How women’s movement in Manipur became a platform for chauvinist elements

Few places in India have seen a sustained women’s movement of the kind seen in Manipur—but the grinding ethnic war tearing the state apart has revealed it also has an ugly face.

A Meitei woman talks on the phone while the group guards a highway in Manipur | Praveen Jain | ThePrint

PRAVEEN SWAMI, The Print,  12 July, 2023 : Like most evenings, the small liquor store at Leikai Awang Turel had an unwelcome visitor: An angry woman, loudly demanding her husband be sent home. The staff and clients at the store had learned to deal with interruptions to their pleasant evenings. The woman was beaten up and pushed away. There were many things to raise glasses to on 30 December 1975, after all: The sixth day of Christmas, the anniversary of the crucifixion of the Grand Vizier of Granada, the birth of Empress Dowager Bian.

Then, sociologist Arambam Sofia records, something unusual happened: Women poured in from nearby neighbourhoods to help the lone protester. Large temperance groups were spontaneously formed, and women began setting fires to liquor stores. Local drunks were tied up, beaten, and marched in shame.

Few places in India have seen a sustained women’s movement of the kind seen in Manipur—but the grinding ethnic war tearing the state apart has revealed it also has an ugly face. Women-led vigilantes have blockaded highways into southern Manipur, leading to severe shortages of food and essentials for Kukis. Groups of women have protected armed terrorists responsible for the killings of Indian soldiers.

Leaders of the women’s movement, like Thokchom Romani, have used incendiary language against rival ethnic groups, accusing immigrants from Bangladesh and Myanmar of seeking to overrun Manipur.

For decades, Left-wing activists have cast independent women’s movements like Manipur’s Meira Paibis—named for the flaming torches they carry—as critical elements in peace-building in war-torn societies. Even military authorities have engaged with the Meira Paibis, seeing them as civil society partners. Among the consequences, it’s clear, is the empowerment of some of the most chauvinist elements in Manipur’s society.

Women, power, and war

Ever since the mid-19th century, scholar Sanamani Yambem has shown, women occupied a critical role in the trading economy of Imphal, with thousands gathering to sell rice, oil, fish, and tobacco each evening at the Khwairamband Bazar. Economic power, Yambem observes, had not automatically translated into greater social rights, and the wars with Burma in 1817 and Great Britain in 1891 led to shortages of men, which deepened the institution of polygamy. The significance of women’s income, though, gave them some power.

Lieutenant-Colonel Henry St Patrick Maxwell, the colonial-era administrator, sought to restore the practice of lalup—forced labour, extracted under the local monarchy—to rebuild the house of the assistant political agent. Large-scale protests of Khwairamband Bazar women—egged on by disgruntled princes—forced the military officer to back down.

“It is very difficult to know how to treat a mob of wild cats like this, but I shall take care to disperse them next time before they become numerous,” one account records Maxwell as saying.

The coming of the road—an instrument not just of transport, but economic and cultural transformation—brought deep changes in the lives of the Khwairamband Bazar women. From the plains, the great Marwari trading families of Kasturichand and Sons, Ganeshlal, and Guru Dayal slowly took control of the trade in textiles and cotton. The trading family of Mangolchand Meghraj was granted a monopoly of the cart tax, allowing it to control rice exports.

Faced with famine after large-scale exports of rice to the plains began in 1939, a second great women’s uprising broke out. This time, administrator Thomas Sharpe was taken hostage by the women inside the telegraph office, along with the civil surgeon and other officials. The women initially wavered, Yambem writes, when troops of the 4 Assam Rifles with bayonets fixed moved in. Twenty-one women were injured, by some accounts, but the protestors held their ground.

The government learned, as Maxwell had done, that herding wildcats is hard, even at bayonet point. The rice-exports ended.

Anti-cosmopolitanism development

Like in many parts of India, the process of identity-formation in Manipur was enmeshed with ethnophobia. The communities who had migrated from the plains—Marwaris, of course, but also Bhojpuris, Sahus, Bengalis, and Nepalis, sometimes collectively referred to as Mayang—were seen as foreigners, S. Priyokumar Meitei and MC Arunkumar have written. PREPAK, the communist-inspired Meitei group that began a lethal insurgency in the 1950s, sought the expulsion of these so-called outsiders from the Meitei homeland.

Enabled by missionary education, and rents extracted from the region’s notoriously corrupt development programmes, a small Kuki élite also began to emerge. Thanggoulen Kipgen and Biswambhar Panda have, in a rare anthropological work on Kuki migrants to Delhi, showed how the community relied on close-knit networks to resist discrimination and secure access to opportunity. Inside Imphal, migrant Kukis built the same kind of networks.

Kuki run-businesses and properties in Imphal set off deep resentment, especially among the poorer, unemployed Meitei youth. The community’s visible representations in the higher echelons of the bureaucracy, the result of affirmative action for Scheduled Tribes, became another source of resentment. And Hindu nationalism—powered by a new generation of lumpenised youth, with little access to opportunity—became a language to express this resentment.

Ethnic Meitei politicians adroitly forged these cultural anxieties and economic grievances into a divisive politics that pitted community against community. Imphal, rapidly modernising, ought to have become a melting pot for the region’s various communities. Instead, it became cauldron to brew poison.

The women’s movement, instead of speaking for women, was assigned the role of protecting the frontiers of the community, its rituals and its faith.

Lost opportunities

Even 20 years ago, women’s rights groups noted the ambiguities of the Meitei women’s movement. Though the Meira Paibis ferociously protested against the rape-murder of Thangjam Manorama Devi—alleged by the Assam Rifles to have been an insurgent courier—the concern wasn’t uniform. Following sexual violence against Hmar women by the ethnic-Meitei Kangleipak Communist Party, there was almost no protest in the Imphal valley.

The anthropologist Karie Riddle noted that Meitei groups routinely rejected invitations from Naga organisations to participate in trans-ethnic events. The Meira Paibis, in turn, resented the refusal of the Naga organisations to show solidarity for their movements. Even opportunities to mobilise on issues like drug abuse among young people, which affected all communities, were lost.

Little surprise should exist, of course, that women are as driven to violence by concerns over ethnicity and religious identity as men. Women, historians have noted, participated in the First Crusades not just as victims but as perpetrators. They were present in pogroms against Jews in medieval Europe and as Nazi prison camp guards. Women have supported mobs engaging in communal violence in India and made speeches calling for ethnic-religious genocide. Women have served as terrorists and as suicide bombers.

The state’s engagement with groups representing ethnic-religious communities, in Manipur as elsewhere, has ended up entrenching social divisions and creating a class of leadership whose political power rests on the perpetuation of conflict. To rebuild peace, the region needs a language of rights—not identity.

The author is National Security Editor, ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.

(Edited by Prashant)