The Wire Staff 
New Delhi: Officials of the Union home ministry met with representatives of the Kuki-Zo Council in Delhi on Friday (January 17), where they spoke about the conditions needed for peace in strife-torn Manipur.
Home ministry officials at the meeting submitted to the Council, which is a relatively new body comprising representatives from various organisations, that there must be peace before a political solution to the state’s ethnic tensions is reached.
But the Council “retort[ed] that [the] cessation of violence has to be done from both sides, and the government needs to urge the Meitei community to restrain from attacking the Kuki-Zo,” it said in a statement.
It also urged the government to “initiate political talks as soon as possible”.
Over 220 people have been killed during the ethnic violence between Meiteis and Kukis in Manipur since May 2023 and 60,000 people rendered displaced.
Segregation between the Meiteis and Kukis reached near-complete levels after the violence and the two communities are physically separated by buffer zones patrolled by security forces.
The Council sent four representatives to Friday’s meeting, where they met the home ministry’s A.K. Mishra and the Intelligence Bureau’s Rajesh Kamble, it said.
The Deccan Herald cited Council spokesperson Ginza Vualzong as describing the meeting as “a kind of ice-breaker”.
“… We conveyed that the peace must be maintained from the Meitei side too. If the Meiteis attack our villages and our people, we will have no option but to retaliate in defence,” Vualzong was also quoted as saying.
DH reported that the Council also submitted a memorandum to home minister Amit Shah reiterating that a separate Union territory with a legislature for the Kuki-Zo people in Manipur was the only way to end the ethnic conflict in the state.
Earlier this month, the Council said it met Manipur governor and former Union home secretary Ajay Bhalla in the Kuki-dominated Churachandpur town.
While Bhalla insisted that peace ought to precede a political solution, the Council “strongly asserted that political talk should be expedited” with armed groups in suspension-of-operations agreements with the government and that a separate Union territory with a legislature for the Kuki-Zo people be granted “for peace to prevail”, it said in a statement as per PTI.
In October, the home ministry said that a group of Manipur MLAs from the Meitei, Kuki-Zo and Naga communities met in New Delhi to discuss the prevailing scenario in the state.
“The meeting unanimously resolved to appeal to the people of the state belonging to all communities to shun the path of violence so that no more precious lives of innocent citizens are lost,” the ministry said in a communique.
However, the Kuki-Zo legislators later said that they did not sit with their Meitei or Naga counterparts during the meeting, but only with Union government and BJP leaders, The Hindu reported.