Navin Upadhyay
Editor, PowerCorridors.in
BY Hen Kuki @hennaryL
As Manipur staggers under the weight of President’s Rule, a Central Government imposition meant to quell the unrelenting ethnic violence tearing the state apart, the Kuki-Zo people stand at a crossroads. Today, the Kuki Students’ Organisation (KSO) Delhi converged on Jantar Mantar, not for mere platitudes of peace but to demand a political solution: a separate administration for their beleaguered community.
This was no fleeting protest but a desperate plea from a people who have endured centuries of subjugation, betrayal, and, most recently, a chilling campaign of ethnic cleansing orchestrated by the Meitei majority with the complicity of a biased state machinery. With the Central Government now holding Manipur’s reins, the time has come to dismantle this oppressive legacy and deliver justice to the Kuki-Zo tribes.
The seeds of today’s crisis were sown nearly two centuries ago, when the British, driven by imperial expediency rather than consent, forcibly stitched the autonomous Hills home to the Kuki-Zo and other tribal peoples onto the Meitei-dominated Valley of Manipur. This unnatural union, formalized after the Treaty of Yandaboo in 1826 and cemented through arbitrary boundary-drawing in the 1830s and 1840s, handed the hills to a Maharaja whose disdain for the tribal populace was matched only by his lust for their resources. The Cheitharol Kumbaba, Manipur’s royal chronicle, chronicles this plunder with stark clarit: post-1826, Meitei armies marched annually into the hills, torching Kuki and Naga villages, seizing cattle, slaves, and grain, leaving devastation in their wake. This was not governance it was predation, a legacy of pillage that the British briefly curbed by wresting hill administration from the Maharaja after the Anglo-Kuki War of 1917-1919, only for it to resurface in new forms post-independence.
When India inherited this colonial blunder in 1947, it chose not to undo it but to entrench it. Manipur’s statehood in 1972 placed the Kuki-Zo at the mercy of a Meitei-dominated government whose agenda has been unwavering: to erase tribal identity, seize their lands, and monopolize power. What has unfolded since is nothing short of systemic genocide, cloaked as “territorial integrity” but steeped in colonial narcissism. The evidence is damning. The Manipur Land Revenue and Land Reforms Act of 1960, intended to safeguard tribal lands, has been subverted by declaring hill towns like Moreh and Churachandpur as municipal areas, opening them to Meitei settlement. Under Chief Minister N. Biren Singh, vast tracts of Kuki-Zo inhabited hills have been designated as Reserved Forests and Wildlife Sanctuaries without tribal consent, with bulldozers, police, and Meitei mobs razing villages in so-called “evictions” a blatant land grab dressed as conservation.
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Politically, the Kuki-Zo have been strangled. Article 371C, mandating tribal self-governance, remains a dead letter, its implementation thwarted by Meitei opposition. The Delimitation Act of 2002, which would reflect the tribal population’s growth 38.5% in 2001 and increase their legislative seats, has been stalled by Valley chauvinism, leaving the Hill Areas Committee and District Councils powerless shells. Economically, the hills, comprising 90% of Manipur’s territory, receive a pittance of the state budget, while tribal reservations in jobs and education are flouted, consigning Kuki-Zo youth to poverty as Meiteis prosper. Culturally, the Meitei push to strip Kuki-Zo tribes of Scheduled Tribe status, while demanding it for themselves, aims to obliterate tribal rights and seize their lands outright.
This slow strangulation erupted into open violence in 2023, when state-sponsored pogroms abetted by Meitei militias like Arambai Tenggol unleashed hell on the Kuki-Zo. Villages were torched, thousands displaced, and hundreds killed, all under the watch of a Meitei-dominated state police force. This was not random chaos; it was a calculated annihilation, a culmination of decades of majoritarian greed. The Meitei cry for “Manipur’s integrity” is a hollow sham it means nothing more than perpetual Kuki-Zo subjugation, a colonial mindset reborn in modern brutality.
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Now, with Manipur under President’s Rule, the Central Government has a rare chance to right this historic wrong. The Kuki-Zo demand for a separate administration be it a Union Territory or a full-fledged state is not a radical fantasy; it is a return to historical truth. The hills and valley were never one. The Meitei Maharaja never ruled the hills; the British administered them separately; and even post-independence, laws like the Manipur State Hill Peoples (Administration) Regulation of 1947 recognized their distinct identity. To force their continued merger is to sanction genocide by decree.
Today’s rally at Jantar Mantar will stand as a testament to the Kuki-Zo’s unyielding spirit. It echoes the defiance of the Anglo-Kuki War and Rani Gaidinliu’s warning that “overzealous compulsion and interference will mean bloody revolt.” The Kuki-Zo seek not vengeance but liberation from a system that has plundered their lands, erased their rights, and spilled their blood. Their call for a separate administration is a call for peace a peace impossible under Meitei hegemony.
The BJP-led Centre, often vocal on national unity, cannot turn a blind eye to this festering wound in India’s Northeast. President’s Rule is not a time for half-measures or hollow talks; it is a moment to confront the structural violence baked into Manipur’s administration. A separate administration for the Kuki-Zo is not a concession it is justice overdue. Delhi must heed the voices at Jantar Mantar, not the chauvinist clamor of Imphal. The Kuki-Zo are not aggressors; they are survivors of a state turned against them. Their lands are not Meitei lebensraum; their lives are not expendable. The Centre must act now, lest Manipur’s hills become a graveyard of India’s moral credibility.
