Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah are wrecking the country’s emotional integrity and putting its territorial integrity at risk in the northern and eastern border States owing to one reason alone: a congenital inability to understand the sensitivities of the non-Hindu minorities who inhabit our border areas, namely Muslims in Kashmir, Buddhists in Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh, and Christians in Nagaland, Manipur, and Mizoram.
Like the Bourbon monarchs of France who brought on themselves the French Revolution, our version of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette have “forgotten nothing and learned nothing”. They cannot, because Hindutva teaches them that Hindus are the true inhabitants of Bharatvarsha, and others can live in the country only under Hindu tutelage.
It follows that seeking a transactional relationship by throwing money at the religious minorities to buy off dissidence and despair is regarded by the saffron forces as the optimal way of keeping them from grumbling, instead of understanding and addressing their problems of identity, personal and family security, and self-government as the only solution for their anxieties.
Wrong approach
This is how they have wrongly approached Kashmir. And this is how they are wrongly approaching Manipur. Our peripatetic Prime Minister, who has been out of the country some 78 times, has, at long last, found it possible, after 28 months, that is, 123 weeks, or, alternatively, 834 days, to make a “pit stop” of a mere three hours in Kuki-dominated Churachandpur and Meitei-dominated Imphal.
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He deliberately avoided any meaningful interaction with the thousands of internally displaced persons roughing it out in makeshift, sub-human refugee camps, or ordinary Meitei and Kuki-Zo, or their representatives in civil society organisations and non-government organisations (NGOs).
Shockingly, he even refused to meet the 10 elected BJP MLAs representing the hill areas, which forced them to write him a memo demanding Union Territory status. He remained adamant in not listening to anyone in Manipur, intent only on lecturing them from distant public platforms, and that too in Hindi, a language none of the hill people, Kuki-Zo or Naga, understand, while they can easily follow English.
Much was made by the fawning media of the Prime Minister driving 60 km by National Highway-2 (NH-2) when weather came in the way of his taking his helicopter, but little about how perhaps the most fundamental manifestation of troubled Manipur is NH-2 itself, as the hill tribes cannot use it for fear of armed Meitei vigilantes from grisly terrorist groups such as Arambai Tenggol and Meitei Leepun, who have been assaulting and even killing Kuki-Zo men and raping Kuki-Zo women with impunity for more than two horror-filled years.
The impunity derives from the fact that the BJP chose N. Biren Singh as Chief Minister, not despite but precisely because he was/is a fanatical majoritarian Meitei Lainingthou Sanamahi Hindu, while the victims are Kuki-Zo Christians. For nearly two years, he was allowed to get away with callously supervising murder and mayhem, before President’s rule, which should have been imposed in May 2023, was finally and reluctantly invoked only in February 2025.
Fundamental issues
Had Modi even glanced at the Executive Summary of the voluminous report of the “Independent People’s Tribunal on the Ongoing Ethnic Conflicts in Manipur”, submitted a month before the Prime Minister eventually flew to Manipur, or the few short lines, pregnant with insight and meaning, penned by the North-East Region’s most perspicacious political commentator, Patricia Mukhim, who edits TheShillong Times, or the perceptive reports of correspondents Yaqut Ali, Sangeeta B. Pisharody, or Sukrita Baruah, instead of listening only to his ill-intentioned Home Minister, who has been singularly responsible for stoking the flames, he might have known that his announcing an economic package of Rs.7,000-8,000 crore for Manipur, like his similar economic packages for Jammu and Kashmir, would fall flat if he did not address the fundamental political and humanitarian issues facing the religious and ethnic minorities that had set the State on fire for more than two hate-filled years in a border State right next to a Myanmar in turmoil and within calling distance of the Chinese dragon.
What are these highly sensitive fundamental issues? They can be summed up, as Modi’s own BJP MLAs led by the highly articulate Paolienlal Haokip could have told him in short order (as Haokip later told Karan Thapar): “ethnic cleansing”, as publicly affirmed by the former Chief Minister; hill tribes being treated as if they were “colonial subjects”; and “the root of the crisis” being “the unwillingness of the majority community to share political power”, all adding up to “the rationale” he wished to place before his own party’s Prime Minister for seeking “Union Territory status”.
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He might, if given the opportunity, have argued that this was the solution found by none other than the Modi-Shah duo for Ladakh, with numerous precedents ranging from the scattered remains of French Pondicherry subtracting from the “territorial integrity” of Tamil Nadu (Karaikal), Andhra Pradesh (Yanam), and Kerala (Mahe), but also Andhra Pradesh (twice separated, first from Madras province in 1953 and then from Telangana State in 2014), Uttarakhand (separated from Uttar Pradesh), Chhattisgarh (separated from Madhya Pradesh) and Jharkhand (separated from Bihar)—and, going back, Nagaland and Mizoram (separated from Assam).
He might even have concluded with Modi’s home State of Gujarat having wrecked the “territorial integrity” of Bombay State by separating Maharashtra from Gujarat in 1960!
‘First order interests’
Another key Kuki intellectual, Kham Khan Suan Hausing, who heads the Department of Political Science at Hyderabad University, has driven home the point that the “first order interests” of the Kuki-Zo are not economic issues but “peace, justice and accountability”. In Manipur (as much as in Jammu and Kashmir), Modi’s “over-emphasis on development” has come at the cost of “silence on substantive issues” and his “conspicuous failure to lay down a political road map” for Manipur. What Haokip terms the Prime Minister’s “hollow rhetoric” rings just as hollow in Jammu and Kashmi too.
So, where Patricia Mukhim had spotted a week before Modi flew to Manipur that “the prospect of resolution exists”, Hausing, writing after the visit, concludes that Modi’s long-awaited visit to Manipur was “a wasted opportunity”.
I firmly believe that it could not have been otherwise, for our Prime Minister’s majoritarian Hindutva mindset renders him incapable of understanding minority concerns.
The lesson to be learned is:
You can fool some of the Meiteis all of the time,
And all of the Kuki-Zo some of the time,
But you can’t fool all of the Manipuris
All of the time.
Mani Shankar Aiyar served as the Congress Observer for the hill States of the North-East, including Manipur, for several years and was later Union Minister for the Development of the North-Eastern Region.
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