ‘tribe’ in governmental parlance explain the proliferation of such demands (Middleton, 2013, p. 13).

It is not unusual for recognized tribes to oppose the scheduling or the tribal recognition ⁶ of new groups because of the fear that it would result in the shrinking of their share of the pie. But never before has such a controversy escalated from protests to counter-protests, to the point of armed mobs forcing the evacuation of people from their homes—and then transporting them to ethnically defined safe ‘home areas’ with security escort—and many others fleeing in fright. Yet the Manipur High Court order that set off this chain of events did appear to have any immediate effects. An advocacy organization petitioned the court to stop the Manipur government from dragging its feet on a 10-year-old request from New Delhi for material on the subject. The court directed the state government to submit the material within a reasonable time, preferably within four weeks. The judiciary has little authority over scheduling tribes; and the role of state governments is limited. The entire process can take years, if not decades, to complete. Eventually scheduling occurs only after the national parliament passes a bill to that effect.

Against this background, the deadly breakdown of ethnic relations over this controversy can only be understood by (a) a new element of uncertainty introduced by the Modi government’s style of making decisions on hugely consequential matters without following standard procedures, and (b) the fact that the controversy has been festering for decades (see, for instance, Hassan (2006, pp. 15–16, 24) and the High Court’s order only brought those simmering tensions to a head.

The mobilization of communities around demands for scheduling—that is, recognition as a ST or analogous official classificatory categories for the benefits that come with such designation—is a familiar theme in Indian politics. But in Northeast India demands for scheduling tend to acquire a territorial and exclusionary dimension because of the spatial legacy of certain colonial-era ‘boundaries and hierarchies, zones and enclaves’ (Mbembe, 2003, pp. 25–26), which acquired a new lease on life at the end of British colonial rule. Before seeking tribal recognition, the issue that animated Meitei ethnic activists was the extension of the Inner Line Permit (ILP) regime to the state. The ILP is a travel document required of outsiders to enter a few states and establish residence there. When it was first conceived in 1873, nothing could have been further from the minds of its creators than a benevolent interest in the welfare of locals. The goal was to defend the foothills, whose inhabitants were now construed as British subjects and where British settlers had opened tea plantations. The intention was to keep the highlanders marked as ‘primitives’ and ‘savages’ behind this administrative line. Hunting jaunts or raids in the foothills could set off brutal punitive expeditions.

In recent years as the migration issue has acquired heightened saliency, ethnic activists in the region have come to view the Inner Line as a desirable addition to a government’s powers. The antiquated institution’s contemporary appeal lies in the fact that it can, in principle, control the entry and residence of non-native Indian citizens, a de facto immigration control system over an inter-state boundary.

A New Articulation of Indigeneity

To say that indigeneity becomes ‘articulated’ is to recognize that peoples’ making claims under this banner in different parts of the world today comprise a wide diversity of cultures and histories, and they do it for a variety of political ends (Clifford, 2001, p. 472). In a speech in Manipur’s capital city of Imphal in 2020, India’s Home Minister Amit Shah spoke of his government’s decision to extend the Inner Line to the state as the BJP’s ‘best gift’ to the people of Manipur. Crediting Prime Minister Modi for his wisdom, he said, ‘Modiji realised that Manipur is not having the Inner Line Permit when other states surrounding it had it which is injustice to the indigenous people and he found a way’ (Hindustan Times, 2020). But who are the ‘indigenous people’ of Manipur, according to Prime Minister Modi and Home Minister Shah, and how does extending the Inner Line to the state fix a historical injustice?

Until it was made applicable to Manipur in 2020, an ILP was required to enter three Northeast Indian states: Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram and Nagaland. These territories were categorized as the Excluded Areas of Assam by the colonial-era statute, the Government of India Act of 1935—the precursor to the Sixth Schedule areas of India’s 1950 Constitution. Given this history, it should not come as a surprise that STs form a large majority of these states. The Inner Line remained in place in these areas after the transfer of power in 1947 because successive governments decided that demographic stability is a necessary condition for political stability in these strategically sensitive border states. Meghalaya, another tribal majority state in the region, never came under the ILP regime because it was a Partially Excluded Area and not an Excluded Area under the 1935 statute. Manipur, on the other hand was ‘an Indian State under a ruling chief’ in the words of a late-colonial British official and therefore ‘outside the Constitution altogether’ (Reid, 1944, p. 18). He was, of course, referring to the Indian Constitution Act of 1935.

All but one seat in the state legislatures of Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram and Nagaland are reserved for STs. As a result, the elected state governments of these states consist almost entirely of ethnic tribal politicians that the Indian state and its institutions sanctify and legitimize as indigenous to that state. These ethnic communities have near-exclusive access to state-level public employment, business and trade licenses, rights to land ownership and exchange, and the right to seek elected office. Because of these ethnically exclusive privileges, the states that were once Excluded Areas now define the aspirations window for ethnic activists elsewhere in India. The Inner Line along with tribal recognition of Meiteis would give Manipur the tribal majority needed to bring the state to par with the formerly Excluded Area states. The Kukis, however, do not view this prospect favourably. They fear that with tribal recognition, Meiteis will no longer be subject to the restrictions on the transfer of tribal lands to non-tribals—lands that are governed by customary laws and are now controlled by Kukis and Nagas. Kuki activists worry that it might set in motion a process of land dispossession of their community.

A campaign demanding the Inner Line picked up momentum in Manipur nearly a decade ago. But prime minister Modi made his ‘gift’ of the Inner Line to the state only when the BJP’s effort to enact the controversial Citizenship Amendment bill ran into opposition. The Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019 offers non-Muslim undocumented migrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan access to Indian citizenship. The Inner Line is supposed to insulate Manipur from the effects of this law.

The innovation for which Shah credits Modi is that he extended the Inner Line to a state in deference to the wishes of an unscheduled community. That is why Shah spoke of it as the redressing of a historical injustice. His choice of words assumes political significance in the light of two facts (a) unlike the majority communities of Mizoram and Nagaland—two neighbouring states where the ILP regime is in existence—most Meiteis are not Christians, but Hindus and followers of Sanamahism; and (b) some Meitei organizations argue that Kukis that are predominantly Christian, are not an ‘indigenous community’ in Manipur and thus recognizing an ‘immigrant community’ as an ST was a mistake that needs rectification (Sangai Express, 2023). The issue has now entered the agenda of the state government. Delisting of ‘illegal migrants’ (read ‘most Kukis’) as STs featured on Aramboi Tengol’s list of goals when it summoned Meitei members of state Assembly to swear that they would work towards achieving a common agenda (Saikia, 2024). Chief minister Biren Singh has announced that he will form an ‘all-tribe committee’ to reconsider the ST status of the Kukis (Indian Express, 2024).

Given their exclusionary aspirations, Meitei leaders who fought for the extension of the Inner Line to Manipur were disappointed by what it has been able to achieve on the ground. The leader of the group that spearheaded the street protests says that the Inner Line has proved to be a ‘toothless tiger’. It has ‘failed to offer any protection to the indigenous population’ of Manipur. It will remain a ‘flawed system’ unless there is ‘a clear definition of the indigenous population’ (Indian Express, 2022). This has made the quest for tribal recognition a priority for them.

India’s Indigenous People/Scheduled Tribe Conundrum

India does not recognize ‘indigenous people’ as a distinct identity. In international forums Indian officials take the position that the concept—with its roots in political conflicts of white settler colonies—does not apply to India. They claim that the country’s entire population is indigenous. At the same time, it has become standard practice in both official and unofficial circles to treat the classificatory category ST as an equivalent of the international legal category indigenous people. Since the two terms are used as equivalents there is only a short leap from making claims to indigenous status and seeking tribal recognition or challenging the indigenous status of an ST. What makes Northeast India especially prone to such disputes is that some tribal communities may have been latecomers to their present territories compared to their non-tribal neighbours. In the oral histories of many tribal communities, there are repeated references to migration by their forbears to their present territories (Xaxa, 1999, pp. 1591–92).

Whatever quarrels official India may have with indigenous people as a legal category, the claim of indigeneity—of being indigenous or autochthonous to a place—has become entrenched as a powerful political idiom and mobilizing ideology in Northeast India. Autochthony or belonging is the primary meaning of the term ‘indigenous’ in this usage. Marginal or non-dominant status—an essential part of the meaning of the term indigenous people in its international usage—is not understood as being part of its meaning. This particular articulation of indigeneity in Manipur is only the latest example of how state governments in Northeast India and India’s central government have been responding to claims to indigeneity in politically consequential ways.

The Myanmar Connection

The Kukis of Manipur are part of a large and loose assemblage of transborder people often described as the Kuki–Mizo–Chin group of people. They are among the people that historian Bérénice Guyot-Réchard had in mind when she writes that the separation of Burma from India in 1937 ‘ran against the grain of a fluid, connected and dynamic human landscape’ of the Patkai hills. In hindsight, she writes, it can be said that for the transborder people who live on both sides of those hills, the separation of Burma from India ‘resembled a partition’ (Guyot-Réchard, 2021, p. 295).

Today, the Kuki–Mizo–Chin people live in large parts of Northeast India—most significantly in Manipur and Mizoram—the Chin Hills of Myanmar and the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh. There is a long history of Kukis being shunned as ‘foreigners’ in Manipur. Behind this canard lies the nineteenth century history of British colonial border-making. In an engaging essay ‘The Pasts of a Fringe Community’, historian David Zou refers to an illustrative episode in this history. His essay deals with the Zou people that form part of the Kuki–Mizo–Chin group. In 1894, the Chin–Manipur Boundary Commission allocated 16 Zou villages to Manipur. Only three Zou villages were to be retained by the Chin Hills administration in Burma. Colonial administrators were ‘anxious to “award” territories of indigenous hill peoples like the Zou … to locally dominant rulers in the valley who collaborated with the colonial state’. Zou villages could be ‘awarded’ to Manipur like a trophy only because imperial cartographic practice left no room for the agency of local polities and people. ‘The insensitivity of colonial policy to local interests’, he writes, ‘often gave birth to the post-colonial miseries of minority peoples’ (Zou, 2009, pp. 214–215).

With the passage of time, the manner in which British colonial administrators drew boundaries faded from popular memory, nation–state boundaries became hardened while at the same time some level of cross-border movement of people with ethnic ties across the Patkai hills continued. This created the conditions for Kuki–Mizo–Chin people being derided as illegal immigrants or intruders in Manipur (Zou, 2009).

Recent developments in Myanmar have also played into the Manipur crisis. Since the February 2021 coup, the Chin state and the Sagaing region in Western Myanmar that borders India have become a significant battleground between the junta and the forces of opposition. Many civilians fleeing the conflict have sought refuge in India. The office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees puts the number of people arriving in India from Myanmar until 1 May 2023 at approximately 53,500. Nearly 8,000 of them are in Manipur and more than 40,000 in Mizoram (UNHCR, 2023). Their numbers have surely gone up since then. India’s official policy is to treat these refugees as illegal immigrants. But most of them are Chins whom the Kukis of Manipur and the Mizos of Mizoram regard as their ethnic kin.

The bonds that evidently connect them are not unlike what Samuel Huntington identified as the commonality that in times of war can lead to rallying behind a kin-country (Huntington, 1996, pp. 266–298). The response of the two neighbouring Indian states to this refugee influx, however, has been starkly different. In defiance of New Delhi’s wishes, Mizoram has welcomed them in a remarkable instantiation of grassroots humanitarianism. But in Manipur, they have faced hostility because of the very different history of ethnic relations there; and the influx has played into the Meitei–Kuki tensions. Seen from a Kuki–Mizo–Chin perspective, their relative power in the two states has made the difference. While they are at the helm of power at the state level in Mizoram, they lack influence in Manipur’s Meitei-dominated political dispensation. The fact that India does not have a humanitarian policy towards refugees fleeing Myanmar has contributed to the making of the Manipur crisis.

Civilizational Nationalism Meets Meitei Subnationalism

‘Indigenous People Day: Why India has no reason to share the West’s collective guilt’ is the title of an article published in Organiser, the official publication of the Hindu nationalist organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), of which Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the most famous active life-long member. Echoing the official Indian position, it says, ‘all Indians are indigenous to this land…native to this land’. Since India does not have a ‘history of colonization, oppression and genocide’, it has no reason to celebrate 9 August as Indigenous Peoples’ Day (Onatt, 2023). But while Hindu nationalists do not have much use for the category indigenous people, indigenous faith traditions occupy a place of pride in their articulation of indigeneity. Its importance lies in the foundational distinction in Hindu nationalist ideology between ‘foreign religions’—defined as those whose holy lands are located outside India—and religions and faith traditions that have their origins in Punyabhooomi Bharat (the sacred land of India). This, of course, has long been the view of the Hindu nationalist organizations like the RSS. But the view is not limited to Hindu nationalists; in a more elementary form, it is a more widely shared sentiment.

Civilizational nationalism—the idea that Hinduism is India’s national civilization—Peter van der Veer points out, predates the rise of Hindu nationalism. The Indian Constitution guarantees the freedom to profess, practice and spread one’s religion. Yet many Hindus believe that while Christianity and Islam are ‘foreign’, Hinduism has grown out of Indian soil. The existence in India of these so-called foreign religions, they believe, is solely the result of proselytization among the native population whom they regard as Hindu by definition. Historically, there has been a general distrust of missionization and religious conversion not just among Hindu nationalists, but among the so-called secular nationalists as well. Both groups of nationalists assume that Hinduism is the natural religion of the people living in India. Religious conversion to Islam, they believe, was forced at the point of the sword, and conversion to Christianity was the result of material inducements offered by foreign missionaries. Civilizational nationalism, which ‘selectively includes and excludes groups in society’, has now become the common sense in the juridical and political life of contemporary India. In this common-sense construction, Islam and Christianity are not part of the ‘nation’ or part of India’s ‘national civilization’ (van der Veer, 2021).

This is, of course, not how Indian Christians and Indian Muslims understand their faiths. ‘We do not take Christianity as foreign religion any more than we consider the light of the sun as foreign’, declared the Naga nationalist leader Angami Zapu Phizo (Phizo, 1951). Khilafat Movement activist Maulana Mohammad Ali (1878–1931) famously declared that he belonged to ‘two circles of equal size, one India and the other, the Muslim world’ (Quoted in Fazal, 2012, p. 175). Furthermore, the discourse of conversion that focuses on the supposed gullibility of poor Indians falling prey to the machinations of foreign missionaries, strains credibility in the context of Northeast India. Christianity’s appeal in this region lies primarily in being what James C. Scott has called ‘a powerful, alternate and to some degree oppositional, modernity’ (Scott, 2009, p. 319). The phenomenon is best understood in the context of a long history of the people of the hills adopting religious identities that differed from those of the people of the valley states whose cultures had stigmatized them.

Be that as it may, Hindu nationalist organizations have long viewed the large concentration of Christians in Northeast India as a problem that needs a solution by way of ‘new knowledge, facts, or politics’. ⁷ They eulogize the communities of indigenous faith for having resisted the spread of Christianity. After efforts by the RSS and the VHP to reconvert Christians in Northeast India were met with fierce opposition in the 1990s, the major focus of their work shifted to people of indigenous faith, many of whom had embraced Christianity (Longkumer, 2017, pp. 208–209). Their goal has been to Hinduize those faith traditions so that they can hold the line against further conversion to Christianity.

Since the late twentieth century. there has been a wave of Sanamahi revivalism among the Meiteis of Manipur. It occurred in the context of the rise of radical Meitei subnationalism: the emergence of political groups speaking the language of armed resistance and the rise of anti-India sentiments. But in the Hindu nationalist worldview indigenous faith traditions do not have to pose a threat to India’s civilizational unity. The election in 2020 of the titular king Maharaja Sanajaoba Leishemba as a BJP member of the Rajya Sabha is a little-noticed but significant political event in Manipur. It happened reputedly at the initiative of Prime Minister Modi. ⁸

The choice of the titular king, who uses the word Maharaja as part of his name, as the Manipur’s representative in the Rajya Sabha becomes politically significant when we consider the circumstances of the princely state’s controversial merger with India, which was not unlike that of Kashmir. In September 1949, Leishemba’s grandfather Maharaja Bodhchandra signed the instrument of accession with India under duress. He was virtually imprisoned in his seasonal home in Shillong, where he was isolated from his advisors and Manipuri public opinion. Nearly every Manipuri account of the state’s modern history—including the platforms of Meitei non-state armed groups—claim that the merger with India was achieved through ‘a combination of cajolement, promises that were not kept, and plain trickery’ (Prabhakara, 2004).

That after Manipur’s merger, the fortified royal palace and hallowed symbol of Manipuri glory and pride—the Kangla—was under the occupation of the Assam Rifles is a sour point among Meiteis. It was turned over to the state government only in 2004 in response to an unprecedented wave of anger against the Indian armed forces. Since then, the Kangla has become a heritage and recreational site; but it has also recovered some of its importance as a ritual centre. The complex ‘is home to numerous shrines dedicated to the deity Nongda Lairen Pakhangba, the divine ancestor of the Meitei rajas and one of the most important gods of the Meitei pantheon’ (Moon-Little, 2022, pp. 202–203). Sanajaoba may no longer be the official king of Manipur, but he ‘continues to be the symbolic and spiritual head of many ritualistic traditions of the old Manipur kingdom’ (Phanjoubam, 2020). He took his oath of office as member of the Rajya Sabha in Meiteilon (the Meitei language) in the name of Pakhangba, Sanamahi—both Meitei deities—and Govindajee, a name for the Hindu deity Krishna—an exemplification of the Hindu nationalist credo that all indigenous faith traditions of India are Hindu. Members of Aramboi Tengol claim Sanajaoba as the organization’s founder and leader. In September 2022, Sanajaoba himself posted on his Facebook page pictures of the ‘oath-taking ceremony’ of the group that he said was held in his house (Saikia, 2023). Sanajaoba was present also at the Aramboi Tengol-administered oath-taking ceremony for Meitei members of the state legislature that took place at the Kangla on 24 January 2024.

‘There Won’t Be a Manipur’

The above is the title of a chapter of a book by veteran journalist Sudeep Chakravarti. The words are those of a senior leader of the military wing of the NSCN (I-M). ⁹ The rebel organization signed a ceasefire agreement with the Indian government in 1997 and it has been negotiating for peace with it for the past two decades. The talks, writes Chakravarti, are ‘one of the deadliest games of political chess being played in India’. One possible outcome of this process, speculated the Naga leader, is the end of Manipur as we know it (Chakravarti, 2022, p. 22).

The NSCN (I-M) has long maintained that two of its demands are non-negotiable: Naga sovereignty and the integration of the Naga-inhabited areas. That it has been in talks with the government is generally interpreted as a sign that it is now willing to settle for something less than full independent statehood. That has made its demand for Nagalim, or Greater Nagaland—its detractors’ phrase for this irredentist territorial imaginary—the focus of public attention. Insofar as the territorial imaginary of Nagalim makes claims to more than half of Manipur, it seriously undermines the state. Moreover, Thuingaleng Muivah, the sole surviving founding leader of the NSCN-IM, is a Tangkhul Naga from Manipur. In Muivah’s home district of Ukhrul in Manipur, the NSCN-IM possesses significant attributes of statehood such as the capacity to wield coercive violence and extract revenue as well as substantial levels of popular legitimacy and support. In 2016 two researchers found that the NSCN (I-M) runs a virtual parallel government in Ukhrul (Thakur & Venugopal, 2019, p. 291).

It has been evident for decades now that the future of Naga peace is closely intertwined with what happens in Manipur. When the ceasefire agreement with the NSCN-IM came into effect on 1 August 1997, there were street protests in Manipur underpinned by the fear of possible territorial concessions to Nagas at Manipur’s expense. Indeed, to avoid this possibility, the Indian government initially left the territorial scope of the ceasefire deliberately vague. Things came to a head when a joint statement in June 2001 confirmed that the ceasefire was ‘between the Government of India and the NSCN-IM as two entities without territorial limits’. The announcement led to a veritable political explosion in Manipur. The protests died down only after India’s Home Minister announced that the three words ‘without territorial limits’ will be dropped from the agreement. Since then, there have been loud demands for an amendment of the Indian Constitution to guarantee the inviolability of Manipur’s borders. ¹⁰

Two decades later, the road to Naga peace still runs through Manipur. As the political hurdles to achieving Naga integration have gone up, representative organizations of the Manipuri Nagas have been articulating the aspiration for an ‘alternative arrangement’, that is, an alternative to their current political status as a constituent part of the state of Manipur.

The common ground that the BJP and Hindu nationalist forces have found with a militant brand of Meitei subnationalism has important implications for the Naga peace process. Well before the current crisis, a historian of Manipur wrote that the deeply felt grievances of the Kukis and the Nagas have turned the state’s hill–valley divide into a conflictual binary of power relations. ‘Against such strongly felt sentiments’, he wrote, the assertion of the territorial integrity of Manipur and ‘political projects that evoke gestures of socio-cultural ties and affinities between the hill and valley peoples…sound rather feeble and often become narratives of loss and nostalgia’ (Jilangamba, 2015, p. 279). Nevertheless, many Meitei revivalists believe in the millenarian idea of the return of Pakhangba. They hope that a leader with the charisma of Pakhangba will emerge one day to unite the hills and plains together (Moon-Little, 2022, p. 208). Such religiously infused sentiments have made the defence of Manipur’s territorial integrity a more emotionally charged issue than ever before. Compromises on the Naga demand for Nagalim or for an ‘alternative arrangement’, or on the demand for the administrative separation of the Kuki areas—articulated in recent months by Kuki leaders—have now become even more difficult to achieve.

BJP and its Hindu nationalist allies have long celebrated an indigenous Naga religious reform movement now called Heraka and its spiritual leader Rani Gaidenliu, who preached against Christian proselytization, as ‘the ideal personification of all that is good about the Nagas’ (Longkumer, 2015). This is only of their many efforts to sideline the Christianity-inflected discourse of Naga nationalism. The crisis in Manipur and the unprecedented hardening of Meitei attitudes against interference with Manipur’s territorial integrity has created the opportunity for the Modi government to seek a different path for resolving the Naga conflict than the one that has been pursued for the past quarter of a century. If a symbolic form of Naga integration short of territorial reorganization remains the only path to resolving the Naga conflict, the evident keenness of the Hindu nationalist establishment to leave the Christian mainstream of Naga nationalism out of its reckonings has made the prospects for a durable Naga peace more remote than ever.