It is intriguing that there exists this curious stereotype of a communal divide in Manipur which sees only a distinct and formidable binary between the hills and the valley.
While nobody can deny there is such a divide, this is hardly the complete picture of the complex ethnic mosaic that Manipur is. It would even have been understandable if this stereotype was the major and overwhelming divide which renders all other fissures insignificant.
Perhaps the fault is with the vogue of adopting unconditionally the occidental approach to knowledge through a process of reductive analysis which by and large is about pigeon-holing human experiences into tight structures and vocabularies of sociological constructs. To a great extent this may be unavoidable for the lack of a credible elaborate competing system.
Moreover, even if it is arguable that this approach cannot encompass the entirety of human experience, it would still remain a very a helpful instrument in our understanding of society and its dynamics.
But even within this frame, there seems something missing in the analysis of Manipur’s great hill-valley divide. Just a closer consideration of some of the empirics of the frictions within the state should open eyes.
Take for instance the direct human casualties that have resulted out of this divide. It is practically none. Even during the heights of the June 2001 tension between “Manipur integrity” and “Naga integration” campaigners, undoubtedly one of the abiding and visible fault lines of this divide in current times, it should be of interest for observers of this conflict theatre to note that there was not even a single direct human casualty, not in the valley or in the hills.
What on the other hand what bit the dust, as we all remember, were government institutions, including the State Legislative Assembly building in Imphal, and in the hills, government school buildings, offices and such others, not necessarily in the immediate wake of the tension but in the lingering tails of the same agitation. There were also plenty of bandhs and blockades.
Contrast this with what happened in the hill-hill divide or to a lesser extent the valley-valley divide. In this, memories of the 1990s which would be still vivid to most of us, should say it all.
The Kuki-Naga feud was nearly an ethnic cleansing civil war situation and the inferno raged for nearly a whole decade. More than a thousand lives were lost, many villages razed to the ground, populations uprooted violently and permanently from various pockets, to be resettled in other pockets, clearly resulting in a sweeping remapping of ethnic demography.
Take again the Kuki-Paite clashes that followed in the later part of the same decade in the Churachandpur district, one which confounded everybody as the Kukis and Paites are supposed to be kindred communities. Nobody will have any doubt about the animosity involved in this feud though.
As for instance, a new station of the All India Radio commissioned at the time is still non-functional because of the objection to the base medium to be used – Kuki or Paite – by either of the two groups.
The valley-valley divide also saw a single day (May 3, 1993) or maybe two days of madness in which Meiteis and Meitei Pangals drew blood, but it was hardly the sustained feud of the variety witnessed in the hill-hill binaries we just mentioned.
It was more like a cruel and brutal aberration in history, as the then popular video magazine “Eye-Witness” (sold as cassettes before the advent of satellite television) run by Karan Thappar described it.
Yet, the pigeon holing of this entire experience into the broad, and by that virtue clumsy, category described as “hill-valley divide” continues. The empirics which demonstrate that the rest of the myriad deadly “inner lines” and “inner fissures” are nothing to be trifled are simply and conveniently swept under the carpet.
Surprisingly, those pushing it, apart from the usual suspects – politicians with vested interests – include some well-heeled and bright academics. Vested interest again? As somebody unabashedly interested in the welfare of Manipur, this is not a question of being defensive on behalf of anybody, valley or hills.
The caution which prompted us to make these observations is, wrong diagnoses always lead to wrong prescriptions, in the process perpetuating the problems at hand. The hill-valley divide exists and must be met with policy interventions, but the other divides cannot be erased by political rhetoric alone either.
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