Behind India’s Manipur conflict: A tale of drugs, armed groups and politics

Sugnu, India – Ratan Kumar Singh, a 58-year-old high school teacher, never imagined he would be happy to see armed fighters, or “revolutionaries” as he called them. But on May 28 last year, Singh welcomed them to his town of Sugnu in Manipur, a state in India’s northeast corner bordering Myanmar.

For nearly three weeks, the small town had managed to dodge the ethnic violence between the Meitei community and the Kuki-Zo tribespeople that had engulfed the rest of the state since May 3. But that day, four people were killed in the area and 12 injured as bullets found their way from surrounding hilly regions and from a camp dominated by the Kuki-Zo community. “Then they started burning our houses. Our reinforcements, including the police and our civilian volunteers, started firing back. It was only when the revolutionaries came that we succeeded in overcoming the other side,” Singh told Al Jazeera.

“We were never for gun violence… but when we saw the revolutionaries and other Meitei volunteers come on that day, we cried [out of happiness] because we knew we would be safe.”

The fighters who came to defend Sugnu were, like him, ethnically Meitei.

Eleven months on, the conflict has killed 219 people, injured 1,100, displaced 60,000 and divided the state into ethnic territories. Armed groups have been fighting battles using sophisticated weapons and explosives in rural parts for territorial control even as more than 60,000 armed forces of the federal government and the state have so far failed to bring a durable end to the violence. “Then they started burning our houses. Our reinforcements, including the police and our civilian volunteers, started firing back. It was only when the revolutionaries came that we succeeded in overcoming the other side,” Singh told Al Jazeera.

“We were never for gun violence… but when we saw the revolutionaries and other Meitei volunteers come on that day, we cried [out of happiness] because we knew we would be safe.”

The fighters who came to defend Sugnu were, like him, ethnically Meitei.

Eleven months on, the conflict has killed 219 people, injured 1,100, displaced 60,000 and divided the state into ethnic territories. Armed groups have been fighting battles using sophisticated weapons and explosives in rural parts for territorial control even as more than 60,000 armed forces of the federal government and the state have so far failed to bring a durable end to the violence. Chief Minister Singh swept the elections. In his second tenure beginning 2022, the BJP won five of the 10 state assembly seats from the Kuki-dominated hill constituencies. BJP legislators (MLAs) from these constituencies increased to seven after two of the Kuki MLAs who had won on Janata Dal United tickets defected to the governing party in September 2022. Two out of seven MLAs became ministers in his cabinet.

However, two years later, Modi and Singh’s claims bit dust, with Manipur witnessing unending ethnic violence between the Kuki and Meitei people, arguably, the longest-running ethnic conflict the country has witnessed in the 21st century.

Now, as the state prepares to vote in national elections on April 19 and April 26, those divisions have become entrenched, with a resurgence in armed groups formed along ethnic lines, as the first part of this series showed. It also revealed a presentation by the Assam Rifles that listed several factors that played a role in igniting the conflict: illegal immigrants from Myanmar, the demand for Kukiland, political authoritarianism and ambition of Chief Minister Singh and his war on drugs among others. The war on drugs first played a significant role in the political landscape and later in fuelling the conflict in Manipur. This concluding part of the series investigates how the drug trade and politics over it have roiled Manipur.The war on drugs

In 2018, still in his first term as chief minister, Singh announced his war on drugs. “Thousands of hectares of land are used for poppy cultivation in areas near the international border with Myanmar,” he told the media.

Poor economic conditions, lack of job opportunities and easy availability of drugs had led to a high number of drug addicts in the state, he said.

He was not wrong. Manipur sits adjacent to the infamous “Golden Triangle”, an area in Southeast Asia covering civil war-torn Myanmar. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) defines the region as one of the “biggest drug trafficking corridors in the world”. Heroin, opium and synthetic drugs like methamphetamine from the region are “feeding the whole of the Asia Pacific [region]”, the UN said.

The spillover of the trade into Manipur has an old history.

“The drug trade has caught up in Manipur in the last 15 years. [Recently,] the US, other Western countries and the United Nations [have] started going after Myanmar and the Golden Triangle,” Lieutenant General Konsam Himalay Singh, a Meitei, who retired in 2017, told me. He added, “As a result, the Golden Triangle extended towards the West [into Manipur]. It was accelerated by the armed groups who found easy money.”

He was referring to the array of armed rebel groups of different ethnicities, including the Kuki and Meitei fighters, that proliferate in Manipur and are involved in the drug trade across the porous borders with Myanmar.