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11-07-2023
Bureau Report + Agencies
NEW DELHI/ CHURACHANDPUR: Bawla (name changed) and more than a dozen other residents of Langza village in India’s northeastern state of Manipur are keeping a watch as the sound of gunfire closes in on the group.
As the day breaks and they start moving to a vehicle to escape, Bawla hears a sport utility vehicle approaching them. They start to run away from it.
“I ran for a distance and hid myself when I found a nook,” he told Al Jazeera.
From where he was hiding, he heard some voices. “Don’t shoot, let’s capture him alive,” came a voice. Then he heard more gunshots.
Bawla stayed hidden for three hours, before escaping up the hill to Tuinning, a nearby village, where he was told his friend David Thiek had been beheaded.
Only hours ago, Thiek was running behind Bawla as they were being chased by the attackers in an SUV. Now his severed head was hung at the entrance of the Langza village and the rest of his body was burned.
The July 3 incident underscores the horrors still unfolding in Manipur, a remote Himalayan state where ethnic clashes between Meitei and Kuki-Zo tribes have killed at least 140 people and displaced more than 50,000 people in two months.
The mainly Hindu Meitis form a narrow majority among Manipur’s 3.5 million population, as per India’s last census conducted in 2011. The group is largely concentrated in the prosperous valley area around Imphal, the state capital, in central Manipur.
They also enjoy political dominance, with the state’s chief minister N Biren Singh of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) himself being a Meitei as are the 40 legislators in the 60-member state assembly.
On the other hand, the minority Kuki-Zo tribe, along with the Nagas, are predominantly Christian and form about 40 percent of the state’s population. They mostly live in the hills around the valley.
The Kuki-Zos and the Nagas enjoy the Scheduled Tribe status, a constitutional provision that protects the rights and livelihoods of some of India’s Indigenous communities through reservation in academic institutions and government jobs for them.
While clashes between the Meitei and Kuki-Zo tribes are not uncommon in ethnically-divided Manipur, few had predicted the scale and length of the latest riots, which some reports have even called a civil war.
