India’s Manipuris cannot go back a year after fleeing violence

Lingneifel Vaiphei collapsed to the ground in agony after she saw the lifeless body of her infant child laid out on a cold steel stretcher in a mortuary in Chennai, the capital of India’s southern Tamil Nadu state.

Steven’s body was tightly wrapped in a striped woollen shawl, traditionally worn by the Kuki-Zo tribe in the northeastern Manipur state. His face had turned blue. He was only six months old. Crying profusely, the 20-year-old mother kept kissing her child’s face as she carried his body towards an ambulance, her husband Kennedy Vaiphei walking beside her. Amid sobs and muted rage, the family made their way to a burial ground, about 7km (4 miles) away, and laid their only child to rest. Nine months after Lingneifel and Kennedy had moved to Chennai in search of a fresh start away from violence, a nightmare they had never imagined had visited them. Less than 24 hours earlier, on the night of April 25, the couple had rushed Steven to Chennai’s Kilpauk Medical Hospital after his week-long fever refused to subside and kept getting worse. But the infant died on the way in his mother’s arms – before the family could even reach the hospital. A year of deadly violence

Steven was born last winter in Chennai, nearly 3,200km (1,988 miles) away from the place his parents call home in Manipur, which has been in the grip of deadly ethnic clashes between the predominantly Hindu Meitei and the mainly Christian Kuki-Zo tribes for a year now. The Meiteis – about 60 percent of Manipur’s 2.9 million people – are concentrated in the more prosperous valley areas around the state capital, Imphal. The Kuki-Zo and the Nagas, another prominent tribal group, mostly live in scattered settlements in the hills around the valley. The tribes constitute about 40 percent of the Himalayan state’s population. The Meiteis are politically dominant. The state government is led by Chief Minister N Biren Singh, a Meitei and member of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In the 60-member Manipur legislative assembly, 40 are Meitei.

The Kuki-Zo and the Nagas are protected through Scheduled Tribe (ST) status given by the Indian constitution, making them eligible for various state-run affirmative action programmes. The status provides them quotas in state-run educational institutions and government jobs – a provision which, for decades, has caused tensions between the tribes and the Meities. Those tensions came to a boil in March last year when a local court recommended that the ST quotas should also be extended to the Meiteis. The court order angered Kuki-Zo and Naga groups, who, fearing a takeover of their entitlements by the majority Meiteis, held protest marches mainly in the hill districts, demanding the withdrawal of the court order. The protests led to threats of a Meitei backlash. During a Kuki-Zo rally on May 3, 2023, in the hill district of Churachandpur, a centenary gate built to commemorate the tribe’s 1917-1919 rebellion against the colonial British was set on fire, allegedly by a Meitei mob. The incident immediately triggered deadly clashes between the two communities across the state. Amid the killings, mutilations and lynchings, there were also multiple allegations of sexual assault on Kuki-Zo women and burning of dozens of their villages and churches. The internet remained suspended for months across the state and the army was called in to contain the bloodshed.

A year later, however, the violence has not abated – making it one of India’s longest-running civil wars that has already claimed more than 200 lives and displaced tens of thousands of mainly Kuki-Zo people.

Among the displaced were Lingneifel and Kennedy, who moved to Tamil Nadu in July last year after their villages were burned down in the first week of the clashes. As they rebuilt their lives in a new city despite barriers of language and culture, the struggle for a livelihood trumped their worries over the violence back home.