Manipur’s conflict has harsh lessons for all of India’s Northeast

In mid-July, the Coordination Committee for Manipur Integrity (COCOMI), a Meitei-led civil-society organisation based in Imphal, wrote to the European Parliament. COCOMI declared that a resolution the European Parliament had adopted on Manipur, where ethnic violence had been raging since May, wrongly framed the Indian state's conflict as one between two communities. Instead, it said, the violence was between "immigrant Chin-Kuki narco-terrorists." In saying this, the COCOMI was sticking to its line of projecting the hill tribes of Manipur, now foes to the Imphal Valley-dwelling Meiteis, as both criminals and outsiders in the state.

In the four months of violence so far, Manipur's state government and India's central government have failed to reestablish law and order, and both the local and the national media have become increasingly unreliable, often saturated with misinformation. But perhaps the most tragic factor in the Manipur crisis has been the erosion of civil society in the state, evident in the vicious other-ing of fellow citizens and neighbours. The disintegration and myopia of Manipur's civil society is one of the root causes of the unrelenting violence.