Biren Singh’s BJP-led Manipur state government has used arrests, intimidation and narrative manipulation as tools to dominate the public and exacerbate decades-old tensions between Meiteis and Kuki-Zomi-Hmars.
From Himal Southasian
On 27 November 2018, police in Manipur arrested the journalist Kishorechandra Wangkhem for a video he had posted on social media criticising the state’s chief minister N Biren Singh, his Bharatiya Janata Party and India’s prime minister Narendra Modi. In the video, Wangkhem objected to the ruling dispensation’s push for a local celebration of the Rani of Jhansi, a 19th-century Maratha queen lionised by Hindu nationalists but with little or no connection to Manipur’s history. The courts, finding no cause for judicial action against Wangkhem, released him. But he was arrested again a few days later for the same social media post, this time under the stringent National Security Act.
Wangkhem has been in and out of prison since, repeatedly charged and arrested for his online criticisms of the BJP and its ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. His detentions, which the state has repeatedly justified as being for the maintenance of order, have been a public performance of state power over anyone who might challenge the Manipur government’s preferred narratives. Wangkhem is from the Meitei community, and his persecution reveals how the state has not hesitated to extend its repression to dissident members of Manipur’s ethnic majority, which Biren Singh claims as his own people.
While this logic of power extends across ethnic and community lines, its effects are unevenly distributed. The Biren Singh government’s apparatus of control has been more stark and repressive in the case of minority communities, and the state apparatus has exercised violence most freely against the minority Kuki-Zomi-Hmars.
Hanglalmuan Vaiphei, a 21-year-old Kuki-Zomi student, was arrested on 30 April 2023. This was days before ethnic violence broke out between Meiteis and the tribal Kuki-Zomi-Hmar minority – violence that has continued with little respite for the last 20 months and counting. Vaiphei’s offense had been merely sharing a Facebook post critical of the Manipur government. His detention was shrouded in procedural violations, including his mother being coerced into signing documents she did not understand. That May, a police vehicle transporting Vaiphei from a court proceeding was intercepted by a mob and he was beaten to death.
Under Biren Singh’s BJP-led Manipur state government, arrests, intimidation and narrative manipulation have turned governance into a tool to dominate the public. The violence that erupted in Manipur in May 2023 was a manifestation of decades-old ethnic tensions in the state, exacerbated by Biren Singh’s divisive ethnic politics. But a less-noticed aspect of Manipur’s trajectory is how underlying and fuelling those tensions were years of systemic repression at the hands of a state machinery designed to silence dissent and marginalise minority communities, all in an attempt to consolidate power.
For Manipur’s tribal minority communities, after decades of marginalisation, the immediate tipping point was the issue of tribal land rights and the Biren Singh government’s threat to them – something they saw as being representative of their broader struggle against institutional discrimination and neglect. Meanwhile, even among the majority Meitei community on the other side of Manipur’s ethnic divide, there had been growing dissatisfaction with governance under Biren Singh’s rule. The state’s response, which helped to escalate and precipitate the violence, was a narrative that directed this frustration into anger against the tribal communities instead of against the government.
The pattern of the state silencing dissenting democratic voices from within the Meitei community while stoking majority fear and anxieties against the Kuki-Zomi-Hmars has historically been part of Manipur’s politics. The state’s orchestration of ethnic tensions through policies and public discourse rendered differences virtually irreconcilable, leaving no alternative but confrontation.
This dual strategy serves a broader purpose: to fragment democratic resistance. By criminalising dissent across ethnic lines while escalating conflict along ethnic lines, the state has widened gaps of distrust and isolated potential opponents.
Sangmuan Hangsing is a student at the Kautilya School of Public Policy in Hyderabad and writes on the lived experiences of minorities and marginalised communities in India.