Stories the Fire Could Not Burn: Manipur's serial institutional failures

This is as fair an account of the violence that engulfed the state as possible, but the hurt, sorrow, and loss of the author calls out to you through the pages

Stories the Fire Could not Burn: A Personal Account of the Manipur crisis: 2023-25

By Hoihnu Hauzel

Published by Speaking Tiger Books

231 pages  ₹499

  Manipur is no stranger to violence. It is the state in India that has seen the maximum number of spells of President’s Rule. It is almost as if the people of Manipur — the tribal Kuki-Zomi-Mizo and the Naga communities that live in the hills; and the majority Meiteis — consider democracy their primary enemy. How can anyone blame them? The institutions that run the Indian state — the bureaucracy, the police, the Central and the state governments, sections of the media and in many cases, even the judiciary — have failed them repeatedly and comprehensively. The last instance was the “selection” of a new government headed by Yumnam Khemchand Singh, a Meitei who was given a Kuki deputy chief minister who had to be sworn in virtually because it was not “safe” for her to travel to the capital, Imphal. 

This institutional failure is the message of a book that will make every Indian squirm. For the author Hoihnu Hauzel, the book is another way of catharsis. As someone who has witnessed the horrors that she has, the rage, helplessness and sense of injustice come bubbling up to the surface periodically in the book, especially her social media campaign #ModiSpeakUpForManipur. She reports the trolling she encountered. 

Ms Hauzel writes unapologetically from the perspective of a Kuki-Zomi-Mizo tribal. In Manipur, you get the impression that political parties — the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Congress, etc — are just names. She is neither exculpatory nor accusatory about the political stance these parties have taken in the upheavals in Manipur over the years. For her, none of the groups comes to the court with clean hands. Rather, she analyses problems from the perspective of tribal politics, religion and society. 

And land. 

That’s what it’s always about: Land. 

Ms Hauzel has selected a tight timeframe for her analysis. But she bookmarks three sets of dates: 1972, when the Manipur government said no areas would be declared reserved forest without the permission of the Hill Committees; 1997, when 187.50 km of land in south Manipur was declared a wildlife sanctuary (meaning people couldn’t live there) and 2023, when a settlement of Kuki-Zomi tribals was evicted and their dwellings razed to the ground because they had encroached.

 

There were other provocations. In 2023, in Imphal East, three important churches were demolished on the grounds that they stood on “government-owned land”. In 2011, following a Supreme Court directive, 188 structures were deemed to have been regularised even if the provenance of the land holding could not be proved. Not one was a church. More than 60 per cent of Manipur’s population is Christian; most among them are tribals. So the tribals felt they were being singled out, all together, all at once.

 

Ms Hauzel says relations between Meiteis and Kuki-Zo-Mizo-Naga were never especially warm. But they were not estranged communities and lived alongside each other — except when they started attacking each other. Shorn of adjectives and verbiage, Ms Hauzel describes the attacks that occurred on Kuki-Zo communities starting in 2023. Her own home was not just vandalised but burnt to the ground. Her mother’s carefully laid gardens, her father’s lovingly tended teak trees, his library, his typewriter, the piano around which the family spent many happy hours... everything was gone along with the property owned by her tribal neighbours. For easier identification, properties were marked with a red X. Because Manipur is a small place, an aunt recognised her attacker, a Meitei. When asked why he was doing this, he replied: “We have to do what we have to do”. Ms Hauzel says baldly that the attacks were led by a Meitei vigilante organisation, the Arambai Tenggol.

 

There are horrific stories based on eyewitness accounts. Some escaped. Others could not and were decapitated, burnt alive or shot. Worse, videos of a decapitation and the rape of two women were all over social media. Ms Hauzel describes the government-sanctioned and -led systematic demolition of churches, and what the pastors and the followers felt and thought. “The state had failed its people,” she writes. The account of the various camps where these proud people were led to and lodged in, is even more depressing.

 

The only gap — if it is that —in the book is that it does not explain the intra-tribal tensions that came to the surface when Nagas and Kukis clashed in Ukhrul earlier this year. Maybe that is for another book. Ms Hauzel strives to be fair but the hurt and the sorrow, the loss of the idea that there was no place called “home,” calls out to you through the pages. All Indians must read this haunting book.