Manipur to Chittagong Hills to Myanmar: Why unrest is festering across South Asia’s borderlands

This is the second of a two-part series. Read the first here.

In our continuing discussion of South Asia’s ring of fire, let us talk about the borderlands that mark India, Myanmar, and Bangladesh. Because – as if things were not tense enough – various governments and vested interests seem to find ways to keep these border regions on the boil. These political plays are over and above the reality of these areas being among the most brutally administered in India, Bangladesh, and Myanmar. That this attitude birthed numerous rebellions, is axiomatic. Moreover, continuing such impulses and impositions have altogether made these often-interlinked border areas deeply vulnerable to geo-political stress.

For instance, the ongoing self-inflicted mess in the far-eastern Indian state of Manipur, and the self-inflicted and, lamentably, whitewashed situation in Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hill Tracts, only add to the state of tension that an imploding Myanmar superimposes on this sub-region. Countries crying wolf will not cut it.

Here is a quick and uneasy primer as to the why and where-to.

These are significant borders. Beginning at a trijunction with China and Myanmar, India’s far east shares a 1,643km north-to-south border with Myanmar in a north-to-south stack along the Indian states of Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur, and Mizoram. The southernmost of this stack, Mizoram, also shares a 318km border with Bangladesh along the Chittagong Hill Tracts, or CHT. And CHT, contiguous to the border with Mizoram, also shares a strategically significant 271km land and river boundary with Myanmar, along both Rakhine and Chin states of Myanmar.

Complicated? It gets more so.

These colonial and post-colonial borders have, in large swathes, cut through the traditional homelands of several ethnic groups. For instance, Naga tribes in Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, and Manipur have kin across the border in the northwestern Sagaing region of Myanmar. The Kuki-Chin-Zo peoples have homelands in Manipur and Mizoram – and have ancestral and ethnic ties across the border in Myanmar’s Sagaing region and Chin State, as well as the northern aspects of CHT.

The upshot of this complicated ethno-geography mixed with a deeply cynical politics is that events in one area can have a spillover in another. For example, tens of thousands of Chakmas displaced on account of projects and politics in CHT, during both Pakistan and Bangladesh eras, took shelter in Mizoram and elsewhere in India. More recently, Bangladesh learned a similar lesson to its great cost when, particularly since the mid-2010s, more than a million Rohingya arrived in Bangladesh from Rakhine after Myanmar ejected them.

So, a seemingly distant ethno-political upheaval in Manipur can have a domino effect in Bangladesh.

In May 2023, Manipur caught fire after the government pushed a majoritarian project to appease the majority Meitei ethnic group in that state. A decades-long affirmative action that provided reservations in education and government jobs to non-Meitei Naga and Kuki-Chin-Zo peoples of the state, was also judicially recognised for the Meitei. This was a semi-transparent ploy by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and its ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh to buttress their position in Manipur in much the same manner as they have aggressively pushed a majoritarian agenda in other northeast Indian states such as Assam and Tripura, besides elsewhere in India.

It backfired. All tribal ethnic groups emptied onto the streets of Imphal – the state capital of Manipur – and elsewhere, to protest. In a now-confusing sequence of who cast the first stone, the Kuki-Chin-Zo people were quickly enmeshed in a spiralling life-and-limb battle with the Meitei even as the Naga tribes diplomatically stepped back. In the past year-and-a-half, the Meitei have been ejected from several “hill” districts, including border districts to take shelter in the Meitei redoubt of Imphal Valley. In turn the Kuki-Chin-Zo have been forced to leave Imphal Valley and take shelter in their home districts, as it were.

Homes were razed and set fire to. People of both ethnicities were beaten, raped, and killed in a spiral of territoriality and revenge attacks. Over the past fortnight, women and infants were killed in renewed violence. Weapons looted from state armouries and police posts in 2023 by both Meitei and Kuk-Chin-Zo rebels and radicals, often with officials looking away if not aiding and abetting, are now awash in the sub-region.

Manipur is now more deeply divided than at any time in its long history. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that, with ethnic territories of the Meitei, Kuki and Naga sharply marked by aspirations of identity overlayed by politics and an imposed violence, Manipur at present exists as a map, not a cohesive and coherent administrative unit of India.

Besides amping up the presence of army adjuncts and paramilitaries, there has been no significant intervention by New Delhi in Manipur. The top leadership of India, which had tom-tommed their vision of a brave new Manipur during times of general elections, have been notable in both their absence from the state and the state’s absence in their everyday rhetoric. The leadership have distanced themselves from the abject failure they aided Manipur to become.

Meanwhile, India’s majoritarian evangelists, who helped to create the mess in Manipur in the first place, strenuously broad-brushed the entire Kuki-Chin-Zo peoples both as murderers and as poppy farmers and heroin and methamphetamine traffickers, when their project went south. This rhetoric persists and is driven by both the BJP and RSS superstructure in New Delhi and in Manipur.

This failure from the administration’s need to serve what is essentially a telescoped politico-religious interest has led to vulnerabilities and disruptions along the international border. The Kuki-Chin-Zo groups control large aspects of Manipur’s territory bordering Myanmar. This has now added another layer of vulnerability alongside disruptive pressures from within Myanmar. To put it more bluntly, it has led directly to weakening India’s evolving border security doctrine in a region that has nearby China and an unstable Myanmar – and, in India’s estimation, a currently unstable Bangladesh – as direct threats to India’s peace of mind.

Continuing instability in Manipur has the potential to trigger a reaction in Mizoram state to the south, which has strong ethnic and filial bonds with Manipur’s Kuki-Chin-Zo groups.

A knee-jerk reaction from India’s establishment has been to announce an aggressive fencing of the entire border with Myanmar. Alongside, the government has also yanked a much-appreciated mechanism of cross-border trade and people movement: The so-called Free Movement Regime, or FMR, which, through a bilateral mechanism with Myanmar, permitted the citizens of either country to daily visit the other up to a depth of 16km through numerous checkpoints along the entire border. So, it was possible to cross from Moreh on the border of Manipur and Myanmar, travel to the sleepy trading town of Tamu in Myanmar, have a terrific Chin lunch, shop, walk the town, visit pagodas, and come back to India before sunset (as this columnist has done several times).

Elsewhere, heavy-handed administration and policing with military in CHT, and massive encroachment of traditional Indigenous lands, which ignore most aspects of a peace treaty signed with fanfare in 1997, has retained vulnerabilities for Bangladesh. Instead of ensuring democratic dignity and aspiration, CHT remains home to a lamentable suspicion of not-Bengali ethnic groups in the name of national security. It is hardly a formula for a shared peace and prosperity.

And, in this situation, if tensions travel south from Manipur to Mizoram, and spill over across the border in Myanmar, there is every reason to expect fermentation of trouble in CHT. This international trijunction is deeply vulnerable.

But instead of addressing reasons for this vulnerability, all three countries tend to demonise their ethnic minorities.

We have seen the steady, state-led demonisation of the Kukis in India. In Bangladesh, this past June, the disinformation-led rhetoric of a Christian nation for the Kukis took wing – gleefully enhanced by many in India’s majoritarianism-fed media. It ignored the truth that Kukis and several other tribes were aggressively addressed by British missionaries in colonial times and, since, also addressed by a grab-all band of North American missionaries. Even so, without any state-led jostling they remain both Christian and Indian – or Bangladeshi, or Myanmarese.

This nationalistic paranoia is an extension of the Rambo-myths propagated by Hollywood, where Vietnam-era hotheads defend the project of evangelicals to rescue, say, the Karens along the border with Thailand from the evil clutches of Myanmar’s military regime.

But pie-in-the-sky dreams of a Christian nation in South Asia’s geo-political stew did not unravel Bangladesh’s long-standing regime this past August. Its own misguided policies and practices did. A significant part of India’s northeast is now on the boil, not on account of dreams of a Kuki/evangelical Great Game but the gross missteps of a political game gone horribly wrong. Myanmar’s leaders talked war instead of peace and dignified co-existence with its people, and that country is now paying a price and threatening to take vast parts of Eastern South Asia and western Southeast Asia down with it.

South Asia’s ring of fire? You bet. It is a no-brainer. Literally a no brainer.

Sudeep Chakravarti works in the policy-and-practice space in South Asia and the Indian Ocean Region.