The only time it seemed the Centre was about to take a decisive step in Manipur—finally—was when Home Minister Amit Shah cut short his election campaign in Maharashtra on 17 November and dashed back to New Delhi. He supposedly rushed to headquarters to confabulate with stakeholders on how to control the latest conflagration in the northeastern state that’s been burning and simmering in turns over the last 19 months—only to explode once again two weeks ago.
Other than that, the BJP–led government at the Centre that boasts a double-engine sarkaarin Manipur has done little to reassure the state or the rest of the country that Manipur matters. But even in the five days since Shah’s return to Delhi, what has the Centre done? Except rush more paramilitary forces to the state and impose the controversial Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) in six police station areas, nothing.
At least 250 people have died in Meitei-Kuki violence in Manipur since 3 May 2023 after the Meiteis demanded Scheduled Tribe status, like the Kukis.
Nineteen months later, after violence in the Jiribam district escalated the tensions once again, the chorus is growing louder for the imposition of President’s Rule or at least a change of chief minister. These seem the two most obvious interventions the Centre can make and yet it seems caught in a Hamlet-like dilemma: to act or not to act?
Is it procrastination? Is it policy paralysis? Is it indifference? Or is it that the Centre simply doesn’t know what to do next?
It looks like a khichiri of all of the above.
Let’s take the last question first. It is becoming increasingly clear that the BJP doesn’t quite have a finger on the Manipur pulse and is floundering over what to do. The knee-jerk move to impose AFSPA in six police stations, for instance, is triggering a fresh ethnic churn.
AFSPA was reimposed on 14 November. Three days later, Chief Minister Biren Singh wrote to the Centre, asking for a rollback. But on Thursday, all 10 Kuki MLAs in the Manipur Assembly, including seven BJP MLAs, demanded AFSPA be extended to all 60 police stations in the state, including 13 that are still out of its jurisdiction. They want the Actextended, they say, so that authorities can hunt for and seize around 6,000 arms stolen from state armouries on 3 May last year when chaos descended on the state.
What BJP appears to have forgotten is that AFSPA has a dark history in Manipur. The Draconian law ignited widespread protestsagainst alleged killings of civilians by the Army. The protests have been going on since it was imposed to tackle the insurgency in 1958—initially in the Naga-dominated districts and then across Manipur in 1980. Dramatic protests erupted in July 2004 after a 32-year-old woman Thangjam Manorama was allegedly raped and then killed by forces. A dozen women disrobed in front of the headquarters of Assam Rifles in Imphal in protest. Four years earlier, a 28-year-old woman Irom Sharmila had gone on an indefinite hunger strike against AFSPA, which she finally ended in August 2016.
The Act was rolled back in large swathes of Manipur over 2022-23.
The lack of clarity on how to deal with Manipur was on display last May when the Centre dithered over whether to impose Article 355 or not. Media reports varied widely, with a section claiming it was imposed, while another asserted that it was not. It took an RTI by a Karnataka High Court lawyer to get MHA to finally state in June that—full marks for obfuscation—the ministry’s CPIO “has no such information for the period January 2023 to June 2023.”
Had it been imposed back then, Article 355 could have worked. On the other hand, the Centre’s latest move to reimpose AFSPA in six police station areas could backfire seriously.
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The BJP’s actions are motivated by electoral gain and Manipur is not on its list ofpriorities. A BJP-led government is safely ensconced there. The allied party,National People’s Power (NPP), has said it is withdrawing support from the Biren Singh government but the BJP hasn’t turned a hair. It has the numbers without the NPP or even its seven Kuki MLAs who are speaking out against the incumbent chief minister more and more loudly. The Congress won the parliamentary seats in Manipur this June. But that’s only two seats. So, it is easy for the BJP to put Manipur on the back burner, if not for good, then for long stretches of time.
It is not as if Congress knows much better than the BJP what to do next in Manipur. To its credit, at least Rahul Gandhi visited the state. The Prime Minister still has not. Gandhi’s visit helped Congress make a clean sweep of the state in the general elections. But now a tweet, since deleted by P Chidambaram, once the country’s home minister, has caused the party much embarrassment—he called for regional autonomy of Manipur. The state leadership has chided him publicly and demanded that the party take action against him.
But the BJP is the party in power and the onus of restoring normalcy in Manipur rests on its shoulders. Heavily, uneasily.
Monideepa Banerjie is a senior journalist based in Kolkata. She tweets @Monideepa62. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)
