In grief-struck relief camps, songs and prayers heavy with suffering – Manipur, seven months later

Manipur has fallen off the national conscience. But as I travel through dusty potholed roads in the picturesque countryside of the state seven months after Manipur had exploded with violence and hate, I encounter a land that is still smouldering, wounded and aching.

The local people have erected tall hoardings in Churachandpur that demand “Peace After Justice”. But the prospects of both peace and justice appear even more remote than they did seven months earlier.

The informal border that separates the two bitterly warring communities, the Meiteis and Kukis, remains as stubborn and unbending as it was when they first took up arms against the other. Check-posts manned by a variety of military, paramilitary and police formations search you for weapons as you pass. Bullets do not fly and bombs do not explode with the frequency that they did the last time we visited. Yet the silence that we encounter instead is tense and overwrought. The skeletal remains of burnt houses and shops intrude into the periphery of your vision as you drive past.

There are two citizen check-posts as well, operated remarkably entirely by women. These check your identity and search you not just for weapons but also drugs.

I speak with one soldier in army fatigues armed with a light machine gun. He is from a village in Uttar Pradesh, and was deployed in Manipur shortly after the conflict broke out. “I feel a sadness,” he says to me. “Thousands of people still in relief camps. Children are unable to attend school. The government is doing nothing. I don’t know when all of this will end”.

This new border between the Meitei valley and Kuki hills is unyielding. Even the 10 Kuki MLAs, including a state minister, cannot still cross from the hills into the Imphal valley for fear for their lives. Kuki doctors, nurses, police persons, teachers and other government officials similarly fear that they will be killed if they return to the valley to work, as do Meitei health, education, police and other public officials if they are to journey from the valley to the hills. Public officials have redistributed themselves between the valley and the hills based on their respective identities. Many specialisations lie vacant in the Churachandpur Medical College because Meitei doctors had to flee from the valley and cannot return.

The border is also pitiless. One-hundred and nine bodies of Kuki men, women and children killed during the violence lay in the mortuary of the medical college in Imphal for seven months, until finally the Supreme Court intervened and the bodies of 64 victims were airlifted on December 14. Until then no arrangements had been made to secure their safe transport from the valley to the hills, and it was not possible for the families of the dead to travel to Imphal to claim their dead for fear of being murdered along the way.

The Solicitor General of the Union government Tushar Mehta claimed to the Supreme Court that most of these unclaimed bodies were of “infiltrators” who “came with a particular design and got killed”. In the mortuary of the Churachandpur Medical College, another 46 bodies lay. The Kuki people awaited the return of the corpses from Imphal before all the killed people were buried side by side in keeping with their customs.

In the mortuary of the Churachandpur Medical College, another 46 bodies lay. The Kuki people awaited the return of the corpses from Imphal before all those killed were buried side by side in keeping with their customs.

Citizen groups, including those made up of women, have blocked for all these months the movement of trucks from the valley transporting supplies of food and medicine and security personnel. The result is that even the government medical college in Churachandpur is forced to depend only on citizen contributions to secure food and medicines for the patients and medical students. Even these stocks are delivered after an arduous 14-hour journey through mountain roads from Mizoram instead of the one-hour drive from Imphal.

Every week, large numbers gather at a memorial built by people to pay tribute to those killed in the carnage that tore apart Manipur. In the front of the memorial lie empty black coffins. To the rear is a wall with pictures of each of those who died. You see photographs of young men and women, hope shining in their eyes; you see children and babies; you see older people. You numbly read their names. You see flowers hung on the wall in their memory. Behind is another wall on which visitors write messages to the dead. “You are not dead,” declares one message. “Your blood will not flow in vain,” reads another. “You gave your life for our tomorrow”.

Wrenching also are the conditions in the 119 relief camps in the hills from which the state is almost entirely, culpably absent. An estimated 45,500 children, women and men continue to languish seven months after the savagery began in the most inhospitable makeshift camps to which they fled after their villages and homes were looted and burnt to ashes. The large majority of these camps are in the courtyards of churches. Food is austere, sanitation primitive and children unschooled.

Grief permeates every corner of life in the bare relief camps. Yet, the laughter of children rings out and people have found ways to gather in communities and share their pain. In one of the camps where we arrive unannounced, we hear the unexpected resonance of hymns. We find the adults and teenagers in the camp have gathered as they do every second evening at the rear of the camp to pray and chant hymns together. I cannot follow the language but recognise that the songs and prayers are heavy with suffering and longing.

Their loss is so profound – of homeland, loved ones, home, friends, trust and an entire way of life – that much grief cannot be assuaged by holding hands together or by appealing to god. The senior pastor who leads a lot of the relief work spoke to me of the sharp spike in drug usage by young people who found themselves trapped in the darkest of despair.

A minimal supply of dry rations comes to the camps from the state government. The rest – food, milk, vegetables, clothes, medicines, toiletries, textbooks – are collected by extraordinary collectives of citizen groups from a community that is both highly impoverished even in peacetime and after the conflict is severely battered. Many of these efforts are led by young people. When I meet some of them, I find them sterling in their organisation and focus. Some speak in passing of their own home being among the 4,500 plus homes that were destroyed and their village among the 292 plus that were burnt down. But they do not linger with these memories. Their preoccupation is with helping their people rebuild their broken lives.

They explain to me that even after seven months, a tiny trickle of people has returned to their villages, barely a few hundred. These too are only young men trying to cultivate their fields even at risk to their lives to better feed their families in the camps. They are convinced now that there is no chance at all of the Kuki and Meitei people finding space in their hearts to both forgive and trust the other community enough to live side by side again. How can they risk the safety of their children, their parents and their loved ones after the horrific assaults that they suffered? Even more so since there have been no public expressions of remorse, no legal justice, little attempt to confiscate the massive cache of firearms looted from police armouries, or no let-up on the propaganda of hate?

They believe now that if they are to be safe, the Kuki people will be forced to give up their age-old ways of life. In the past they built small scattered habitations in the hills that followed their shifting modes of cultivation within the area of each chief. Now, they will never feel secure except with the strength of their numbers. They have, therefore, collectively resolved to leave their ancient ways of life behind and to adapt profoundly to learn to live instead in large regroupings of smaller villages together.

The young people shared with me their plans for the first among these new larger habitations, for which six of their chiefs have donated their lands. In these new abodes, the young community leaders hope that their pounded, tormented people will be able to build their lives afresh.

I spoke to them of my immense sadness that they no longer felt they could live together with their Meitei neighbours. Yet, I said to them, “I hope that even if you do not live together now, you will be able over the years that lie ahead at least to rebuild your trust and goodwill to each other”.

In the corner of one relief camp, we encountered an inquisitive and spirited sightless child, in animated conversation with his mother. The pastor who accompanied me translated. The boy is asking: “Why did people burn down our village?”

I wonder how we will ever be able to answer this child.

Harsh Mander is a human rights activist, peace worker, writer, and teacher. He works with survivors of mass violence and hunger, and homeless persons and street children.