The home ministry will hold talks “at the earliest” with Meitei and Kuki representatives from Manipur as part of a fresh bid to bridge the ethnic divide that has been causing recurrent unrest and clashes between the state’s indigenous communities over the past one year.
This was stated by home minister Amit Shah at a meeting chaired by him to review the security situation in Manipur, particularly in the wake of fresh ethnic tension triggered by the June 6 killing of a farmer in Jiribam, a town bordering Assam that until now was unaffected by violence. Sources said the talks led by MHA will be different from the off-and-on peace parleys held thus far by a central team led by senior Intelligence Bureau officer A K Mishra, usually involving separate talks with the ethnic groups or civil society representatives. “There is a need to bring representatives of both the communities, Kukis and Meiteis, to the table together and resolve issues causing mistrust between them... as it is done in a political-level dialogue,” a senior official said.
Incidentally, Kuki leaders are said to have resisted sitting across the table with Meiteis under the current Manipur regime led by chief minister N Biren Singh. Singh, interestingly, was conspicuous by his absence at Monday’s meeting, the first after BJP lost both Lok Sabha seats in the state. Home ministry sources insisted that the review was limited to the level of officials, which included adviser to Manipur govt Kuldiep Singh, state chief secretary and DGP, Army chief Gen Manoj Pande, Army chief-designate Lt Gen Upendra Dwivedi, Assam Rifles DG and senior officers of the MHA.
Singh, in recent media interviews, had spoken about the need for “central forces to actively support the state’s initiatives”. There have also been rumblings that the state security set-up had failed to act on alerts from the CM’s office about possible ethnic flare-up in Jiribam, which police sources refuted as baseless, citing the five-month gap between the alerts sent in July and the tension in Jiribam. A senior IPS officer said the situation in Jiribam was under control and the movement of essential goods resumed 2-3 days ago.
