MENDING MANIPUR

Around the same time in the evening when President's Rule was imposed in Manipur on February 13, N. Biren Singh, who had stepped down as chief minister just four days earlier, took to social media platform X with a lengthy post addressing his "indigenous" friends.

- Kaushik Deka

Referencing a 2022 post about the arrest of a Myanmar national with a fake Aadhaar card, he urged authorities to take stringent action and ramp up efforts to deport illegal immigrants from Manipur. Describing illegal immigration as a crisis, he recounted how he had gone after said illegals until ethnic violence erupted on May 3, 2023, following which the state machinery struggled to keep up. Biren warned that Manipur's unguarded 398-km border with Myanmar and the Free Movement Regime (FMR) pact were rapidly altering the state's demographic composition, posing an existential threat to the local population. And then he vowed to continue this fight "in every way he can".

Biren's post offers an implicit rationale for why the BJP-led central government hesitated for 21 months before considering a leadership change in a state where ethnic violence has killed over 250, displaced more than 60,000, and redrawn its geography along communal lines. At the heart of the conflict is the Meitei community's fear of demographic shifts due to alleged illegal immigration of Kuki-Zo-Hmar people from Myanmar-a claim whose scale remains contested but was amplified into a rallying call by the Biren Singh government.

To the Kuki population, this was less about border security and more about ethnic persecution by a Meitei-dominated state. Biren's aggressive crackdowns on alleged drug trafficking and forest encroachments, widely seen as targeting the Kuki-dominated areas, only deepened the divide-a charge he strenuously denied. Yet, while his stand made him an enemy among the Kukis, it reinforced his standing with the Meitei electorate, which dominates the 60-member assembly with 40 seats from the valley.