Kim Gangte, the former MP for Outer Manipur, has said that “a middle path” between the Kuki demand for separate administration and the Meitei insistence on maintaining a united Manipur should be the solution for the crisis in the state. However, Gangte adds that the wounds are deep and it will not be easy to find this middle path. She also said that the onus to find this middle path should fall on the seven states of the Northeast because neither Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Union government nor Manipur chief minister Biren Singh are capable of – or even willing to – initiate a dialogue between the Meitei and Kuki.Asked which chief ministers she had in mind as the right people to initiate this process, Gangte said the chief ministers of Nagaland and Mizoram because of their close association with the communities of Manipur. At one point in the interview, Gangte also accepted that someone like Ratan Thiyam, the highly regarded playwright and director, could play an important role in initiating the process that leads to a middle path.In a 35-minute interview with Karan Thapar for The Wire, Gangte said that a middle path would only emerge on the basis of “give and take” by both communities. She said all stakeholders would have to be involved.What makes Gangte unique is that she is the only important Kuki leader who has spoken of a middle path rather than separate administration. Although she repeatedly said that this was her personal opinion, she also said she would be willing to write to the chief ministers of Nagaland and Mizoram to encourage them to take steps to start a dialogue between the Kuki and Meitei communities which, hopefully, would lead to the middle path solution.In the first half of the interview, Gangte recounts in detail the harrowing experience she and her young nephew went through on May 3, 4 and 5, when mobs started attacking the area in Imphal where she lives. She describes how buildings were set on fire and the sky became completely black with smoke. After 36 hours, she and her nephew fled their house, and ran down the road not knowing where they were going. All they had was a small suitcase in which they had hurriedly packed a few clothes.Gangte and her nephew spent five days in a school camp where they sheltered with some 500 others who had similarly fled their homes. Then they were taken by the army to a CRPF camp which had 3,000 people seeking shelter. After five more days in the CRPF camp, Gangte and her nephew boarded an army vehicle without knowing in which direction it was heading and were thus able to slowly get back to some sort of normal life.One important point she made is that whilst in the school camp and the CRPF camp, her Meitei colleagues and friends did reach out and even, on occasion, came to meet them. The bond that she had established with her Meitei constituents and friends did not snap during that difficult period.
