RETURN OF THE NATIVES IN MANIPUR

Rehabilitation of the displaced will be the first step towards a lasting peace. Casting aside the state's foisted binaries, all communities need to share their traumas to move past them

- PRADIP PHANJOUBAM

CLOSE to three years after mindless ethnic blood-letting broke out between the Kuki-Zo group of tribes and the majority Meitei community in May 2023, overt violence has ceased in Manipur-but the state remains bitterly divided physically and psychologically. Over 60,000 conflict-displaced people from both sides of the divide continue to languish in several relief camps, unsure of their and their children's future. They have also become prone to depression and even suicide cases among them are on the rise.

The trouble is, both the warring sides continue to see and push for amelioration of their side of the suffering and their understanding of what a solution should be, missing out in the process the fact that the losses and sufferings brought by the violence is shared on both sides. They also tend to forget that Manipur is multi-ethnic, and a solution cannot be a bilateral matter only between them. Another major community, the Nagas, have begun asserting this, and all need to note this seriously.

Any reconciliation would have to begin with a comprehensive plan for the displaced on both sides to return to their abandoned homes and rebuild their lives. This would also mean opening up the highways for free movement either way for all. The responsibility for making this happen cannot just be of the government alone, but also by what conflict resolution and mediation expert John Paul Lederach called "the moral imagination" of the people in his book of the same title. It contends that just as hostility begets hostility as a response, goodwill will be reciprocated with goodwill.