Friends on WhatsApp, adversaries next door: Across Manipur’s ‘Kargil’ divide

Senapati/Kangpokpi , From the courtyard of his home in Taphou Kuki, village chief Lenkhomang Chongloi can see the houses of his Naga neighbours. A CRPF contingent is stationed at his residence, and he points to marks on a wall that he says were left by bullets.

"It is like Kargil, like India and Pakistan," he says, describing the hostility between the neighbouring settlements, a comparison that might have passed for dry humour in less troubled times.

But in heavily militarised Manipur, where more than three years of ethnic conflict have hardened divisions and turned neighbours into adversaries, the language of war has become part of everyday conversation. As it has been since 2023 when schisms between people in the northeastern state drew divides across entire villages and districts, first Kuki-Meitei and now Kuki-Naga.

A short distance away from Taphou Kuki is Taphou Liangmai - the very names marking territory inhabited by members of the Liangmai Naga tribe. Sitting in his home, Api Pamai looks across to Chongloi's dwelling. Chongloi's son was his classmate and it was a place he visited often.

"We grew up together. I have many friends on that side. Since May, we are not on talking terms. We see their WhatsApp statuses but do not respond. The situation has changed," says the 35-year-old.

Security barricades now mark the separation between the settlements, about 65 km from the state capital Imphal. Beyond them, houses, farms and slopes lie close together across undulating green hills and valleys. To an unfamiliar eye, it is difficult to tell where one village ends and another begins.

The pastoral calm is deceptive.

Here, on the boundary between the Kangpokpi-Senapati districts, a hostage crisis in May and June marked a defining escalation in the renewed Naga-Kuki confrontation, adding another violent front to Manipur's ethnic conflict. While Senapati is predominantly inhabitated by the Nagas, Kangpokpi is predominantly Kuki-Zo, but it has several pockets of Naga villages as well.

The violence has killed more than 300 people and displaced around 60,000 since May 2023. The state government put the death toll at 306 as of August 31 this year; further killings have followed.

On May 13 this year, three Kuki-Zo church leaders were killed in an ambush in Kangpokpi district. Naga and Kuki villagers were subsequently abducted in Kangpokpi and neighbouring Senapati, with Naga representatives terming the seizure of Kuki villagers a retaliation.

Although several captives were released two days later, six Naga men remained missing, while Naga groups continued to hold 14 Kuki men, demanding the missing men's release. Kuki groups denied holding them.

On June 9, the 14 Kuki men were freed after nearly a month in captivity. The following day, the bodies of the six missing Naga men were recovered. The sharply different outcomes remain central to how the two sides explain what has happened since.

"We abducted their people from Senapati after they abducted our people," says Benwang Bo, general secretary of the Liangmai Naga Council.

"We took good care of their people and eventually released them, but they killed six of our men."

On the Kuki side, Chongloi recalls 25 villagers being intercepted in Senapati after news came of the church leaders' killings. "After we informed the police, they were nearly brought back to the village. But they were intercepted again and taken back to Senapati despite the presence of police."

For roughly two years after May 2023, Nagas largely remained outside the principal Meitei-Kuki confrontation. But older Naga-Kuki disputes over land, settlement and political aspirations, which had taken a bloody turn in the 1990s, remained unresolved.

The February 7 assault on a Tangkhul Naga man at Litan in Ukhrul district, followed by arson and clashes, brought those tensions back into violent confrontation. And in May, the crisis exploded.

Minthang, a village volunteer in Taphou Kuki, recalls having friends on the Naga side. Now, residents speak of defending their settlement and acknowledge possessing firearms, including automatic weapons.

They describe an earlier generation of Kukis as "helpless" during the 1990s violence and insist they are better prepared this time.

Across the divide, Ahzapou MK, describes surviving an August 27 ambush along the Imphal-Tamenglong Road, commonly called IT Road, in Kangpokpi district that killed four Naga men. He says he fled into the forest and hid for hours.

"They were waiting to wage this war," he says of the Kukis.

Each side sees its own preparations as protection and the other's as evidence of planned aggression.

For Ahzapou, the question extends beyond his village's immediate security to whether Kukis can claim an indigenous homeland in the area. "They are outsiders. Even the name Taphou is a Naga name to which they have added Kuki," he says.

Kukis reject descriptions of themselves as outsiders and assert their own historical presence and rights over the land.

Bo alleges that attacks on Liangmai villages along IT Road are intended to take over territory. He puts the number of houses burned there at 108, a figure that could not be independently verified.

Liangmai settlements are in a minority in that belt, he says, but access to Kuki villages passes through their areas.

"They want to take over land," he alleges.

The road and adjoining settlements have become a recurring flashpoint. The settlements are 50-100 km away from Imphal along IT Road.

Four Naga men were killed in the August 27 ambush; three Kuki villagers, including two women, were killed in an attack on N Teikhang on August 31; and Liangmai villages came under attack in early September, with homes burned and a pastor injured.

"As long as Nagas are holding arms, the Kukis also have to keep arms for their defence," says Ginza Vualjong, chief spokesperson of the Indigenous Tribal Leaders' Forum, an umbrella body of Kuki-Zo civil society groups,.

Without a political solution, he argues, weapons would remain despite the deployment of additional security forces.

The competing positions are visible in accounts of the violence that broke out around Taphou in August. Chongloi alleges firing towards his village, says three homes were burned and maintains that no arrests have followed. Bo disputes the account of Naga responsibility.

"Rather, it is the contrary. They attacked us," he says.

The violence followed an attempt at government outreach. Chief Minister Yumnam Khemchand Singh visited Taphou Kuki on July 8, when Chongloi sought a permanent security post.

"In July, the CM visited and we requested that a CRPF camp be set up. Only then was it set up in my house," Chongloi says.

Security deployment has not restored residents' confidence in ordinary movement.

National Highway 2, one of Manipur's principal links with the rest of India, runs through the neighbouring villages of Taphou Kuki and Taphou Liangmai. Northwards, it leads through Senapati towards Dimapur and Guwahati and southwards lies the Meitei-majority Imphal valley.

Chongloi says residents fear travelling towards Senapati, while journeys to Imphal can require escorts, sometimes in armoured vehicles, subject to arrangements becoming available.

Political proposals to resolve that separation encounter the same overlapping geography.

Kuki-Zo organisations seek a union territory with a legislature. Vualjong says scattered Kuki-inhabited areas could be administered through an arrangement modelled on geographically separated Puducherry.

"We will sit together and decide which village has to be on our side, which village has to be on their side," he says, proposing negotiations with Naga leaders and the Centre.

Ahzapou's insistence that a homeland cannot be created without the consent of those he regards as the land's indigenous owners shows the distance such negotiations would have to bridge.

A senior government official told PTI that while the Kuki groups have advanced the proposal for a UT, "the government is not considering any move that will affect Manipur's territorial integrity".

Ng Lun Kipgen, spokesperson of the Committee on Tribal Unity, another influential Kuki forum, cautions against treating the confrontation as involving every Naga community.

"Only the Tangkhul and Liangmai Naga tribes are involved in the conflict with us. There are villages of Naga tribes such as Thangal and Mao living in peace in Kangpokpi and other districts, next to Kuki settlements," he says.

For those living beside one another in Taphou, however, the wider arguments have entered personal relationships. From one side, Chongloi sees a situation he compares to Kargil. From the other, Pamai sees the house of his former classmate.

While the WhatsApp status updates still appear, the conversations have stopped.

This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.