Inter-ethnic violence in India’s Manipur state (northeast) has divided communities, but victims on both sides give similar testimonies of murdered relatives, burned houses and their feelings of despair.
At least 120 people have died since May in this state during armed clashes between the Meiteis – a mainly Hindu majority community – and the Christian minority of the Kukis. The human toll would be much higher, believe many residents.
Some 50,000 people were forced to flee. Among them was Ranjana Moirangthem, a teacher evacuated by the army after spending a horrific night with 25 neighbors in a shelter to escape the raging gun battles.
This Meitei, who lived in what became a Kuki stronghold of Churachandpur, fled with only the clothes she was wearing as her belongings. In the panic, she forgot her diplomas, essential to find a job.
She asked a Kuki friend to recover her precious documents but they would have burned down, her house being probably one of the thousands of homes that went up in smoke.
“I was a teacher,” she says, “I don’t know what to do because I have nothing left to prove that I am qualified.”
She now lives on help from the government and charities, in an overcrowded house in Moirang district: some 250 people live there, the floor is strewn with mattresses.
“I just want to go home,” she laments. “Churachandpur is where I have always lived, this is my home”.
L. Sonia, a Meitei who now lives in the same house, recounts having tried in vain to challenge local elected officials when gangs ransacked her neighborhood of Churachandpur.
“Their problem is the government, isn’t it? Why burn down our houses?” she asks, letting out her anger. “After floods, people are transferred to camps, but they return to their homes… What to do?”
India’s remote northeast states, between Bangladesh, China and Burma, have long experienced inter-ethnic tensions.
The resurgence of violence in Manipur erupted particularly after a protest march against the possibility that the Meiteis obtain the more advantageous status of “scheduled tribe” which would guarantee them quotas for public jobs and admissions to universities.
Both sides accuse the state government, led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and the central government of failing to end the violence.
Indian Home Minister Amit Shah promised an “impartial investigation” into the violence, saying the government stands “with the people of Manipur”.
But the clashes have not stopped and the people who have lost everything do not take off.
“Tens of thousands of people in Manipur are crying, what is Narendra Modi doing?” enraged Sonia, in a desperate appeal to the Indian Prime Minister. “Aren’t we Indian citizens?”
To signify to the Meiteis that they are no longer welcome in the district of Churachandpur, false coffins line the road leading there, as a warning. On the road signs, the name of Churachandpur has been crossed out because it comes from an ancient king Meitei.
The Kukis built a bamboo memorial with images of their slain fellow citizens, including the youngest, a two-month-old baby. A message recalls that their “blood did not flow in vain”.
In a camp for displaced Kukis, Vaneilhing, 40, a mother of two, recounts how hundreds of people dressed in black arrived at her home. They first looted his house before setting it on fire.
“We cry every day (…) some did not have time to put on their shoes before running away”, testifies this former shopkeeper, too frightened by possible reprisals to give her complete identity. .
In the evening, the community gathers in a makeshift chapel, praying and singing hymns in an attempt to drown out the noise of firefights between rival militias.
At the beginning of the month, a birth brought a little joy to the camp, but very quickly sadness took over.
“What is this baby going to do now? Where is it going to go?” wonders Vaneilhing.
02/08/2023 09:42:38 – Moirang (Inde) (AFP) © 2023 AFP
