When Civilizational Nationalism Meets Subnationalism: The Crisis in Manipur
Published date | 01 June 2024 |
DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/23210230241235360 |
Author | Sanjib Baruah |
Date | 01 June 2024 |
When Civilizational Nationalism
Meets Subnationalism:
The Crisis in Manipur
Sanjib Baruah1
Abstract
The armed ethnic warfare that has been raging in Manipur since May of last year is unprecedented. It
pits the state’s subnational majority Meiteis against Kukis—a subnational minority in the state. The eth-
nicization of law enforcement and the looting of arms from police stations by mobs have created a situ-
ation in the state that now resembles a civil war. There is ample evidence pointing to the fact that the
state government bears the lion’s share of the responsibility for this violence. Proclaiming President’s
Rule—dismissing the state government and assuming its functions—could have helped restore faith
in the impartiality and integrity of state institutions. That New Delhi has chosen not to exercise this
option provides important clues to what is at stake from the perspective of the ruling party and the
Hindu nationalist establishment’s long-term political–ideological agenda. This political configuration has
implications for the future of the Naga peace process.
Keywords
Manipur, subnationalism, Hindu nationalism, indigenous people, Asian borderlands
The situation in Manipur has nothing to do with counterinsurgency and is primarily a clash between two
ethnicities. It is a law-and-order kind of situation, and we are helping the state government with the problem. We
(the Army) have done an excellent job and saved a large number of lives. (Hindustan Times, 2023)
This is how India’s Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) General Anil Chauhan characterized the eruption of
ethnic violence in Manipur in May 2023. The context for this unusual public assessment of a domestic
political crisis by the country’s top military leader is the long history of the Indian Army’s presence as a
counterinsurgent force in the state and the sudden outbreak of lethal conflicts on its watch, which
evidently took the general and his colleagues by surprise.
After battling ‘insurgencies’ for decades, the Indian Army finds itself in an uncomfortable and
unfamiliar situation in Manipur. What General Chauhan calls a law-and-order situation created by ‘a
clash between two ethnicities’ should not have taken India’s security establishment by surprise. It has
long viewed Manipur’s non-state armed actors through ethnic lenses. It has been common practice to
classify them into valley-based and hill-based groups—the former being ethnically Meitei—the state’s
Original Article
Studies in Indian Politics
12(1) 8–19, 2024
© 2024 Lokniti, Centre for the
Study of Developing Societies
Article reuse guidelines:
in.sagepub.com/journals-permissions-india
DOI: 10.1177/23210230241235360
journals.sagepub.com/home/inp
1 Asian University for Women, Chattogram, Bangladesh
Corresponding author:
Sanjib Baruah, Asian University for Women, M. M. Ali Rd, Chattogram 4000, Bangladesh.
E-mail: baruah@bard.edu
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