Nandita Haksar’s 2023 book Shooting the Sun: Why Manipur was Engulfed with Violence and the Government Remained Silent contains several stories of Manipur that are “violent, cruel and infused with unadulterated savagery,” she states in the prelude. She adds, “The hate and rage in them is tangible and there is no way to make the stories any less brutal.” 

One such story is of 34-year-old David Theik, who lived in Langza in Manipur’s Churachandpur district, home to his Hmar community of Christians. Haksar notes that due to issues like poverty and lack of employment, David migrated to Mumbai for work like so many other tribal boys. Like many other migrant workers who had lost their livelihood during the COVID-19 pandemic, David was forced to return home to Langza. With a heavy heart, his brother recounted that he was planning to return to Mumbai to set up a business, but “all the plans failed.” 

David and his friends had their turn to guard the village the night preceding July 2nd, 2023 when armed Meitei mobs attacked Langza and began unleashing horrors. The frenzied mob caught hold of David and, as Haksar narrates in Shooting the Sun, “put a rope around his neck and dragged him to a field. Instead of shooting David, they tortured him for four hours.” Khuma, David’s father, recalled that the image of his son’s severed head on a spike neither lets him sleep nor stay awake. 

David’s story is not an exception to the everyday social life of the people of Manipur. Since May 2023, Manipur has been gripped by violence between the Kuki-Zo and the Meitei community. Arson, looting, destruction of homes, killing, rape, and torture have become part of the everyday life-world in Manipur. In the face of such unprecedented violence and its devastating impact, the Chief Minister of Manipur, Biren Singh offered a mealy-mouthed apology to the people of Manipur during a press conference in Imphal on December 31, 2024. 

It is suspicious that the apology came only after a wave of violence in Jiribam on November 11, 2024, and a protest in which the homes of ministers and MLAs were attacked, including his own, on November 23, 2024. The urgency of “discussion and dialogue” that he emphasized when asked about his plan to bring about peace and normalcy in Manipur, only raises more suspicion about the law and order infrastructure that has allowed the violence to endure for over 20 weeks. 

Shooting the Sun is the first book on the current violence that provides insights into the weaponization of identity politics, the complicity of the government, the politics of vilification and dehumanization of the Kuki-Zo minority, gendered violence in times of conflict, human rights violations, the intimate connection between poverty, unemployment, and poppy cultivation, the redundancy of “war on drugs” and the rhetoric of narcoterrorism, and the questions of political economy. 

These issues hold a mirror to both the government and civil society. By charting out a jarring reality that the violence is state-sanctioned, Shooting the Sun lays bare how both Meitei and Kuki-Zo communities experience the state differently in Manipur. 

“Necropolitical Indifference” and India’s Age-Old Neglect of Manipur 

The attitude of the Indian state towards the region has been that of “age-old neglect,” reminded Bimol Akoijam in an article titled How History Repeats Itself. But this neglect is by design. Many other problems in the northeast region, he said, can be linked to this indifferent attitude. 

Former JNU professor and now Congress Manipur Member of Parliament (MP), Bimol Akoijam, in his recent motion of thanks on the President’s address in the 18th Lok Sabha, reminded the MPs of the “tragedy of Manipur, which is sought to be silent by the government,” alluding to the absence of Manipur in the President’s address, as well as the silence of Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi and the incompetence of the state machinery to curb the violence. “It is not a simple absence,” Akoijam said. “It is a reminder of the Rashtrachetna (national consciousness) which excludes people.” 

He also pointed out that the violence that continues to engulf Manipur has claimed the lives of hundreds and more than 60,000 people have been rendered homeless. These numbers are increasing. Health and sanitary conditions in relief camps are abysmal. However, Akoijam considering the National Register of Citizens (NRC) as a solution to Manipur’s Kuki population only shows his indifference to the obvious power imbalance between Meiteis and Kukis. 

In his article “Zone of Interest” (2024), social anthropologist Ghassan Hage offers many ways in which “necropolitical indifference,” as he calls it, can be understood as a social phenomenon that sheds light on the politics of indifference. Generally, it can be seen as lacking any interest or sympathy towards something or someone that is an integral part of our affective space. The attitude of both the State and the Central Government towards Manipur appears to be one of “necropolitical indifference.” 

The Indian State’s Complicity in Manipur’s Violence

Morevoer, the Indian Central Government is, in fact, complicit in the face of continued violence, death, and displacement. Rather than curbing the violence, it has repressed voices that highlighted the state’s complicity. Haksar highlights an FIR filed against three members of the fact-finding team of the National Federation of Indian Women stating that the violence was “state-sponsored” as an example of this censorship. The report also observed that the BJP-ruled State and Central Governments also stoked mistrust and anxiety between the Meitei and Kuki communities.

Shooting the Sun offers more profound insights into the failure of the double-engine government. Haksar highlights that since the violence began in May till August 2023, the Centre successfully added to the already deployed central armed police in Manipur. 9,000 personnel were already on the ground, yet the Centre sent more enforcement including the CRPF, SSB, ITBP, and BSF to assist in “area domination, sanitation and other law and order exercises.” But violence continues, unabated. Moreover, the violence in the Jiribam district of the state that borders Assam is a testament to how it affects Manipur’s neighboring states.

The issue of sexual violence and rape targeting minority Kuki-Zo women fell on deaf ears. Haksar mentions that a complaint was filed to the National Commission of Women (NCW) to take cognizance of a horrific incident. The complaint stated that two women from Kangpokpi districts were “disrobed, paraded naked, beaten and then encircled by a marauding Meitei mob and raped in public.” Despite the appeal made on 12th June 2023, Haksar notes how it was appalling that NCW “did not react for thirty-eight days.” 

PM Modi made only a brief comment in the parliament on August 10, 2023, breaking his long-standing apathetic silence on the issue of Manipur violence, only to claim shame and none of the responsibility. To this date, PM Modi hasn’t found time to visit Manipur. 

In Shooting the Sun, Haksar flags that in the recent past “Manipur has been marked by the rise of the strong identity-based movement of the Meitei” where on one level they have been engaged in rediscovering and reconstructing their script and on the other there is a stress on their pre-Vaishnavite Sanamahi religious identity. Within this backdrop, it is clear that language and religion have played a significant role in making the Meitei identity central to Manipur. 

Contesting this stress of homogenization, she highlights that according to the 2011 census, there is significant diversity not only in Manipur but also within the Meitei community based on religion.

The Language Of Dehumanization and the Border Industrial Complex 

As Meitei identity movements establish their centrality to Manipur by rejecting, alienating, and dehumanizing the tribal groups in Manipur, Haksar notes that this identity politics is being weaponized by the government against the minority communities. The alienation––and the subsequent violence unleashed on the Kuki-Zo––has been actively enabled by the Manipur State Government, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). 

The hate-filled narrative of Kukis being the “outsiders” and the “infiltrators” was manufactured, peddled, and garnered support from people and organizations alleged to be patronized by Chief Minister N. Biren Singh. Pramot Singh, the Convenor of the militant organization Meitei Leepun called for the annihilation of Kukis on a Facebook post on April 28 and deemed them “outsiders”, “not indigenous to Manipur,” “tenants” and claimed that “the majority of Kukis are illegal.” 

Even Biren Singh’s recent claim about “over 900 Kuki militants” entering Manipur from Myanmar was refuted by Manipur Security Advisor Kuldiep Singh and Director General of Police Rajiv Singh in a joint statement in September 2024. State representatives and militant organizations using the same language of dehumanization show their mutual interest in producing categories of outsiders and militants to criminalize a certain community’s existence, in this case, the Kuki-Zo minority. 

Given this context, the demand for state policies such as the implementation of the NRC in Manipur, and the support it has garnered ought to be a matter of concern especially because of the horrors it will entail for the Kuki minority. In their research, scholars Suraj Gogoi and Rohini Sen have shown that by law, the ongoing process of NRC is an exclusionary majoritarian viewpoint which creates the other, the outsider, the enemy as “an absolute public subject targeted both socially and by the bureaucracy.” In Assam, Gogoi and Sen point out that the law has effectively erased Bengali Muslims. 

The Kuki-Zo in Manipur fear the same eventuality for themselves, highlights Haksar. This can be understood more deeply through the consequences of the conflation of the category of illegal migrants with a political refugee by the Manipur government. After the Myanmar military coup in 2021, even as the “government turned to deporting refugees,” many individuals “Meiteis, Naga and Kuki-Zo offered humanitarian assistance to them,” Haksar notes. The people forced the State Government to allow the refugees to access the healthcare facilities in the heart of Manipur, Imphal. 

However, under pressure from the Centre, Haksar highlights, people “began treating the refugees as illegal migrants, confining those who had arrived to the border, with the threat of Assam Rifles pushing them back looming over their heads. As a result, the refugees had to go into hiding and it fell on the shoulders of the Kuki-Zo communities, who were the majority living in the border areas, and some Meiteis, to provide them with food and shelter and to protect them from deportation.” The solidarity of Kukis also makes them vulnerable to accusations of harboring “illegal migrants.” 

In Shooting the Sun, Haksar further highlights how media bias only adds fuel to the fire and proves true that Meitei-owned media houses are manufacturing perceptions. Additionally, overzealous Hindutva activists have run online social media campaigns in solidarity with the Meitei and against Kukis by flooding social media posts targeting Kukis as “Christian terrorists”. The construction of such categories has life-altering implications for the Kuki-Zo minority, especially when the state-sanctioned technologies of borders and militarization are gaining momentum. 

In that vein, instead of reopening the Free Movement Regime post-COVID-19 pandemic, the Government of India announced the proposal to build a fence along the Indo-Myanmar border, which runs along Mizoram, Manipur, Nagaland, and Arunachal Pradesh. Haksar points to how this step will also add to the “Border Industrial Complex” (BIC). 

“This industry,” she quotes from a 2020 report by the Transnational Institute, “has reinforced a narrative in which migration and other political and/or humanitarian challenges at the border are primarily framed as a security problem, where the frontier can never be secure enough, and for which its latest military and security technologies are always the solution.”

From Identity Politics to Accountability

By addressing volatile questions that no mainstream media will, Shooting the Sun holds a mirror to the State and Central Government. It deals with complex and volatile subjects with great precision and responsibility. 

While identity is historically acknowledged as a necessary factor in political mobilization against the nationalistic projects of assimilation, its limitation lies in addressing the growing link between poverty and impoverishment in the state. Haksar highlights these critical questions of political economy that lie at the root of the social, political, and economic inequalities among the Meiteis and Kuki-Zo people.

Development projects have also severely affected agricultural growth; the drying up of paddy fields leads to impoverishment. Haksar points out that 52% of Manipur’s population is engaged as cultivators and agricultural laborers. Youth migrating to cities and towns in search of work as an effect of increasing poverty and lack of employment opportunities is an issue that rarely comes to the surface of the socio-political discourse. 

Poverty and poppy cultivation are interlinked in Manipur, driving up opium production in the state. The government’s ‘war on drugs’ by the destruction of hundreds of poppy fields in the hill districts of Ukhrul, Senapati, Kamjong, Churachandpur, Kangpokpi, and Tengnoupal has not solved the social problem of drug addiction. Haksar thus questions the intention of this war itself. 

In Shooting the Sun, Haksar further highlights that every study on poppy cultivation has indicated that “all communities are involved in this dangerous trade,” even though the cultivation is done largely by the tribal. If all are involved in the trade, Haksar asks, the question that we ought to ask is who benefits from targeting attacks on Kukis and repeatedly calling them narcoterrorists? Why this vilification of just one community to the extent that their villages are derecognized? 

Given this context, the question that needs immediate attention is: how can we hold not just the state but ourselves as political citizens accountable to the “other”? The “necropolitical indifference” underlining the Manipur violence has opened up space for us to reimagine the state-society relations.