Igreat all around Playwright Ratan Thayim Seen hysterical madness before the apocalypse. A monkey crying in front of a picture of Darwin, a survivor of Ramnarayan who had gone to fight in the Great World War. A curse prevented the monkey from becoming a man, but the priest who had promised to help him had become a follower of Mao Zedong. The Kauravas had won the Battle of Kurukshetra, and the streets were filled with preachers offering new religions at cheap prices.
Ever since the barbaric ethnic cleansing began in Manipur last month – claiming more than a hundred lives and tens of thousands of homes – Thayim’s surrealist poetry is providing a more accurate guide to reality than the insights of administrators, spies and experts.
The Indian government had turned rebel groups into state-funded enterprises since 2006, paying 6,000 rupees per month to live in the camps. Paid displaced Kuki rebels per month. arrears of payments was cleverly handled To turn surrendered rebels into election campaigners.
Contracts were awarded on a large scale, to elites in all communities, in an effort to corrupt them into compliance. The state carefully shied away from endemic drug trafficking and extortion.
As subsequent governments claimed they were making peace, they were building a dystopia. There are many narratives that collide in Manipur, but the story of why the Kukis went to war helps to understand the conflict that unfolded.
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coping with the modern world
Faced a severe shortage of workers to service the massacres of Ypres and Flanders, historian Radhika Singla RecordsImperial Britain needed Indian bodies. The Maharaja of Manipur provided Naga, Lushai and Meitei communities, among other native rulers, as colonial army officers. noted by leslie shakespeare, “Had done this kind of work for the government before in border operations in many cases, and knew the job.” The rewards included a lifetime exemption from forced free labor.
Slavery was incorporated into the monarchy system before Manipur was incorporated into British India in 1891, and was then allowed to become a nominally-independent state. The keeping of human property by the king ended, but the British continued to use forced labour, often for their own ends.
hill people, anthropologist james scott have taught, are practitioners of the Art of Not Being Government, skillfully using terrain to avoid taxation by the valley-based state. The hill people used their hilly terrain to escape state slavery, raids, conscription, taxation and forced labour.
Even though colonial discourse described Kuki as a savage marauder, Historian Jankhomang Guite pointed out that the reality was much more complex. The hill tribes often helped the lowland princes to wage war, and provided them with refuge during invasions from Burma. The Kuki ran a crude taxation system, charging protection money from cultivators and merchants who worked on their land.
The relentless demand made by the Great War for human bodies, however, prompted Britain to turn to the Kuki hills – which were outside the control of the Imphal-based princes. Kookie was not enthused by his first major encounter with the modern world – and he decided to fight back.
A local rebellion against imperial authority broke out in what is now known as the Chittagong Hill Tract in early 1845–71. There were new rebellions in 1872 and 1888, and the Anglo-Chinese War of 1889–90. In the late spring of 1917, the Kuki chiefs met in the village of Jumpi, and sacrificed a sacred Mithun cow, to take an oath that they would not travel to France. Legend has it that the pills were sent from village to village as talismans asking for support.
The Empire was equally determined to ensure compliance, and ordered Cooke to surrender his guns: “It is essential to the administration of a country inhabited by uncivilized tribes that they should be made to understand that lawful orders are to be obeyed.” cannot be disobeyed and that disobedience brings certain punishment,” said political agent J.C. Higgins insisted.
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little war of the great war
Fought in the shadow of the Great War, the Anglo-Kuki War began with a raid against ethnic-Nepalese pastoralists settled by the British in the Khuga Valley near Churachandpur. The settlement was a smoldering source of resentment for Zu and Thadou as the best land available for rice cultivation. Elsewhere, villages were fortified and food stores scattered in anticipation of an inevitable counterattack by superior forces.
Initially, the British believed that the Kukis were being inspired by an ethnic-Meitei claimant to the throne, Chingkhamba Sana Chauba Singh, who claimed to have magical powers that would protect the tribes. However, the so-called primitive fighters were well prepared for battle.
Like other minor wars, or rebellions, the odds were stacked against the rebels – who had to rely on their own tactical skill and intelligence. The British had anticipated that, faced with force, the Kuki resistance would collapse. Instead, the rebels melted away.
Great scholarship even though Cookie had a small number of firearms Jangkhomang Guite and Thongkholal Haokip Records, the tribes had learned to extract nitrates from bat excreta in the Senlung caves. It can be mixed with charcoal and saltpeter to make gunpowder.
Assam Rifles, a large number of children and women were forced into concentration camps at Ningale, Tengnoupal, Bongmol, Lonpi and Nungba by the former governor. recorded by robert reed, in an attempt to force the Kuki rebels to surrender. The camps were also used to torture suspects with whips. Elsewhere, in an attempt to quell the rebellion by starvation, entire villages were burned and crops looted.
These Barbaric Colonial Era Practices, Eminent Indian Administrative Services Recorded by Vijender JaffaAnti-insurgency remained part of the lexicon in the northeast until the 1960s – generations of sour relations between New Delhi and the people of the region.
After the Anglo-Kuki war, an unsettled peace is restored in the hills. The British had shown that they could crush the Kuki rebellion, but at an economic price the Empire was unwilling to pay.
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a dubious freedom
The Anglo-Kuki war was not the only tragedy inflicted by the empire in the region: the horrific miscalculation leading to the Manipur War of 1891, brilliantly documented by Caroline Keane, fractured society, opening the way for both religious nationalism and communism Is. The independence struggle was particularly brutal in regions such as Nagaland and Mizoram. Assam and Manipur saw a variety of ethno-nationalist and communist-inspired movements. Lacking deep political legitimacy in the region, New Delhi used imperial means of bargaining and coercion.
Independence, to make things even more complicated, provided some ethnic formations with territory where they could exercise political power—but excluded others, scholars Telsing Haokip observesout in the cold.
Equal economic prosperity, education and a polity that looks beyond caste contractors could have created a different Northeast, Writer Sudip Chakraborty Noted. In the process of democratization, close-knit communities could be given power and agency, allowing them to resolve their conflicts. Instead, electoral politics served to harden and consolidate conflicting ethnic identities – a process that has reached its grim climax in Manipur, where rival militias are engaged in pushing entire peoples off their lands.
Learning all the wrong lessons from the Empire, independent India chose to rule the Northeast through cash and coercion. As in much of India, communities have responded to the absence of genuine democratic institutions by sharpening group boundaries and raising walls of identity. The fate of Manipur is a cautionary tale of what could happen to much of India tomorrow – and a test of the republic’s ability to prevent it.
The writer is National Security Editor with ThePrint. He tweeted @praveenswami. Thoughts are personal.
(Editing by Anurag Choubey)