ANCIENT FRICTIONS FIND AN ECHO IN MANIPUR CRISIS

Land plays the main role in the conflict. The friction between the tribes in the northeastern state has a lot to do with how each community views the possession of land

- PRADIP PHANJOUBAM

IT is despairing to watch Manipur continue to spiral deeper into the heart of darkness, almost completely out of the administration's control. After the initial frenzied week of mob violence that exploded on May 3 at Torbung village and then spread to other parts of the state like a tsunami, the pattern has been brief spells of calm that held the promise of peace broken rudely and periodically by fresh outbreaks of violence and scandal in some corner or the other of the state. Even as the universal outrage over the video from May 4 of two Kuki women being paraded naked by a Meitei mob that surfaced on July 19 began cooling, another one erupted when pictures of a cold-blooded execution of two teenagers-abducted on July 6 and missing since-surfaced on social media on September 25.

The identities of the killers in the latter case are now official, though they were known much earlier as they apparently were using the dead teens' phones after changing SIM cards; their movements were therefore registered digitally. Four of them were arrested on October 1, and two children, probably dependents of a couple among the arrested, were also picked up. In the earlier case, seven identified culprits have been arrested and prior to that, some of them faced the wrath of mobs. Both these sensitive cases are being handled by the Central Bureau of Investigation.

The day after the photos of the teens became public, school and college students in uniforms flocked to the streets of Imphal in outrage. To everybody's utter surprise and anger, riot control police inexplicably responded with extreme violence, breaking up the rallies not just with tear gas but pellet guns, injuring several grievously. A seventeen-year-old boy was shot point-blank on his shoulders, and his arm was nearly blown off; over ninety metal pellets were lodged in his body.