The sensitive border state of Manipur “is engulfed in violent anarchy,” says M. G. Devasahayam, a retired bureaucrat from India’s elite civil service cadre, who previously served as an army officer seeing action in war and engaging in internal security matters.
Devasahayam, a guiding force of an exceptionally influential group of retired civil servants and judges who have taken on the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, this week cautioned that the decision to arm police with mortars and machine guns is not the way to a “Manipur solution.”
He quotes another retired army officer living in the state, Lieutenant General L. Nishikanta Singh, saying Manipur is now “stateless” where life and property can be destroyed by anyone at any time, “as it happens in Libya, Lebanon, Nigeria, Syria.”
“It seems that Manipur has been left to dissolve in its own juice. Is anyone listening?” he adds.
Among those not listening is the Indian prime minister, who was in New York recently to address the United Nations General Assembly. He attends such international events regularly and torus other pasts of India but has not visited Manipur once.
He has also failed to announce any action program on restoring peace and providing relief to the more than 60,000 people living in refugee camps in the state or scattered elsewhere in the country without any livelihood, and often with little food or medicines.
The fact that most of the 250 or so dead are Christians and over 400 churches have been destroyed in the state has helped consolidate the argument that the persecution is both ethnic and targeted against Christians. All the Kuki-Zo-Hmar are Christians, of Catholic and several Protestant denominations. The government says it is just ethnic strife.
Amnesty International in a recent report on Manipur found “a picture of a state missing-in-action” despite the claims of “timely intervention” and a promise of financial aid.
The London-based rights group accused the state government of a “violation of UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement.”
This columnist in his visit to the state found the camps lacked adequate relief and rehabilitation measures, including shelter, sanitation, food, water, medical care, and access to education opportunities.
Modi’s majordomo, federal Home Minister Amit Shah, controls the paramilitary Central Reserve Police Force and the Border Security Force, which have both failed in keeping the Hindu Meitei ethnic majority from continuing its armed campaign against the indigenous Kuki-Zo-Hmar tribals.
Shah has supported the state’s Chief Minister N Biren Singh, who patronizes the more violent elements of his Meitei community, especially a band of armed young men rallying under the banner of Meitei Leepun.
The chief minister has exhorted them to “take the battle to the hills” where the tribals live.
Watershed for Church, state
The Meitei Leepun have obeyed the chief minister and have announced the launch of a pre-emptive strike on the hill strongholds of the tribals, alleging that 900 Kuki people have infiltrated from Myanmar, where China is said to be fueling the civil war between rebels and government forces. The military has denied any infiltration from Myanmar.
The Kuki-Zo-Hmar have in the 16 months since their women were raped and paraded naked in a village near the state capital in May 2023, have also procured arms.
The internecine battleground now has drones, sophisticated machine guns, and a variety of artillery pieces.
This is a watershed moment for Manipur, as much for matters of violence and peace, as for restoring the lives of the victims, whichever be their ethnicity or their faith.
This is also a watershed in its own way for the Church, both in Manipur, and the rest of the country.
There can be nothing but praise for the Diocese of Imphal which serves both the small section of Meitei Catholics and a much larger section of the Kuki-Zo-Hmar.
And more praise for the Baptist, and many independent churches, in the hills who continue to give shelter and food to the displaced Kuki-Zo-Hmar from their fast-depleting resources.
But for the average Christian outside the Northeast, Manipur’s Christians have fallen through a big hole in their collective short attention span.
The senior bishops of the scores of denominations that exist — even independent evangelical churches now have bishops and archbishops — perhaps have other preoccupations that weigh heavy on their minds, including asking Modi to sharpen the law so that Muslim Sharia wakfs or charities cannot attempt to displace fishermen in coastal villages in southern Kerala state’s Ernakulam region.
The government has cracked down in the last two years on a sizable number of churches and connected public services and people’s empowerment. Without the all-important license under the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA), Church groups cannot receive international aid which powers all their public outreach.
Raw fear may also be working on the collectives of the denominational hierarchies, and individual bishops and religious groups.
Violations of the FCRA conditions in the past have been effectively used to coerce congregations, many of whom have almost entirely withdrawn from empowerment work and the protests for mobilization of the people seeking their rights, often just food and medicare.
Almost every law has been weaponized against Muslims, Christians, Dalits, and tribal people across the country, even in states where the provincial government is not of Modi’s party.
The most potent are the anti-conversion laws, or Freedom of Religion Acts as they are called in the 12 states that enacted them in the last fifty years or so. In the most populous state of Uttar Pradesh, at one time this year, there were over 100 pastors in jail accused of converting people by fraud.
Religious congregations and diocesan clergy face an ever-present threat under the powerful law to protect children from sexual offenses. Several clergy and others have spent time in jail before they could be set free on bail.
The central organization charged with enforcing this law has deliberately targeted schools and child welfare homes set up by women religious, including the Missionaries of Charity founded by Mother Teresa.
This pincer movement by government agencies serves as a sign of the power of the ruling party, and its ideological mother, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
It also effectively silences the Church and seriously injures its mission of service and empowerment of the poorest, the dispossessed, the victimized, and the voiceless.
Church leaders, each in their silo of fear and avarice, are still to find a united, strong voice that can break through the overwhelming fear.
source : uca news