Row Over Assam Rifles Ex Chief’s “Meitei Police, Kuki Police” Comment; Cops Say “Myopic Mindset”

The Manipur Police have strongly reacted to what they called “immature” comments by the former Assam Rifles chief, who indicated the state force could be partisan amid the ethnic tension between the valley-dominant Meitei community and the Kuki tribes, who are dominant in southern Manipur’s hill districts and some other areas.

Senior officers of the Manipur Police in a press conference on Tuesday said the comments on the police by the former Assam Rifles (AR) chief also showed “a myopic mindset”.

The Manipur Police and the AR have exchanged indirect barbs, and their personnel have had heated exchanges over matters such as road blockades since ethnic clashes began in May 2023, but never in the manner of a formal press conference or a news interview.

Lieutenant General PC Nair (retired), the former Director General of the AR, in a nearly 50-minute interview to News9 on Monday touched on a wide range of issues endemic in the state bordering Myanmar. One of the points he highlighted was the difficulty in operating at a place where he claimed the police, too, were sharply divided on ethnic lines.

While Lt General Nair acknowledged that the AR had a lot of successes during anti-insurgency operations due to the police’s support, he said the police are this time divided on ethnic lines – between Meiteis and Kukis.

“… Let me be very honest in saying that there is no Manipur Police. It is ‘Meitei Police’. It is ‘Kuki Police’. That’s how they went into their respective areas and that is how they have been since then,” Lt General Nair told News9. “If they didn’t go, you don’t know what would have happened to their families. So it was in their own interest. I wouldn’t blame them. The situation was so volatile that they had no option, but to go back to their areas where they belonged,” he said.

The former AR chief added the divide is “more or less complete” in the police, particularly the constabulary, which was “one of the problems.”

“See, in any internal security situation, if you don’t have the local police by your side, it’s very difficult. You try and think of such a situation in Jammu and Kashmir. Surely, the successes the army and the Rashtriya Rifles have been getting are largely due to having the police by their side, which was not the case here [in Manipur],” Lt General Nair said.

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Responding to Lt General Nair, the Inspector General of Police (Operations) IK Muivah said the state force “strongly refutes” several points, particularly the ‘Meitei Police’ reference, made by the former AR chief.

“Manipur Police comprises people from all communities, whether from the mainland, Nagas, Kukis, Meiteis. So there is no such thing as the statement which he made. It is an immature statement, which shows a myopic mindset. We want to refute that,” Mr Muivah told reporters in the state capital Imphal.

“We don’t take such comments lightly. This is why we called this press conference in the first place. We are disappointed with him over his biased, immature comments. They are not true. Saying ‘Meitei Police’, ‘Kuki Police’ is a very harmful, false statement. We completely refute this immature and false statement,” Mr Muivah said.

Inspector General of Police (Administration) K Jayanta Singh said Lt General Nair’s comment is not likely the opinion of the Assam Rifles as a whole. “The immature comment coming from an experienced, retired officer seems to be his opinion. It doesn’t look like the official view of the Assam Rifles,” Mr Singh told reporters.

On the huge controversy over attacks by weaponized drones, Lt General Nair denied any drone dropped bombs in Manipur, though both Kuki and Meitei groups use drones for reconnaissance. He also rubbished the claim that rockets have been fired in Manipur. A senior citizen from the Meitei community was killed in what the police and residents said was a “rocket attack” on the lakeside town Moirang, 45 km from Imphal. A shrapnel had pierced through his head, the police said.

Mr Keishing, citing evidence which the police have collected from the areas where they claimed drone bombings have happened, refuted the former AR chief’s statement that no drone dropped bombs. The Manipur Police officer said they have been collecting evidence, and have picked up drones that were downed, debris and bomb residue.

“We have also collected other evidence for the forensics teams. We will most likely hand over this very important case to the National Investigation Agency so that it can be probed at the highest level,” Mr Keishing said, referring to the country’s top anti-terror investigator NIA.

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Lt General Nair, explaining the situation in neighbouring Myanmar where anti-junta insurgents have been using swarm drones to bomb military camps, pointed out the projectile that hit Moirang can only be a homemade weapon known as ‘pumpi gun’.

“Again, it’s not a rocket or a missile. It is a very crude kind of a weapon, called pumpi. It is just a barrel in which they put some ammunition and it is fired. But do you know most of the times the ammunition gets blasted in the barrel itself… The media plays it up as if it’s something very alarming… they’re not rockets, they’re not designed. Narratives are being built by many people,” Lt General Nair said.

The AR is under the administrative control of the Home Ministry and operational control of the army. It guards the 1,600-km-long Indo-Myanmar border, of which nearly 400 km is in Manipur, where it also functions as the primary counter-insurgency force making its task a dual-role one. There are some Border Security Force (BSF) battalions in Manipur, but they are not specifically tasked with guarding the Indo-Myanmar border.

Since May 2023, when ethnic clashes began in Manipur, the Assam Rifles have been criticised by both the Meitei community and the Kuki tribes for allegedly being biased, Lt General Nair said, adding this clearly shows the force has been neutral.

The army had invited a team of the Editors Guild of India (EGI) to Manipur to analyse the local media’s coverage of the Manipur crisis, which was seen as partisan and biased towards the Meiteis. The editors’ body led by journalist Seema Mustafa had revealed this to the Supreme Court in September last year, after two Manipur residents filed police cases against the EGI for allegedly doing a hit job on the Meitei community, largely using information provided by groups of the Kuki tribes. The Supreme Court later gave relief to the EGI.

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Another controversy erupted when the investigative news website The Reporters Collective (TRC) shared with the public its assessment of what it claimed was a PowerPoint presentation by AR officers in Manipur. The report, published in Al Jazeera on April 15, put a part of the blame for the Manipur crisis on Chief Minister N Biren Singh’s “political authoritarianism and ambition”. The AR later told Al Jazeera the content of the report was not the official viewpoint of the force, and that no such presentation had been made by the AR.

The All Manipur Working Journalists’ Union (AMWJU), a registered body formed in 1974, in a statement today refuted Lt General Nair’s comments that the local media was partisan. “When speaking to national media, we wish the [Lt] General also spoke to locals for their inputs including the media and not rely only on one side,” it said.

The AMWJU also said the former AR chief’s statement that weaponized drones were not used were “not borne by facts”. “… There are many eyewitnesses who saw the release of the bombs by drones, including a journalist of Impact TV who was also injured by shrapnel on his hand and foot in Koutruk,” the AMJU said, referring to the incident on September 8.

Two battalions of the Assam Rifles have been shifted out of Manipur for deployment in Jammu and Kashmir. The Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) has been moved to the areas where these two battalions had guarded, including the Kuki-dominant Churachandpur. The Kuki tribes have fiercely protested against the move, and highlighted their preference for the AR, amid a huge trust-deficit with the government led by Biren Singh, who belongs to the Meitei community.

There are many villages of the Kuki tribes in the hills surrounding the Meitei-dominated valley. The clashes between the Meitei community and the nearly two dozen tribes known as Kukis – a term given by the British in colonial times – who are dominant in some hill areas of Manipur, has killed over 220 people and internally displaced nearly 50,000.

The general category Meiteis want to be included under the Scheduled Tribes category, while the Kukis who share ethnic ties with people in neighbouring Myanmar’s Chin State and Mizoram want a separate administration carved out of Manipur, citing discrimination and unequal share of resources and power with the Meiteis.