Members of Bamar People’s Liberation Army (BPLA), who came back from a frontline after deployment, take a break in territory belonging to the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) in Karen State, Myanmar, on March 9, 2024. (Photo: Reuters)
IMPHAL — Indian militant groups that took refuge in Myanmar and fought in its civil war have been streaming back across the border to Manipur state this year, Indian security officers said, inflaming the bitter 19-month ethnic conflict there with weapons and battle-hardened cadres.
This has led to an increase in violence between Manipur’s dominant and mostly Hindu Meitei community and the mainly Christian Kuki tribes – a conflict that critics say is the biggest law-and-order failure of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 11-year-old government. Since May 2023, some 260 people have been killed in the fighting and more than 60,000 displaced.
Nine Indian military and police officers who spoke to Reuters, plus several politicians and rebel sources in Myanmar, described a conflict that is spreading to new areas as militants from the rival groups come across the border to Manipur.
Fighters are equipped with more sophisticated weapons, including rocket launchers, and 20 people were killed in fighting in November alone. In response, the federal government announced it was deploying 10,000 more soldiers in Manipur, taking the total number of troops to nearly 67,000 in addition to the 30,000-strong police force.
The escalation has been accompanied by an increase in crime – mainly extortion and illegal drugs trade – to fund the weapons and operations of the rival factions, the police and military officers said.
“The insurgents who we had controlled about 10 years ago are gaining relevance again,” said Yumnam Joykumar Singh, a former Manipur police chief and the state’s deputy chief minister between 2017 and 2020.
“Some of them are coming back from Myanmar, some have already come,” said Singh, a Meitei, who led operations against Meitei militants in Manipur as a hardline chief of police between 2007 and 2012.
The federal interior ministry, Manipur Police and the Myanmar junta did not respond to requests for comment.
Manipur is a hilly, forested region of 3.2 million people in India’s northeast, bordered by Myanmar. The fighting there was sparked last year by a court order that proposed giving the Meiteis, who live in the prosperous Imphal valley region of the state, the same government benefits as those given to historically disadvantaged Kukis, who live in the more-impoverished hills.
Security forces have manned a buffer zone between the two groups to try to limit the violence.