Understanding FMR, border fencing Answer lies in the reality
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Playing around with words or skirting the issue or just plain lies and more lies, all done with a larger political purpose in mind ? These are the words that come to mind when one looks at the status of the Free Movement Regime put in place across the Indo-Myanmar border, more particularly at the Manipur stretch. It was sometime in the early part of 2024 that Union Home Minister Amit Shah announced that the Government of India has decided to scrap the Free Movement Regime. Manipur was in flames at that point of time, with the indigenous people of the State raising the call to actuate the National Register of Citizens, identify and weed out all the illegal immigrants from across the border. However later developments show that Delhi has not moved beyond putting in place certain steps to regulate movement across the border and it was along this line that a revised Free Movement Regime was instead put in place. It was to align with the revised exercise that the Government of India activated 22 border gates out of the 43 planned crossing points on the Indo-Myanmar border and under the revised FMR, movement of people has been restricted to 10 kilometres, down from the earlier 16 kms and the 40 kms when it was first introduced in 1968. Under the revised FMR, residents from either side of the border can travel without a visa but there are certain regulations, with the Assam Rifles authorised to issue border passes. Moreover people crossing the border, via the passes would need to get their bio-metric recorded which is then uploaded to a centralised portal. In short, the FMR has not been scrapped but now comes with certain regulations, ostensibly to check incursion from across the border, especially in the face of the growing number of cases of arms and drugs smuggling, which fuel the ongoing clash between the Meiteis and the Kuki-Chin-Zo community. The mass scale incursion from the across the border and it is to check this reality that the Government of India decided to put in place a revised FMR as well as fence the Indo-Myanmar border. The reality is, FMR has not been scrapped as understood in the context of ‘totally abrogated’ but is a revised version of its earlier form. And this reality should be kept in mind while hailing or opposing the FMR in its current avatar, for while the Union Home Minister did announce that the FMR would be scrapped in the early part of 2024, there has been no official follow up in this regard and instead what one saw was the revision of the earlier form of the FMR.
It should also be kept in mind that the first community to be affected by the unchecked incursion from across the border are the Nagas, who inhabit the hills, and not the Meiteis, who by law cannot buy land in the hills. A look back at the past decades, including the time when the Burmanisation programme was launched intensively by Ne Win in the then Burma in the latter part of 1960s, the 8888 or the August 8, 1988 uprising in Burma are two instances that come to mind and a look at the manner in which the number of MLAs representing the Kuki-Chin-Zo community has come up at the expense of the Naga people should not be forgotten. As a young Naga scholar and researcher wrote some time back, in the 1957 Territorial Council election the Nagas secured 7 MLA seats and the Kuki and Paitei community secured one seat each, in the Manipur Territorial Council election of 1957 to 1962 there were 4 Naga MLAs, one Paite MLA and one Thadou Kuki MLA. This was out of the total of 32 MLAs back then. In the first Manipur Territorial Assembly, out of the 10 tribal MLAs, there were 8 Naga MLAs, 1 Paite MLA and 1 Thadou Kuki MLA. The same trend, more or less followed in the first Manipur Legislative Assembly where out of the 60 MLAs, there were 13 Naga MLAs while only 6 represented the Kuki-Chin community. Then in the second Legislative Assembly the number of Naga MLAs declined while the number of Kuki-Chin MLAs increased to 8. The spike in the number of MLAs means a spike in the population of the Kuki-Chin-Zo community and how did their population grow in such a manner that it reflected on the composition of the Assembly ? And in a way, it is this unnatural growth that the Naga Foothill Co-ordination Committee is battling against today. This is where it becomes important to get a more rounded view on the need to fence the border as well as regulate the FMR.
It should also be kept in mind that the first community to be affected by the unchecked incursion from across the border are the Nagas, who inhabit the hills, and not the Meiteis, who by law cannot buy land in the hills. A look back at the past decades, including the time when the Burmanisation programme was launched intensively by Ne Win in the then Burma in the latter part of 1960s, the 8888 or the August 8, 1988 uprising in Burma are two instances that come to mind and a look at the manner in which the number of MLAs representing the Kuki-Chin-Zo community has come up at the expense of the Naga people should not be forgotten. As a young Naga scholar and researcher wrote some time back, in the 1957 Territorial Council election the Nagas secured 7 MLA seats and the Kuki and Paitei community secured one seat each, in the Manipur Territorial Council election of 1957 to 1962 there were 4 Naga MLAs, one Paite MLA and one Thadou Kuki MLA. This was out of the total of 32 MLAs back then. In the first Manipur Territorial Assembly, out of the 10 tribal MLAs, there were 8 Naga MLAs, 1 Paite MLA and 1 Thadou Kuki MLA. The same trend, more or less followed in the first Manipur Legislative Assembly where out of the 60 MLAs, there were 13 Naga MLAs while only 6 represented the Kuki-Chin community. Then in the second Legislative Assembly the number of Naga MLAs declined while the number of Kuki-Chin MLAs increased to 8. The spike in the number of MLAs means a spike in the population of the Kuki-Chin-Zo community and how did their population grow in such a manner that it reflected on the composition of the Assembly ? And in a way, it is this unnatural growth that the Naga Foothill Co-ordination Committee is battling against today. This is where it becomes important to get a more rounded view on the need to fence the border as well as regulate the FMR.