Behind India’s Manipur conflict : A tale of drugs, armed groups and politics
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Angana Chakrabarti (associate member of The Reporters’ Collective)
Sugnu, India – Ratan Kumar Singh, a 58-year-old high school teacher, never imagined he would be happy to see armed fighters, or “revolutionaries” as he called them. But on May 28 last year, Singh welcomed them to his town of Sugnu in Manipur, a State in India’s North East corner bordering Myanmar.
For nearly three weeks, the small town had managed to dodge the ethnic violence between the Meitei community and the Kuki-Zo tribes people that had engulfed the rest of the State since May 3. But that day, four people were killed in the area and 12 injured as bullets found their way from surrounding hilly regions and from a camp dominated by the Kuki-Zo community.
“Then they started burning our houses. Our reinforcements, including the police and our civilian volunteers, started firing back. It was only when the revolutionaries came that we succeeded in overcoming the other side,” Singh told Al Jazeera.
“We were never for gun violence… but when we saw the revolutionaries and other Meitei volunteers come on that day, we cried [out of happiness] because we knew we would be safe.”
The fighters who came to defend Sugnu were, like him, ethnically Meitei.
Eleven months on, the conflict has killed 219 people, injured 1,100, displaced 60,000 and divided the State into ethnic territories. Armed groups have been fighting battles using sophisticated weapons and explosives in rural parts for territorial control even as more than 60,000 armed forces of the federal Government and the State have so far failed to bring a durable end to the violence.
Each episode of violence and killing has punctured the claims of bridging divides that Prime Minister and right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Narendra Modi made during an election rally two years ago when he was campaigning for re-election of his party’s Chief Minister, N Biren Singh, a Meitei.
“From ‘blockade State’, Manipur is paving the way for international trade. Our Government has launched… campaigns to bridge the gaps between the Hill and the Valley,” he said during the rally.
Modi was referring to the historical discrimination felt by tribal communities, including the Kukis, who live on the hillsides and feel that the Meitei community is economically more prosperous than them and are in the majority in the smaller valleys and the capital, Imphal. Modi said Chief Minister Singh’s policies had fostered a more integrated relationship between the hill and valley communities.
It appeared true at the time. In several parts of the hills, the civil society and the rebel groups of the Kuki-Zo community canvassed for Chief Minister Singh, and top politicians of the tribal community lined up for tickets from his party.
Chief Minister Singh swept the elections. In his second tenure beginning 2022, the BJP won five of the 10 State Assembly seats from the Kuki-dominated hill Constituencies. BJP legislators (MLAs) from these constituencies increased to seven after two of the Kuki MLAs who had won on Janata Dal United tickets defected to the governing party in September 2022. Two out of seven MLAs became Ministers in his Cabinet.
However, two years later, Modi and Singh’s claims bit dust, with Manipur witnessing unending ethnic violence between the Kuki and Meitei people, arguably, the longest-running ethnic conflict the country has witnessed in the 21st century.
Now, as the State prepares to vote in National elections on April 19 and April 26, those divisions have become entrenched, with a resurgence in armed groups formed along ethnic lines, as the first part of this series showed. It also revealed a presentation by the Assam Rifles that listed several factors that played a role in igniting the conflict: illegal immigrants from Myanmar, the demand for Kukiland, political authoritarianism and ambition of Chief Minister Singh and his war on drugs among others.
The war on drugs first played a significant role in the political landscape and later in fuelling the conflict in Manipur. This concluding part of the series investigates how the drug trade and politics over it have roiled Manipur.
The war on drugs
“Thousands of hectares of land are used for poppy cultivation in areas near the international border with Myanmar,” he told the media.
Poor economic conditions, lack of job opportunities and easy availability of drugs had led to a high number of drug addicts in the State, he said.
He was not wrong. Manipur sits adjacent to the infamous “Golden Triangle”, an area in Southeast Asia covering civil war-torn Myanmar. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) defines the region as one of the “biggest drug trafficking corridors in the world”. Heroin, opium and synthetic drugs like methamphetamine from the region are “feeding the whole of the Asia Pacific [region]”, the UN said.
The spillover of the trade into Manipur has an old history.
“The drug trade has caught up in Manipur in the last 15 years. [Recently,] the US, other Western countries and the United Nations [have] started going after Myanmar and the Golden Triangle,” Lieutenant General Konsam Himalay Singh, a Meitei, who retired in 2017, told me.
He added, “As a result, the Golden Triangle extended towards the West [into Manipur]. It was accelerated by the armed groups who found easy money.”
He was referring to the array of armed rebel groups of different ethnicities, including the Kuki fighters, that proliferate in Manipur and are involved in the drug trade across the porous borders with Myanmar.
By several accounts, the drug trade has seen a rise over the past two decades.
“During the ’90s and ’80s, there were only some hotspots in Manipur where drugs were sold. Now, it is found everywhere” across the State, said Maibam Jogesh, co-convenor of the 3.5 Collective, a coalition of 18 civil society groups campaigning against the drug and alcohol menace.
Jogesh, who also heads the Users Society for Effective Response–one of the oldest community organisations of drug abuse victims in the State–said their field workers had found poppy cultivation in the hills of Manipur as far back as 2006.
“In the last six to seven years, manufacturing units have come up in several parts of the State, even Imphal,” he added. The locally made, cruder version, called Thum Morok–the Meitei phrase for salt and chilli–came to replace the “Number 4 heroin,” which was produced in Myanmar.
In mid-December, “the cost of Thum Morok was 500 rupees per gramme [$6 per 0.03 ounces]. Compared to this, 20 years ago, you could buy Number 4 from Myanmar for 1,200 rupees per gramme [$14.40 per 0.03 ounces],” Jogesh added.
As a result, the number of drug users also increased.
Back in June 2023, Manipur police’s then-Superintendent of Narcotics and Border Affairs and current police Superintendent of the Bishnupur district, K Meghachandra, told me, “There is cultivation in the hills. Now in the valley, a lot of processing units have been established, particularly in the Thoubal and Bishnupur districts,” which adjoin the hill areas. “The processing units [of brown sugar] are mainly in the Muslim areas,” Meghachandra said. He added, “In Imphal, Meiteis are the transporters.”
According to the data he shared, of the 2,518 arrests made in drug cases since 2017, 873 were “Kuki-Chin” people, 1,083 were Muslims, 381 were Meiteis and 181 were “others”.
That month, sitting inside a shanty house in a corner of the Churachandpur district, which is dominated by the Kuki-Zo community, I met a few poppy cultivators.
“I switched to poppy cultivation in 2014 because in those days a kilo of chilli was 50 rupees to 60 rupees [$0.27 – $0.33 per pound]. I couldn’t depend on that. The cost of living is high and I have seven kids,” said one of the cultivators, who didn’t wish to be named.
Today, the drug economy accounts roughly for 700 billion rupees per year ($8.37bn), but only about 20 billion rupees to 25 billion rupees ($240m to $300m) of drugs are intercepted annually, which is less than 5 percent, said Himalay Singh.
The Government does not officially put out such estimates, so Al Jazeera could not verify these numbers. But in February 2020, the authorities said, over two and a half years, the Government had seized drugs worth more than 20 billion rupees ($240m) and busted five drugs manufacturing makeshift factories in Manipur.
For a tiny State with a population of about 2.72 million people and an annual economy of slightly more than 400 billion rupees ($4.78bn), this is a significant haul. According to an answer to an unstarred question in the Rajya Sabha, 1,728kg (3,909 pounds) of heroin was seized from across the country in 2021 and 2022, which going by the typical retail price of heroin as reported by the UNODC in 2021, was worth $213.24m.
Five months after the Chief Minister announced a war on drugs, a close associate of the Chief Minister was accused of having connections to an alleged drug lord from the Kuki-Zo community.
(To be contd)
Sugnu, India – Ratan Kumar Singh, a 58-year-old high school teacher, never imagined he would be happy to see armed fighters, or “revolutionaries” as he called them. But on May 28 last year, Singh welcomed them to his town of Sugnu in Manipur, a State in India’s North East corner bordering Myanmar.
For nearly three weeks, the small town had managed to dodge the ethnic violence between the Meitei community and the Kuki-Zo tribes people that had engulfed the rest of the State since May 3. But that day, four people were killed in the area and 12 injured as bullets found their way from surrounding hilly regions and from a camp dominated by the Kuki-Zo community.
“Then they started burning our houses. Our reinforcements, including the police and our civilian volunteers, started firing back. It was only when the revolutionaries came that we succeeded in overcoming the other side,” Singh told Al Jazeera.
“We were never for gun violence… but when we saw the revolutionaries and other Meitei volunteers come on that day, we cried [out of happiness] because we knew we would be safe.”
The fighters who came to defend Sugnu were, like him, ethnically Meitei.
Eleven months on, the conflict has killed 219 people, injured 1,100, displaced 60,000 and divided the State into ethnic territories. Armed groups have been fighting battles using sophisticated weapons and explosives in rural parts for territorial control even as more than 60,000 armed forces of the federal Government and the State have so far failed to bring a durable end to the violence.
Each episode of violence and killing has punctured the claims of bridging divides that Prime Minister and right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Narendra Modi made during an election rally two years ago when he was campaigning for re-election of his party’s Chief Minister, N Biren Singh, a Meitei.
“From ‘blockade State’, Manipur is paving the way for international trade. Our Government has launched… campaigns to bridge the gaps between the Hill and the Valley,” he said during the rally.
Modi was referring to the historical discrimination felt by tribal communities, including the Kukis, who live on the hillsides and feel that the Meitei community is economically more prosperous than them and are in the majority in the smaller valleys and the capital, Imphal. Modi said Chief Minister Singh’s policies had fostered a more integrated relationship between the hill and valley communities.
It appeared true at the time. In several parts of the hills, the civil society and the rebel groups of the Kuki-Zo community canvassed for Chief Minister Singh, and top politicians of the tribal community lined up for tickets from his party.
Chief Minister Singh swept the elections. In his second tenure beginning 2022, the BJP won five of the 10 State Assembly seats from the Kuki-dominated hill Constituencies. BJP legislators (MLAs) from these constituencies increased to seven after two of the Kuki MLAs who had won on Janata Dal United tickets defected to the governing party in September 2022. Two out of seven MLAs became Ministers in his Cabinet.
However, two years later, Modi and Singh’s claims bit dust, with Manipur witnessing unending ethnic violence between the Kuki and Meitei people, arguably, the longest-running ethnic conflict the country has witnessed in the 21st century.
Now, as the State prepares to vote in National elections on April 19 and April 26, those divisions have become entrenched, with a resurgence in armed groups formed along ethnic lines, as the first part of this series showed. It also revealed a presentation by the Assam Rifles that listed several factors that played a role in igniting the conflict: illegal immigrants from Myanmar, the demand for Kukiland, political authoritarianism and ambition of Chief Minister Singh and his war on drugs among others.
The war on drugs first played a significant role in the political landscape and later in fuelling the conflict in Manipur. This concluding part of the series investigates how the drug trade and politics over it have roiled Manipur.
The war on drugs
“Thousands of hectares of land are used for poppy cultivation in areas near the international border with Myanmar,” he told the media.
Poor economic conditions, lack of job opportunities and easy availability of drugs had led to a high number of drug addicts in the State, he said.
He was not wrong. Manipur sits adjacent to the infamous “Golden Triangle”, an area in Southeast Asia covering civil war-torn Myanmar. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) defines the region as one of the “biggest drug trafficking corridors in the world”. Heroin, opium and synthetic drugs like methamphetamine from the region are “feeding the whole of the Asia Pacific [region]”, the UN said.
The spillover of the trade into Manipur has an old history.
“The drug trade has caught up in Manipur in the last 15 years. [Recently,] the US, other Western countries and the United Nations [have] started going after Myanmar and the Golden Triangle,” Lieutenant General Konsam Himalay Singh, a Meitei, who retired in 2017, told me.
He added, “As a result, the Golden Triangle extended towards the West [into Manipur]. It was accelerated by the armed groups who found easy money.”
He was referring to the array of armed rebel groups of different ethnicities, including the Kuki fighters, that proliferate in Manipur and are involved in the drug trade across the porous borders with Myanmar.
By several accounts, the drug trade has seen a rise over the past two decades.
“During the ’90s and ’80s, there were only some hotspots in Manipur where drugs were sold. Now, it is found everywhere” across the State, said Maibam Jogesh, co-convenor of the 3.5 Collective, a coalition of 18 civil society groups campaigning against the drug and alcohol menace.
Jogesh, who also heads the Users Society for Effective Response–one of the oldest community organisations of drug abuse victims in the State–said their field workers had found poppy cultivation in the hills of Manipur as far back as 2006.
“In the last six to seven years, manufacturing units have come up in several parts of the State, even Imphal,” he added. The locally made, cruder version, called Thum Morok–the Meitei phrase for salt and chilli–came to replace the “Number 4 heroin,” which was produced in Myanmar.
In mid-December, “the cost of Thum Morok was 500 rupees per gramme [$6 per 0.03 ounces]. Compared to this, 20 years ago, you could buy Number 4 from Myanmar for 1,200 rupees per gramme [$14.40 per 0.03 ounces],” Jogesh added.
As a result, the number of drug users also increased.
Back in June 2023, Manipur police’s then-Superintendent of Narcotics and Border Affairs and current police Superintendent of the Bishnupur district, K Meghachandra, told me, “There is cultivation in the hills. Now in the valley, a lot of processing units have been established, particularly in the Thoubal and Bishnupur districts,” which adjoin the hill areas. “The processing units [of brown sugar] are mainly in the Muslim areas,” Meghachandra said. He added, “In Imphal, Meiteis are the transporters.”
According to the data he shared, of the 2,518 arrests made in drug cases since 2017, 873 were “Kuki-Chin” people, 1,083 were Muslims, 381 were Meiteis and 181 were “others”.
That month, sitting inside a shanty house in a corner of the Churachandpur district, which is dominated by the Kuki-Zo community, I met a few poppy cultivators.
“I switched to poppy cultivation in 2014 because in those days a kilo of chilli was 50 rupees to 60 rupees [$0.27 – $0.33 per pound]. I couldn’t depend on that. The cost of living is high and I have seven kids,” said one of the cultivators, who didn’t wish to be named.
Today, the drug economy accounts roughly for 700 billion rupees per year ($8.37bn), but only about 20 billion rupees to 25 billion rupees ($240m to $300m) of drugs are intercepted annually, which is less than 5 percent, said Himalay Singh.
The Government does not officially put out such estimates, so Al Jazeera could not verify these numbers. But in February 2020, the authorities said, over two and a half years, the Government had seized drugs worth more than 20 billion rupees ($240m) and busted five drugs manufacturing makeshift factories in Manipur.
For a tiny State with a population of about 2.72 million people and an annual economy of slightly more than 400 billion rupees ($4.78bn), this is a significant haul. According to an answer to an unstarred question in the Rajya Sabha, 1,728kg (3,909 pounds) of heroin was seized from across the country in 2021 and 2022, which going by the typical retail price of heroin as reported by the UNODC in 2021, was worth $213.24m.
Five months after the Chief Minister announced a war on drugs, a close associate of the Chief Minister was accused of having connections to an alleged drug lord from the Kuki-Zo community.
(To be contd)