The autopsy report of the 10 Kuki-Zo young men who were killed on November 11 in an alleged encounter with the CRPF in the Jiribam district of Manipur raises serious questions on the nature of the incident. According to a report in the Times of India, the post-mortem conducted by the Silchar Medical College and Hospital in Assam says that most of them died of bullet wounds which were predominantly from the back.
The implications of this are obvious, though there has been little comment from the authorities. Sadly, the media, too, seems to be playing down what could possibly be a very serious case of extra-judicial killings which have added fuel to the already raging fire in Manipur.
The young men were reportedly killed near the Borobekra police station. The police claimed that the militants dressed in camouflage uniforms and armed with sophisticated weapons, including automatic guns and rocket-propelled grenades, had attacked the police station and an adjacent CRPF camp in which one CRPF constable was injured.
Now according to the autopsy report, the bodies had multiple bullet wounds, but most of them from behind which would hardly be the case had they been the attackers. The unequal casualty count of the alleged militants and the police is also suggestive of a fake encounter.
The Indigenous Tribal Leaders Forum (ITLF), a Kuki-Zo organisation, has said that those killed were village volunteers and not militants and that they had been out on a patrol to protect fellow tribals when the incident occurred. On December 5, the men were buried at the Martyrs cemetery in Sekhen village after the bodies, some mutilated and missing an eye, were flown back from Silchar.
The ITLF has demanded a judicial probe into the killing of these young men and in a letter to the Union home minister Amit Shah, they said that “the post-mortem reports of the deceased clearly show that the men were shot from the back, proving that they were not engaged in a gunfight with the security forces when they were gunned down.” The letter goes on to say that they could have been ambushed or murdered after capture.
The National Investigation Agency (NIA) is already probing the incidents which have enraged the tribal communities in the state. They have registered three cases in connection with the Manipur violence after the Ministry of Home Affairs handed over the investigations to the agency, but none of them seem to directly deal with the specific incident of the death of the 10 Kuki-Zo tribals. What the NIA is reportedly doing is investigating the alleged attack on the CRPF at the Jakuradhor Karong and Borobekra police stations by the armed militants.
A tragic outcome of this incident was the deaths of three children and three women belonging to the Meitei community. Meitei groups alleged that they were kidnapped and murdered by the Kukis in retaliation for the deaths of the Kukis who had allegedly attacked the police.
The root of this current phase of violence allegedly began when a woman from the Hmar community, which is predominant in the Jiribam area, was set on fire at her home at Zairawn on November 7. This resulted in the train of violence involving the deaths of the 10 tribal youth as well as the three women and three children belonging to the Meitei community.
Also read: ‘Centre and State Governments Have to Take Action, Not Us’: Supreme Court on Manipur Conflict
It has been more than a year since violence broke out in Manipur following Kuki protests against giving the dominant Meitei community official tribal reservations that had earlier been exclusively given to the Kuki and Naga communities. Since then violence, often akin to a civil war has wracked the state involving the Meiteis and Kukis leading to horrific incidents of violence and arson. A reprehensible aspect of this has been the targeting of women of both communities.
The prolonged instability in Manipur has huge negative implications for the country’s Act East policy. Moreh in Manipur is the point from which the ambitious India-Myanmar-Thailand Trilateral Highway starts from. It is a major entry point from India into Myanmar. The state government led by N Biren Singh of the BJP seems unable or unwilling to check the conflict.
The union government, too, seems to be twiddling its thumbs. The only time the prime minister has commented was in July when he said that the “entire country had been shamed” and that “no guilty will be spared” in relation to an incident when Kuki women were stripped naked and paraded and allegedly gang raped.
It represents a major political and administrative failure on the part of the BJP. Under any other circumstances, the union government would have dismissed the ineffectual state administration. Instead, they have dug in their heels, but to what end is not clear.
Manoj Joshi is a Distinguished Fellow, Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi.
