That afternoon in May last year, when we visited the refugee camps set up in Zokawthar, a village right across the international boundary line (in this case, a river) separating India from Myanmar, the sun had been beating down hard after weeks of torrential rain. The camps were rife with diseases and clean water shortage issues that forced many refugees to move to the Champhai district headquarters for medical treatment, and those who could afford more moved to Aizawl or even out of Mizoram for a more dignified life.
As I entered one of these makeshift houses protected only by tinned roofs and blue tarpaulin sheets, looking for my friend, I ran into a young woman who responded to my calls in English. Lalringsangi, 25, had escaped her village in Falam (Chin state) when the military junta invaded the year before, along with her sons (six and nine months old), husband, mother, and brother. But before she got married and had a family, Lalringsangi worked for several years as a domestic help in Singapore, where she picked up the foreign language. She wanted to get a refugee card that could help her and her family apply for asylum abroad.
Like other refugees in the camp, their family was getting by on donations received from civil society, aid groups, and the government, in addition to wages earned by her brother (who was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder) and her husband, both working as lumberjacks.
Although her time abroad wasn't something Lalringsangi fondly remembered, it now offered a better prospect than being a refugee in a place that could offer charity, some security, but not a fighting chance at a bright future.
This is the typical story of many migrants or refugees fleeing dire circumstances of instability or conflict in their homeland. India's northeast, particularly Manipur and Mizoram, has seen waves of refugees from Myanmar - with which it shares a 1,643-km stretch of border - since the 1988 uprising against the military junta. As reported since March 2021, the bulk of refugees found shelter in a receptive Mizoram, where dominant tribal communities share close ethnic ties with the Chin tribes, much like the Kuki-Zo tribes in Manipur.
In Manipur, the politically dominant Hindu Meiteis in the valley do not have any particular ethnic affectation, even though Myanmar has a sizeable Meitei population. But more importantly, the BJP-led coalition government in Manipur does not care for refugees (unless they are Hindus) in line with the larger absence of a refugee policy. With refugees being turned away and detained in Manipur, the few that made it were only temporarily sheltered by their ethnic kin before they landed up in Mizoram or New Delhi, in the hope of getting a UNHCR refugee card.
Despite this reality, the narrative painted by vested political parties or nationalist gangs is to sound the alarm on an "invasion" by migrants out to displace the native communities from their own land. An armed inter-ethnic conflict continues to play out in Manipur that has killed more than a hundred and displaced thousands of people who can't imagine returning. A majority of the victims are tribals.
Since violence broke out on May 3, the questions I have been fielding are from those wondering if Kukis - the ethnic community that I belong to - are illegal immigrants, poppy cultivators and/or terrorists. As someone who has reported from East to West on communities that are systemically harassed and labelled suspicious by the powers that be, the deep prejudice and nasty accusations have hit home. The roles are reversed in the northeast, where the 'indigenous' identity (the definition of which is far from settled) becomes a weapon to label disempowered folks in the margins here as 'colonial settlers', even though they are not even remotely from the Anglo-Saxon European stock.
Even the peace marches carried out by the Meitei community in Manipur or abroad end with calls for settling the issue by implementing the National Register of Citizens (NRC), an exercise carried out in Assam to ostensibly detect illegal immigrants that only left 19 lakh applicants in limbo, yet killed many by suicide. I have seen people in Assam lose precious years of their life in a detention centre on flimsy grounds of being declared an "illegal Bangladeshi" or dying on their way to prove their links to an ancestor.
In Manipur, where villages have turned into rubble and thousands of ancestral homes reduced to ashes, it befuddles me how anyone could imagine producing documents or proving family links in the midst of anarchy. It befuddles me more what sort of peace can be achieved by disenfranchising communities, instead of demanding justice for the dead.
Any exercise in state surveillance will be riddled with racial or ethnic biases. Although an Assamese scholar once theorised to me that this was particularly an issue for "transnational" communities, it's actually the minority underserved communities that always come in the fray. When the NRC was being updated in Assam, the draft lists had even excluded ethnic Ahoms, apart from disproportionately excluding Bengal-origin Muslims and Hindus. Yet the records of foreigners' tribunals consistently showed the systemic exclusion of Bengali Muslims more than any other ethnic community. It has declared people like retired army men illegal foreigners after 30 years of service because of spelling errors in documents, a regular occurrence in India.
For a region that has seen little sync and unity with "mainland" India, the idea of the NRC soon caught fire in the rest of the northeast. Ironically enough, the demand for securing borders along multiple nationalisms in a region filled with contiguous ethnic identities found more resonance with a Hindu nationalist government in the centre than the past status quo-ist yet secular-branded government.
In a politically motivated exercise that was 'too little, too late', the Manipur cabinet formed a subcommittee to survey 'illegal immigrants' in March, which is alleged to be one of the main reasons for the current clashes. Per documents recently reviewed by NDTV, over 2,000 illegal immigrants from Myanmar were found in just four districts by the committee that also had Letpao Haokip, a minister from the Kuki tribe who had conversed with the immigrants in the dialect. However, the document, alleged to be an 'initial report summary' submitted after the violence, titled 'Role of illegal Myanmari immigrants in the recent violence in Manipur' (sic), runs contrary to the subcommittee reports from visits to Churachandpur and Chandel districts.
Besides the reported figures of illegal settlements cited in the NDTV report, the subcommittee reports make no mention of "objections raised by illegal immigrants" to their proposal for shelter homes nor any discussions on poppy cultivation. This was confirmed to me by a subcommittee member who did not wish to be named.
However, the same member would not confirm or deny the undated and unsigned 'summary' report that concluded, "the recent violence in Manipur was fuelled by influential illegal poppy cultivators and drug lords from Myanmar settling in Manipur" (sic).
But this isn't about singling out the Meiteis, amongst whom the consensus for Scheduled Tribe (ST) status or an NRC was built after they suffered retaliatory killings and displacement in the clashes. Even if the narrative of an invasion can be believed, it is at the instance of Chief Minister N Biren Singh that Manipur did not admit refugees from Myanmar on humanitarian grounds. Valley-based civil society groups were, in fact, not opposed to offering them shelter with temporary IDs, fearful of a situation where the influx rate remained unknown, and the entire community came under suspicion.
But this is what inevitably happened, and the violence that ensued suited a government that thrives in chaos and suspicion. And the indigenous communities - who were once seeking self-determination - are falling for it hook, line, and sinker.
(Makepeace Sitlhou is an award-winning journalist who has reported from India's Northeast. She was a Humphrey fellow (Fulbright) at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, Arizona State University.)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author.