A team of the Karwan-e-Mohabbat (Caravan of Love) spent four days in violence-torn Manipur from July 25 to July 28. This is an excerpt from their ground report.The Karwan-e-Mohabbat is a citizen initiative which from 2017 has strived to reach out to victims of hate violence in far corners of the country, to offer solace and solidarity to the survivors. We spent in Manipur many hours listening to survivors in seven relief camps on both sides of what is now perceived popularly to be a “border” between the Imphal valley, home mostly to the Meitei, and the hills, inhabited mainly by the Kuki and Naga tribal peoples. We met scores of community leaders from both communities.We found, in these four harrowing days, a Manipur that is beleaguered and broken. Nothing indeed had prepared us for what we bore witness to. We found a Manipur almost fully transformed into a war zone, bursting with sophisticated rifles, mortars, bombs, and massive daily mobilisation of ordinary civilians. (Even we were caught once within a few hundred metres of raging cross-fire and narrowly escaped).Our travels within Manipur, our visits to the relief camps and our meetings with a wide range of political leaders was made possible because of the generous support of two finest community leaders, human rights defender Babloo Loitongbam and pastor Reverend Jangkholam Haokip.Watch | Prime Minister Modi Has Failed in Manipur: World Meitei Council Chair Heigrujam NabashyamThe Karwan team to Manipur included veteran journalist John Dayal, community physicians Dr Meena Isaac and Dr Randall Sequeira, community psychiatrist Dr Rajesh Isaac, Surender Pokhal from the Evangelical Fellowship of India (EFI), Jatin Sharma, Director CES, Karwan Media Fellow Imaad ul Hassan, Karwan community leader from Assam Mirza Lutfar and Akanksha Rao, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Equity Studies (CES); and peace worker and author Harsh Mander. Each of them have contributed to this report.Entire villages of both warring communities have been razed to ashes. Our foremost observation is that the state is led by a government that has done nothing to restore peace, and ensure justice against people who kill, rape and destroy homes with unfettered impunity even three months later. The state is absent in its foremost constitutional duty to protect civilians; it is absent from relief camps. Instead the state government is often perceived to be taking sides in what is quickly escalating into a full-blown civil war.The grief, the rage and above all the hate on both sides are boundless. The grief in both Meitei and Kuki camps almost mirrored each other. Where Kukis were in minority settlements in the Imphal valley, they were surrounded by crowds with torches that set their homes on fire. The same happened to Meitei people who had lived for generations in the hill villages of the Kuki tribal people. The unbearable grief and rage of both were that neighbours of the “other” community, with who they had lived for generations with peace and goodwill, turned overnight into murderous and pitiless enemies.Housed demolished during the ethnic violence. Photo: Imaad ul HasanThey each recalled their fearful escapes, often trudging kilometres with children, sick and old people in their backs in the cover of the night. They spoke of pregnant women who gave birth as they escaped, of hungry, frightened babies whose cries they had to stifle. They spoke of people killed, of people who could not survive the arduous journeys. They mourned with us daughters abducted and sexually assaulted, and sons who never returned.But it was their narratives of fury, of congealed and settled hate on both sides that worried us the most. We were struck first by how as people grieved inconsolably about the loss of their homes and loved ones, they completely erased from their memories the acknowledgment that people of what was now the “other” community had often suffered almost identical tragedies, even though the magnitude of loss and suffering endured by the Kuki-Zo people was greater. On both sides, people had on the one hand been felled by the violence, and at the same time they had also perpetrated these same atrocities. They refused to carry not just the burdens of grief for what was done to them but also of culpability and guilt for what they had done to each other.But even more gravely, we found that the same narratives of the evil of the “other” community were articulated whether we spoke to community leaders, students, women or residents of relief camps. The narratives of the Meitei people were that the Kuki people were foreigners who had illegally immigrated from Myanmar and would one day outnumber the indigenous Meitei people to whom Manipur belonged rightfully. They had benefitted from reservations for tribal people to capture jobs and seats in educational institutions, while the Meitei are prohibited even from buying land in the hills. They accuse them of endangering Meitei youth by illegal poppy cultivation. They allege that the Kuki people are illegally clearing reserved forests for their farms and settlements, and threatening the ecology of the region. They claim that Kuki militants roam freely, and their violence and gun and drug trafficking thrive under the protection of the Assam Rifles.Watch | ‘BJP Government Siding With Meitei Against Kuki; Modi Was Wrong Not To Reach Out’The Kuki people have an entirely different narrative. They allege that their farmers may cultivate poppies for bare survival, but that the drug trade and profits are mostly harvested by politicians and big business in the Imphal valley and beyond. They claim to be legal citizens of Manipur, and allege that Meitei people want Scheduled Tribe status to grab their lands and reduce them to a minority in their mountain abodes. They also want to corner the seats in the legislatures and educational institutions that are reserved for tribal people. They also allege that a militia of Meitei youth is actively supported by the chief minister of Manipur, and that with open state patronage, it is these militants who ravaged their lands and people with rape, murder and arson. They allege long years of work by the RSS to convert Meitei nationalism into Hindu nationalism implacably hostile to the Kuki people also for their Christian faith.Housed demolished during the ethnic violence. Photo: Imaad ul HasanAnd they believe that the Manipur state police and paramilitary forces protect the Meitei militants and those who raped and murdered.The two narratives about the same lived reality are so utterly irreconcilable, that as long as people on both sides of the conflict are not willing to step down a few steps from what today passionately uphold as the truth of the evil “other”, there is no space for even a dialogue to begin.In the midst of all of this, the state government has done nothing to establish and support the relief camps especially for an estimated twenty thousand Kuki internal refugees who have fled after their villages have been burnt down. It is largely the local church, supported by local contributions, that are running more than a hundred Kuki relief camps. Children in these camps have been reduced to eating watery rice with salt. Signs of malnutrition are already unmistakable. No camps have temporary schools. The refusal of the state (and central governments) to establish camps with basic services of safety, sanitation, nutrition, education and health care is another disgraceful abdication by the state of its fundamental constitutional duties.We searched desperately for signs of hope in Manipur for peace and healing in the immediate future. We could find this only in stories we heard in the camps of people of the “other” community who helped save lives. These, and the acknowledgment of their shared suffering and indeed their shared belonging, alone can create the space even for the start of any dialogue.We grieve for our people. We grieve for our critically fractured land. We rage for the malign governments that we have installed.A relief camp in Moirang. Mnaipur. Photo: Imaad ul HasanIt will require extraordinary statesmanship to douse the fires that burn across Manipur, and to heal the fractures that tear it apart. The present state government – whose impartiality and competence are gravely in doubt – needs urgently to be dismissed. Special investigation teams – including police officers from outside the state and monitored by retired judges of the higher courts – need to investigate the crimes of the looting of armouries, murder and sexual violence, and the burning and looting of villages and homes. Civilian populations need to be urgently and extensively disarmed. Leaders of both estranged communities need to be brought together to restore a process of dialogue. These are just the first necessary steps to begin the long journey to restoring peace to broken Manipur.Also read: Manipur Is in the Dark, the Ban on the Internet Must Be LiftedBut all of this is not the subject of this report of the Karwan-e-Mohabbat. There is no evidence that the steps we have outlined above to change the leadership, to investigate crimes, and to disarm populations, are likely to be undertaken in the immediate future. Without these, it would be impossible to rebuild trust between communities and a sense of safety that would enable the internally displaced populations to return to their villages and restart their lives.The focus of the recommendations of this report is therefore centred on the immense humanitarian crisis that we encountered in Manipur. More than 60,000 people have been displaced from their villages and homes. Most of these have been looted and razed to the ground. A majority of these displaced persons are living in relief camps. The state is almost completely absent from these camps, even more starkly from the camps in the hills. Since there is little chance today that relief camps will be wound up and normalcy restored in the coming months, the focus of our report is on the humanitarian crisis of the internally displaced persons, and what we are convinced must be done immediately to alleviate and prevent further human suffering in Manipur.Read the full report here.
