Ethnic Violence & Human rights violation in Manipur

Manisha Raj, The ICFAI University, Gangtok

Introduction

The north east India, fondly called the Land of Seven Sisters is fascinating a place with an enchanted frontier. Manipur is one among the states in north east India, where popular disgruntled around the illegal and unconstitutional merger and consequent judicious treatment explode aversion movement since year 1949 and intensified into open armed conflict since year 1970. The Government of India responded by publishing the colonial armed forces special powers ordinance on 16th April 1950, six months after the merger, to the provision of an Act in Manipur.

Since then the Merger Agreement with India, there has been ongoing civil disruption on the issue of challenging greater autonomy or independence from India by various armed underground groups. Government of India is also still unable to introduce any appropriate means for the perpetual solution of the issue in the state. And she has still taken the authority for arising of that unrest by introducing a handful of Draconian Laws including the Disturb Area Act, Indian Arms Act, 1959, Explosives Act, Explosive Substances Act, UAP, Punjab Security Act, Prevention of Seditious Meetings Act 1911 and Armed Forces (Special Power) Act, 1955 in the state. The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1955, gave enhanced powers of arrest and detention of any people. 

Issues related to North east region

There have been terrorizing communal riots in Manipur due to the Manipur High Court (HC) directing the State to conduct a 10-year-old recommendation to grant Scheduled Tribe (ST) status to the non-tribal Meitei community. The violence shoots up after the all tribal Student Union Manipur (ATSUM) assembled a “tribal solidarity rally” against the rumored move to include the Meiteis on the ST list.

Ethnic Conflict

There are 16 districts in Manipur, but the state is commonly viewed as diverged into ‘valley’ and ‘hill’ districts. Today’s valley districts of Imphal East, Imphal West, Thoubal, Bishnupur, and Kakching were part of the kingdom of Kangleipak, ruled by the Ningthouja dynasty.

The Manipur valley is surrounded by skirts of low hills (hill areas encompassing the bulk of Manipur’s geographical area), reside 15 Naga tribes and the Chin-Kuki-Mizo-Zomi group, which comprises the Kuki, Thadou, Hmar, Paite, Vaiphei and Zou peoples.

The Kangleipak dynasty, then a British protectorate, was frequently raided by Naga tribes who came down from the northern hills. The British political agent in Manipur leads the Kuki-Zomi from the Kuki-Chin hills of Burma to safeguard the valley from ransack by acting as a shield between the Meiteis and the Nagas. The Kukis, like the Nagas, were savage headhunting warriors — and the Maharaja gave them land along the ridges, where they could act as a shield for the Imphal valley below. Kuki-Meitei divides: The hill communities (Naga & Kuki) and the Meiteis have had ethnic tensions since the kingdom era. The Naga movement for independence in the 1950s triggered insurgencies among the Meiteis and Kuki-Zomi. The Kuki-Zomi groups militarized in the 1990s to demand a state within India called ‘Kukiland’(a state within India). This estranged them from the Meiteis, whom they had earlier protected. In 1993, Hindu Meiteis clashed with Pangals (Muslims), and also there was horrific brutality between the tribal Nagas and Kukis, which saw more than a hundred Kukis massacred in a single day by Nagas, and thousands steered from their homes. District of Churachandpur: Kuki-Zomi-influenced Churachandpur (a Myanmar-bordered District) has a mostly Christian community. It is the country’s poorest district (as per the Panchayati Raj Ministry in 2006) and it remains obscurely poor. In 2015, as the Meiteis of the valley objected demanding ILP(Inner Line Permit) in Imphal city, equally fierce opposition were seen in Churachandpur counteracting the demand and protesting the introduction of laws.

The Demand for 6th Schedule

The 6th Schedule of the Indian constitution includes provisions for the administration of tribal areas in the state of Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura 7 Mizoram in north east India. It institutes autonomous councils that have Legislative judicial executive and financial powers to independently govern these areas. The motive of the 6th Schedule is to safeguard the interests of the tribal population in these north eastern states through autonomous governance. There are a total of 10 autonomous councils under the 6th Schedule comprising 3 is in Assam & Mizoram and one in Tripura.

Samatha V. State of Andhra Pradesh (1997) Supreme court case (SCC)191 at page 277- para 136  a bench of three judges of the Supreme Court held that tribals are stated to be the first settlers in the country but gradually pushed back into the forest and hills by subsequent settlers who later came to be known as the Plainsmen or people of or from the plains. The forest and hills provided a natural barrier and isolated the tribals from the people living in the plains. On account of their isolation, they remained illiterate, uneducated, unsophisticated, poor & destitute and developed their own society where they allowed themselves to be governed by their own primitive and customary laws and rituals.

The state of Manipur is the only state of seven sister states of the north eastern region to which the provisions of the 6th Schedule have never been applied. The states in the north eastern region were reorganized by the North Eastern Areas Act 1971 and by Section 3 thereof, the state of Manipur was formed comprising the territories that immediately before that were in the Union Territory of Manipur. 

Human Rights

The term “Human Rights‟ has come into existence during the 17th and 18th centuries. Human rights are generally moral rights professed by everyone and held against everyone, principally against those who run social institutions. These rights include cultural, economic, and political rights, such as the right to life, liberty, education, and equality before the law, rights of association, faith, free speech, information, religion, movement, and nationality. Human Rights permit us to respect each other and live with each other placidly. In other words, they are not only rights to be appealed or demanded, but rights to be respected and be accountable for. Therefore these rights must be respected mutually. With the advent of the United Nations Organization (UNO) and the subsequent adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) on December 10, 1948, by the General Assembly, the notion of human rights has emerged to be one of the most contemporary matters across the globe. The UN Charter, which was adopted in 1945, was the first international document to recognize the protection and promotion of Human rights as a requirement to be carried out by individual, as well as collective states.

India played a crucial role in adopting the UN General Assembly resolution declaring the right of the peoples to self-determination in 1960 (Resolution 1514 [XV] adopted on 14th, December 1960). However, by putting reservations to common Article 1 of the two International Covenants, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). India deliberately denied the inalienable right to self-determination of the people of Manipur. India continues to declare the non-state organizations of Manipur demanding the right to self-determination as “terrorists” under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. The UN Human Rights Committee (HRC) has pointed out that the problem is political and that the approach to resolving it must also, essentially, be political in nature. In doing so, the Committee reminded the government of India to bear in mind the right to self-determination of peoples, the right to freedom of expression, and the right to participation in governance. India also continues to disregard the recommendations of other human rights treaty monitoring bodies. The HRC specifically requested the Indian Supreme Court to examine the Covenant compatibility while examining the constitutional validity of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act 1958 (AFSPA) in Manipur. The request was completely ignored by the judgment pronounced by the apex Court on 27 November 1997. India has ceased to report to the HRC and the 4th Periodic Report under the ICCPR has been overdue since 2001.

The Status of Human Rights Violation in Manipur

The forcible annexation and resultant military occupation of the sovereign state of Manipur in 1949 by India has been opposed since 1978, as encouraged by the UN charter in self-preservation of its sovereignty and espoused by several UN GA resolutions since 1960 till date, by the armed resistance movements of the Revolutionary People’s Front [RPF- its military wing being the PLA(People Liberation Army)], the United National Liberation Front (UNLF-its military wing MPA), other Underground Groups etc. The rejection of the merger agreement has also come from the people of Manipur. In the prevailing armed conflict situation of Manipur, not less than 50,000 Indian soldiers in addition to several thousands of police, armed forces, spies, etc. in a population of 2.4 million are deployed. With the enactment of AFSPA, the massive deployment of

53 International Journal of Interdisciplinary and Multidisciplinary Studies (IJIMS)

armed forces in Manipur continued; the armed forces are occupying sacred cultural sites and prime agricultural land, depriving primary survival sources of Manipuri peoples. Manipur has become one of the most militarized areas of the world.

In the earlier period prior to 2005, the nature of the Human Rights violations was done by the government armed forces arrested the victims without issuing arrest memos, detained them illegally, and administered various types of torture forcing them to accept they were members of the outlawed organizations or to extract information, click the photo of the victims in the custody, got recorded their names and other particulars adding to the list of so-called extremists. According to “Human Rights Special Report Manipur – 2009”, A Report from Human Rights Initiative a total of 60s in the hills and 80s in the valley, the common human rights violations by the government military forces were massacres, extrajudicial executions, enforced disappearances, rapes, tortures, human

Shields, arsons, plunders, forced labor internal displaces, etc happened in Manipur prior to 2005. Many of the cases of Human Rights violations were happening occasionally along with the so-called (military) combing operations given some fancy code names like Operation Thunderbolt, Operation Sunny Vale, Operation All Clear, etc.5 The promulgation of AFSPA for the last 53 years in Manipur, which grants the Indian armed forces special powers to kill on mere suspicion, search without a warrant, destroy property institutionalize impunity, blatantly violate the non-dirigible rights to life, right against torture, right against arbitrary detention and right to a fair trial as provided by the ICCPR (International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights).

Advocate Indra Kumar, a Human Rights activist expressed on the program of International Human Rights Observation Day held on 10th Dec, 2012 at Manipur Press Club that a total of 1528 people have been killed in Manipur from the year 1979 to May 2012 in encounters. Of these, 1399 were males, 31 were females and 98 were children. According to Human Rights Special

Report- 2009 conducted by Human Rights Initiative (HRI), Manipur, a non-governmental organization, on the basis of Extra Executions, there was a total of 298 victims recorded in the year 2008, there is total 288 victims recorded in the year 2009, and a total of 1133 Illegal detain and arrested by Security Force in the year 2008 and a total no of 190 peoples are killed by the Unidentified persons and Non-states Actors. In 2009, a total no of 142 people were killed by Unidentified persons and non-state Actors. But the above data is slide different in the case of Extra Executions victims data given by Universal Periodic Review 2011, Human Rights Council, UN. According to the Universal Periodic Review, the continuing pattern of extra-judicial executions by the government of India has recorded more than 789 persons.

The killing of Reporters by state actors arm personnel and underground groups is one of the frequent challenges faced by Media personals while promoting and broadcasting the reports of Human rights violation happened in the state. Reporters are facing the lost of their lives while performing their activities. For example: Mr. Konsam Rishikanta (a Junior Sub-Editor of

the Imphal Free Press daily) was assassinated in November 2008 by unknown persons, widely believed to be a State-sponsored summary killing. And very recently on 23rd December 2012, Nanao Singh, a journalist of the Prime News, while taking the snaps of the protesters was killed in police firing on the second day of Manipur film actress Momoko Molestation Protest in the State. Human rights defenders are targeted for promoting and defending indigenous peoples‟ rights. Human rights defenders are labeled as terrorists, and charged under criminal laws. Human rights defenders are also arbitrarily arrested, detained, and subjected to severe torture. Human Rights defenders and their organizations are subjected to close monitoring and surveillance including phone and email tapping, email and postal intercepting, hacking, post restrictions, postal theft, restrictions to movement, etc. Right to Information activists have been subjected to systematic targeting by the incorrigibly corrupt and abusive state bureaucracy through threats, arbitrary detention, and torture.

The continued solitary confinement and detention of Miss Irom Sharmila, who has been on a hunger strike demanding the repeal of AFSPA since November 2000 constitutes severe mental and physical torture. Miss Sharmila has been charged for attempting to commit suicide under Section 309 of the Indian Penal Code and kept in detention for the past 12 years. An executive order issued 54 International Journal of Interdisciplinary and Multidisciplinary Studies (IJIMS)

by the Home Department, Government of Manipur dated 8th October 2004 stipulating “not to allow anybody” to meet her without “clear permission of the Home Department” severely curtails her basic human rights and fundamental freedoms including her right to communicate with her family, friends and supporters. In Manipur, violence against women is also increasing. There were 269 cases of violence against women during the period between January and October of 2012 as per record published by local newspapers. The above cases include 21 rape cases, two

rape and murder cases, 16 suicide cases, 7 molestation cases, 4 kidnapping cases, 56 missing cases and 78 trafficking cases. 

Conclusion

Manipur violence is the complicated wave of historical ethnic and political causes that continue to provide problems for the state citizens and the country as a whole. The government civil society and the International Community must walk together on the core causes and create long-term solutions. The human rights violation invocation of special emergency laws, primarily the AFSPA nearly half a century has been inexplicably associated with the denial of the right to self-determination of the people of Manipur and killed more than thousands of innocents people, rape and torture happened in the state in the name of this Act.  

REFERENCES:

[1]https://www.ijims.com (June 29, 2024, 6:00 pm)

[2]https://www.drishtiias.com/daily-updates/daily-news-editorials/voilance-in-manipur (June 29,2024, 6:10)

[3]https://www.livelaw.in (June 29, 2024, 6:25 pm)

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