The paper begins with a brief survey of the literature on conflicts in Manipur and Mizoram, followed by a brief discussion of the conceptual tools I use and a synopsis of my argument. The body of the paper is divided into three parts. In the first, I look at the historical statemaking experience of the two states, their contests with social forces and the outcome of these contests on authority structures. In the second, I explore why and how state-making leaders in the two states, in the years immediately before and after Independence, mobilized ethnic identities in divergent ways: inclusive and aggregating in one, partisan and fragmented in the other. In the third section I analyze the impact of divergent authority structures and varying modes of identity mobilization on the state’s capacity to govern and to incorporate minority demands and respond to the latter’s grievances. Finally, I try to draw some empirical conclusions from the material.

Existing explanations

Ethnic conflicts and violence in Northeast India have been explained using both primordial and instrumental lenses. Scholars, mostly from the region, have pointed to fundamental cultural differences between people in the region and those from ‘mainland India’. This incompatibility has motivated them to question the ‘unequal’ and ‘forced’ integration of the Northeast region into the Indian ‘mainstream’.6 Historians like Sanajaoba trace the problem to the forced integration of Manipur into India and the subsequent development of master-subject relationship between the two, reinforced by a colonial pattern of political, economic and cultural dominance.7 They argue that this seriously undermined the integrity of the state and led to frustrations that fed into ethnic conflicts. Others have tended to see things from an instrumental perspective. They have pointed to rapid modernization as the explanation for the region’s instability.8 Some writers point to the unequal power structure and intra-community competition over resources to account for the region’s many conflicts.9 Others have emphasized the class bases of these conflicts, pointing to the clash between the ‘new class’ and the traditional elite.10 Similar political outcomes in India generally have been explained by looking at the characteristics and the working of the state.11 They attribute India’s rising ethnic and community conflicts, including those in the North East region, to changes in political institutions and to choices of leaders.12 Kohli asserts that institutional vacuum and intensification of democratic politics have together caused the political breakdown that one notices in the country. The shape these breakdowns take depends on how well central authority is institutionalized and how willing ruling groups are to share power and resources with mobilized groups.13 Baruah resorts to similar historical institutionalism to explain the North East’s “durable disorder”. He argues that much of the pathology in the region is the outcome of the central state’s weakness to monopolize security, its disembeddedness from society and its reliance on militarist tactics to respond to challenges posed by militias in the region. The central state’s counter-insurgency policy in the region is accompanied by a tolerance for suspension of the rule of law, authoritarianism and large-scale leakages of development funds. This creates opportunities for insurgent dividends. Baruah claims that public policies promoting self-governance for particular communities contribute to the disorder. They encourage competitive mobilization by other groups not so privileged, resulting in sustained conflicts.14

Cultural and instrumental analyses, deinstitutionalization of polity, leadership options and the political economy of insurgency may explain the intensification (or decline) of community conflicts in India generally. However, they fail to satisfactorily explain variance in violence outcome between comparable cases, such as within North East India. Most parts of the region were subjected to rapid modernization, but it did not have an equally unsettling impact. Mizoram shows this. Group conflicts over power and resources are common to most developing societies, as much in Manipur as in Mizoram. But if these were more serious in Manipur, why was this so? What lies behind this divergence? And how and why has Mizoram seemingly avoided such contestation? Further, deinstitutionalization of the central polity should have affected both Manipur and Mizoram in similar ways. Central leaders have themselves shown equal flexibility (or intransigence) in dealing with mobilized groups and separatist insurgencies across the Northeast. Yet while Mizoram is on the verge of entering the twenty-first year of its post-Peace Accord era, peace has eluded Manipur for most of its post-colonial existence.

My own thoughts of Manipur are filled with memories of mobilization and countermobilisation by contesting identity groups, of the state’s complex ethnic dynamics and its never-ending violence. But what struck me most during my work there was the poor legitimacy of the state. Agencies of the state in Manipur are commonly criticized for their slothfulness, their insensitivity, and their inability to do any good. Though the state’s minority tribal communities have more to complain about than its majority, criticism of how the state functions is universal. Protests, street marches and bandhs (forced closures) are daily occurrences. By contrast, the clearest insight that emerged from my fieldwork in Mizoram was the positive public perception of the state there. Discussions with academics, as well as journalists and human rights activists, reveal that the state is seen as being able to deliver and be accommodative to minority demands. It has a sense of ‘legitimacy’ and is less an object of criticism. But what could explain this difference? Why is the state apparently benign in Mizoram when dealing with public demands while it appears to be malignant in Manipur?

Empirical insights again provide useful directions here. One aspect of the seeming ‘disorder’ in Manipur I noticed was the ease with which different social organizations constantly challenge the authority of the state to order people’s lives. While a variety of armed militant groups have thrown the ultimate challenge to the state, collecting ‘loyalty taxes’ and defining who will wear what clothes and what textbooks will be taught in schools, even ‘civil society’ organizations such as student and community groups constantly challenge the state and take upon themselves the role of rule-makers. The precariousness of the state in Manipur is stark. Mizoram’s was a very distinct state-society dynamic. Here there was little of the sense of constant and competitive struggles over who will define rules or who will order people’s lives. The state-society contest appeared muted, the general impression being one of state agencies and civil society organizations working in tandem, and avoiding breakdown. While realizing the normative implications of this compact, the difference between patterns of state-society relations between the two states was marked. I believe it is by analyzing this difference in state- society relations that we can understand the difference in conflict outcome in the two states.

Conceptual tools

Central to discussions over state-society relations is the issue of state power: where it lies, how it is grounded, and what social forces shape it; and whether those forces constrain and compromise state power or augment and reinforce it. State power has a bearing on the state’s autonomy and its capacity to govern. Equally, it impacts on the state’s ability to manage conflicts. Understanding difference in state capacity and autonomy may thus benefit from exploring the nature of state power. Any analysis of state power itself needs to begin with an understanding of the historical emergence and crystallization of the state and the various struggles that have happened between state-making leaders and their opponents over social control. State-making leaders face opposition from entrenched social forces who seek to provide alternative sources of authority. The outcome of these contests determines whether state-making leaders have been able to incorporate those social forces into the state’s structure, or if they exist outside, continuing to act as alternative centers of power. These determine state power. Therefore it is important to explore state making historically.

Equally important is the need to understand the particular strategies that state-making leaders have employed to respond to social forces. In their struggle over authority, state-making leaders and social forces that confront them have frequently politicized ethnic identities to gain advantage. Political parties, community elites and public organizations have been the most active in these struggles over power and authority. But the basis and manner of identity mobilization can be very different; it can be narrow, confined to the dominant community while excluding all others, or it can be inclusive, taking different communities along. The form of mobilization would undoubtedly depend on cultural affinities, but also on leadership strategies and choice. Important is the effect that the particular form of mobilization has upon inter-community dynamics as well as on the state’s capacity to govern. Where mobilization is inclusive and participatory, the state should be in a better position to respond to minority demands and take on board their concerns. Narrow identity mobilization engenders counter mobilization by excluded groups. It also limits the state’s autonomy and its capacity to govern and uphold the rule of law, which in turn contributes to conflicts and violence. It is these dynamics around state and society in the two states that I address in this paper.

The paper sketches out the divergent historical trajectories of state making in the two states. It explores how in Manipur the state sought to establish its local authority through forging alliances with community specific political organizations (chiefs and tribal fora, for example) rather than by establishing direct rule throughout the territory. These alliances ultimately led to a weakened state structure and continued existence of exclusive political organizations of different communities. State-making leaders sought to capture state power by politicizing the ethnicity of the dominant community. The state has sought to make up for its weaknesses by creating a ‘legitimizing core’ in the Meitei identity. This has excluded and in turn alienated the minorities. Conflicts between different communities, where the state frequently acts as a partisan actor, have worsened in the 1990s, perhaps due to rising socio-economic challenges.

In Mizoram there was an attempt by the state and political actors to incorporate competing social forces into a unified whole within the state. The state was able to enhance its strengths at the cost of exclusive social and political institutions. State-making leaders reinforced this strength by grounding state power in a unified and relatively inclusive identity that they devised and access to which was kept open to all who speak the Lushai language and share a Christian faith, but was itself an “exclusionary” identify since some minorities, like Buddhist Chakmas, were never seen as Mizos. The process of creating a Mizo identity has empowered the state to better respond to ethnic demands and has helped it manage conflicts. I elaborate this argument below using empirical evidence gleaned from ethnographic accounts, archival records, public and private documents, press reports and from interviews with numerous informants.

End Notes

1 Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura.
2 ‘Violence on the rise in Northeast: Manipur the worst sufferer’, Times of India (Guwahati) 5 June 2003, quoting Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India, Annual Report 2002-2003. The Ministry’s Annual Report 2004-2005 demonstrates similar results (www.mha.nic.in). According to another report, “If the first two odd months of year 2005 are any indication, the militancy-ridden state of Manipur appears to be moving into a more vicious cycle of violence” (Bibhu Prasad Routrey, South Asia Intelligence Review, Weekly Assessment and Review, 3:35 (14 March 2005).
3 “Mizoram has tasted and savored peace for seventeen years now. After two decades of insurgency and its related sufferings, peace has been sweet indeed” (‘Brave New Phase of Mizoram’, Telegraph (Guwahati), 22 August 2003.
4 Neera Chandhoke, ‘A State of One’s Own: Secessionism and Federalism in India’, Paper presented at Crisis States Programme Annual Workshop, London, August 2005.
5 See Manorama Sharma & Apurba K Baruah, ‘Mizoram at Crossroads: Democracy vs. Traditional Values’, Crisis States Programme Annual Workshop, New Delhi, December 2004.
6 P. S. Datta, ‘Roots of Insurgency’, Seminar 366, Northeast Special Number (February 1990).
7 N. Sanajaoba, Manipur Past and Present, New Delhi: Mittal Publications, 1988. See also Lokendra Arambam, ‘Language, Identities and Crisis in Manipur’s Civilization’, Imphal Free Press, Special edition: Selected Writings on Issues of Identity, 2003.
8 See B. P. Singh, The Problem of Change: A Study of North East India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987.
9 U. A. Shimray, ‘Socio-Political Unrest in the Region Called Northeast India’, Economic and Political Weekly, 16 October 2004.
10 Walter Fernandez, ‘Conflicts in NE India: A Historical Perspective’, Economic and Political Weekly, 18 December 1999, pp.3579-3582; A. Bimol Akoijam, ‘How History Repeats Itself?’ Economic and Political Weekly, 28 July 2001, pp.2807-2812.
11 Kohli argues that this is because in India, the state occupies a dominant political space, controlling most resources and opportunities. Further, ‘development’ in India is a political process, with the state itself being accessible via this process. As a consequence the state becomes both the object and the arena of the continuing contests between social groups all of whom seek to control the state (Atul Kohli, Democracy and Discontent: India’s Growing Crisis of Governability, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
12 Amrita Basu & Atul Kohli, Can Democracies Accommodate Ethnic Nationalism? Community Conflicts and the State in India, Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1998. pp.2-3.
13 Atul Kohli, ‘The Rise and Decline of Self Determination Movements in India’, in Amrita Basu et al. (eds), Can Democracies Accommodate Ethnic Nationalism? Community Conflicts and the State in India, Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1998, p.7.
14 Sanjib Baruah, Durable Disorder: Understanding the Politics of Northeast India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp.3-27.

*** The author is with the Development Studies Institute, LSE

*** This is a publication of the Crisis States Programme, Development Research Centre, DESTIN, LSE, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE.

*** The paper has been republished with due permission from Crisis States Programme, Development Research Centre, DESTIN, LSE, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE.

*** You may visit www.crisisstates.com for further readings.

to be continued...

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