Dr. Satish Kumar, who’s a Professor of Political Science at the Indira Gandhi National Open University, recently published an insightful piece about the national security dimensions of Manipur’s unrest that can be read here. He drew attention to the potentially disastrous administrative chain reaction that could be catalyzed by complying with one of the minority communities’ demands as well as the roles of drug cartels, illegal migration, missionaries, and political machinations from abroad in events.
Regarding the first of these five subjects, he warned that “The demands of Kuki for a separate administrative unit are dangerous and create a vicious trap. It will lead to multiple State’s demands in future.” Considering the ethno-religious complexity of Northeast India, this process could prompt the region’s “Balkanization” into a bunch of “Bantustans” that could be manipulated into perpetually warring against one another. This outcome would divide-and-rule India and thus hamstring its global rise.
As for the second subject, Dr. Kumar wrote that “The Kukis say a war on drugs waged by the Meitei-led Government is a screen to uproot their communities. Chief Minister Biren Singh has acted tough drug cartels.” At the same time, however, he also warned that “Poppy cultivation and drug trafficking have a direct connection to the month(s)-long ethnic violence in Manipur, India. Poppy cultivation in the hill areas of Manipur has grown many folds with the patronage of Myanmarese drug lords.”
Making matters even worse, he wrote, is that “Illegal migration from Myanmar has heightened tensions.” The Kukis and related groups in the region are connected to the Myanmar-originating Chin people who were sent by the British during the Raj-era occupation to work in what’s nowadays Northeast India. The legacy of these migrations created anchor communities, some of which in turn facilitate illegal immigration in the present, thus segueing into the third subject that he opined about in his piece.
These last two are closely connected since drug cartels and illegal migration often involve the same non-state groups that are behind both crimes. After all, drug-smuggling routes can obviously also be used for human smuggling too. Additionally, illegal migrants obviously have a more difficult time finding legal employment, which in turn makes them susceptible to various job offers from those same groups that smuggled them into India. This consequent cycle of criminality played a crucial role in Manipur’s unrest.
So too, it should be said, did missionaries. The subject of religious conversions is a sensitive one for any country and should thus be left to the state, ideally in partnership with civil society and the security services, to exercise its sovereign right in deciding how to deal with this and whether to regulate it. In the Indian context, Raj-era British missionaries and post-independence American ones converted millions of Kukis and other Northeast tribal groups to Christianity in these historically Hindu regions.
This fourth subject of Dr. Kumar’s article exacerbated the preexisting differences between the Kukis and Meiteis by imbuing them with a religious angle in the eyes of some in that region and abroad. That’s not at all to suggest that there’s anything wrong with anyone converting to any given religion, but just to point out the long-term socio-political consequences that this had and the role that they eventually played in contributing to Manipur’s unrest in the present.
The final subject built upon the last one and concerns political machinations from abroad, specifically those that he attributes to the missionaries’ Western backers as well as neighboring China. The first was already introduced above but can be expanded in this context to include the Anglo-American Axis’ aggressive conversion of Northeastern tribal groups for geostrategic purposes aimed at sowing the seeds for more effectively dividing-and-ruling India in the long term.
As Dr. Kumar wrote, “There has been colonial and post-colonial design of religious conversions and neglect of the Hindu community…Over time, the demographic composition of Manipur underwent significant changes…These (resultant socio-economic and political) disparities and the influx of illicit funds led some Kukis to take up arms, forming militant groups with the goal of eliminating Hindus and demanding a separate homeland.”
Regarding China, he reminded readers that “The ex-army chief general M. M. Naravane pointed out that the involvement of foreign agencies in the Manipur violence ‘cannot be ruled out’, as he flagged the ‘Chinese aid to various insurgent groups.’” About that, China has always denied India’s accusations over the decades that it arms these anti-state forces, but there’s a certain logic to Beijing possibly having done so in spite of claiming otherwise since it makes sense from that country’s national security perspective.
The 1962 Sino-Indo War, which was rooted in colonial-era border differences but the result of purely bilateral tensions brought about by this and not either acting as anyone’s proxy, poisoned their relations to this day. Accordingly, China might have found it strategically convenient to patronize leftist-aligned ethno-separatist groups in India’s adjacent Northeastern Region, which could also have been funneled via the comparatively much more porous border with Myanmar (previously known as Burma till 1989).
Even if the above is true, however, it doesn’t mean that China ordered the latest unrest in Manipur since it could have simply been that the long-running and increasingly tense differences between that state’s two minority communities finally reached the breaking point on their own. In that scenario, Chinese arms might have worsened the violence, but that country wouldn’t have been responsible for it and was likely caught off guard by events just as much as India and everyone else was.
Upon learning more about these five subjects of national security importance to Manipur’s unrest – administrative “Balkanization” threats, drug cartels, illegal immigration, missionaries, and political machinations from abroad – observers can obtain a much better understanding of what’s going on. Unlike what the Indian National Congress opposition and their Western liberal-globalist allies suggest, this isn’t a “genocide” ordered by the ruling party for ideological reasons, but a bonafide Hybrid War.
Preexisting differences between tribes in what’s nowadays Northeast India were exacerbated by a combination of state and non-state actors from the Raj-era into the present, which made early May’s explosion of violence there inevitable in hindsight. To its credit, China hasn’t exploited the situation despite rising Sino-Indo tensions since spring, but some of India’s Western partners haven’t been so respectful of its sovereignty such as when the European Parliament meddled in this matter last month.
The liberal–globalist faction of the Western policymaking bureaucracy envisage weaponizing perceptions about this Hybrid War at home and abroad for the purpose of discrediting the Modi Administration ahead of next spring’s elections and advancing their crusade to “Balkanize” India. They’ll never forgive their rival pragmatic faction for pursuing an equal partnership with India instead of continuing in vain to demand its vassalage, hence why they’re trying to destabilize that multipolar Great Power as revenge.
