An Indian state Manipur under the siege of murders and tears: BBC

On an overcast afternoon last week, hundreds of men and women gathered outside a hastily constructed bamboo hut memorial in Churachandpur, nestled among the picturesque hills of Manipur in northeast India.
Dressed mostly in black and many with war paint on their faces, the mourners belonged to the tribal Kuki group, who are mostly Christians. The walls of the huts were plastered with pictures of themselves, who had died in a recent bout of ethnic violence with the majority Meiteis, most of whom were Hindus.
Clashes between the two communities over the Affirmative Action dispute have rocked Manipur since early May. More than 130 people have died as a result of the violence, and nearly 60,000 have become refugees in their own country.
Now Kuki has called for “territorial autonomy” for the group, a welcome move for a separate, autonomous administration. Matti has warned that there is no question of any piece of Manipur.
At the memorial, Cookie’s mourners wept over photos of the victims, including a two-month-old boy and a 104-year-old man. Wreaths were scattered on the bamboo strip floor. A white board was filled with messages of condolence. Outside, a row of black-painted dummy coffins stretched across a highway connecting Churachandpur to the Imphal Valley, where the Meitei community lives.
“We want freedom! We want freedom from Meitei! We want freedom from Manipur!” A protester shouted from the podium.

The crowd roared in approval. A woman puts a country music-inspired protest song on a pre-recorded track. A group of masked kooky men dressed in black and carrying skinny sticks stormed into the gathering, and appeared to take over the stage.
“Are they carrying guns?” shouted someone in the crowd.

“No, they’re not,” said another protester wearing an Iron Maiden T-shirt.

Meanwhile, a local politician in the sun worked the crowd.

“We want justice for our innocent victims! Long live tribal unity!”
The ethnic divide in Manipur is bitter and deep. Churachandpur, a tribal district in the south, sits atop lush green hills, about 80 kilometers (49 mi) southwest of Imphal, the capital of the Meitei-dominated valley.
Kukis and Meitei bleed into each other as the sweeping hills descend into the valley. However, today the two groups are angry, divided and separate from each other.
The constraints of geography mean that the estimated 300,000 mostly Kuki people who live in Churachandpur are now isolated from the Imphal Valley, where the Meiteis majority also hold political sway. Life and work between the two communities has come to a standstill. Internet has been cut across the state, further adding to the isolation.
“Our lives have been destroyed. It’s like living under a constant siege,” said Mung Nihsial, a student from Churachandpur.

Leaving Manipur has become a nightmare for the cooks. Residents of Churachandpur say they cannot reach their nearest airport in Imphal, 90 minutes from the city, for fear of attacks in the valley. The twice-weekly helicopter service to Imphal has found few locals because “we fear for our lives even at the Imphal airport,” according to a cook who runs a non-profit organization.
Cooks are instead forced to endure a 380-km (236-mile), 14-hour road trip through a landslide-prone region to fly out of Aizawl, the capital of neighboring Mizoram state.
It takes two days for heavy trucks to carry essential goods from Aizawl to Churachandpur using the same route. Not surprisingly, prices of essential commodities have increased in the local market. “Mobility has become our biggest problem, as we can no longer go to the Imphal Valley. We have lost our basic lifeline,” said Suan Naulak, a policy consultant.
Doctors have complained of a shortage of medicines – paracetamol, antibiotics, antacids, cough syrups – in 114 relief camps that house more than 12,000 Kuki evacuees, some of whom have terminal illnesses and HIV/AIDS.
Three refugees have already died in the camps, including one who underwent surgery before the violence erupted. Nylon mosquito nets are suspended in the camps, creating a protective canopy that protects the inmates from endless bites.
Genminlian, a 40-year-old policeman living in a camp, suffers from HIV, diabetes, tuberculosis and neurological problems. Although the local hospital is providing antiretroviral drugs to treat HIV, there is a shortage of other essential drugs. “Our house has burned down, my husband is sick, we can’t get many of his medicines and we have a six-year-old daughter,” his wife Grace said. Now life is going like this.
The town’s 61-year-old, 230-bed hospital is facing an unprecedented manpower crunch. A third of its 74-member crew were Meitei, now gone. The hospital has hired two dozen cookie volunteers from a nursing school to help.

Weekly visits of oncologists, neurologists and urologists from Imphal to visit local patients have stopped, as the hospital faces a shortage of specialist doctors.
A Kuki man with gunshot wounds recently was airlifted to Assam’s capital Guwahati – not Imphal – more than 500 km away for emergency surgery. (He survived.)
In normal times, an ambulance visits Imphal once a week to collect medicines from the hospital. Since May, the hospital has been relying on just three deliveries of medicines from the government, which are transported by army convoys from Imphal.
A group of private doctors sent two deliveries from neighboring Mizoram. “God forbid Kuki suffers a heart attack or gets seriously injured in a road accident here. We can’t take him to Imphal for emergency treatment,” said hospital superintendent Dr Lonlei Vaiphei.
Racial segregation also created a sense of disruption and loss. Manghaulian, an 18-year-old Kuki youth, was forced to flee a school for the blind in Imphal when violence erupted in the Valley.
The school had been his home for five years and he was learning to play the drums. As his community became the target of Meitei attacks, school officials bundled him into an SUV and returned him to his family home in Kangpokpi, a tribal-dominated hill district.
When his village in Kangpokpi came under attack, Manghaulian and his family had to flee again, this time in a bus, to a relief camp in Churachandpur, more than 100 kilometers away. “I just want to go back to Imphal and learn to play drums at my school. I don’t know what’s going on,” he said.

Churachandpur was ground zero for the violence, which erupted on May 3.
Mobs set fire to homes and businesses belonging to the Meiteis in the town, prompting the evacuation of 9,000 community members from 13 neighborhoods under military protection. The evacuees were then taken to safety in Imphal.
Around the same time, army convoys took about 15,000 Kokkis from Imphal to Churachandpur, where they were targeted by the Meiteis. A few thousand – mostly civil servants and businessmen – rented houses or moved in with relatives. And the rest went to relief camps.
“There is not much administrative support from Imphal. There are shortages,” said a senior army official, who preferred anonymity.
The situation is so dire that the army has seized weapons from police stations and explosives used by road works contractors to prevent them from falling into the hands of vigilantes and rebels.
More than 900 insurgents from two dozen Kuki groups seeking greater self-determination within Manipur have been holed up in seven security camps in Churachandpur since 2008 under a “suspension of operations” agreement with the government.
But there are allegations that many insurgents have fled the camps after the violence and later joined the ongoing conflict, a claim denied by security forces.
In Kangvai, barely 20 minutes from the town centre, security forces are now patrolling a buffer zone that separates the villages of Kuki and Meitei. These villages – some of which are separated by only a 200-metre strip of road – were mostly abandoned by residents during the violence.
Farmers from both groups often cross over to cultivate their plots which are now located in rival territory. More than 500 soldiers are engaged here to maintain peace.
A semblance of normalcy has indeed returned to the town of Churachandpur. The bustling central market opens three times a week. People sell petrol in plastic bottles on the black market. Women hawk vegetables under garden canopies. Shops selling bed sheets, shoes, stationery and toys do business and short queues form outside cash machines.
A trickle of farmers have started returning to their fertile fields growing rice, ginger, cabbage, cabbage, pumpkin and more.
It all looks almost normal, until you realise it isn’t.
Within the town, most of the Meitei houses and settlements have been burnt down. The name Churachandpur has been blacked out on business and residential signs, replaced by spray-painted letters proclaiming “Lamka”, which many Kukis believe is the original name of the place.
Kuki children have started playing war games with toy guns. “The way they want to play with their friends has changed. I’ve never seen it here before,” said Muan Mgaiht, a local. As schools are closed, many students are joining the volunteer force to protect their village. (Most village houses have licensed single barrel guns that are used for hunting.)
“Peace is very fragile here. Things can deteriorate very quickly. Communities are completely isolated,” the military officer said.
Mr. Naulak himself is a clear example of this separation. He was working as a private consultant to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, headed by Chief Minister Biren Singh, on a program to modernize government schools.
He says he was sitting in his rented two-storey house in Imphal with six friends when a mob of Matti attacked him and set his car on fire. They escaped by climbing a backyard fence into the home of a neighbor who was a Kuki police officer. Army trucks took them to the airport, from where they took a flight to Delhi.
A third of the top bureaucrats and police officers running the government in Imphal were Kukis, and left the city after the violence, said a senior government official, who preferred anonymity. Mr Naulak, who has returned to Churachandpur, said he could not imagine going back to his old job and home.
“Now it’s like we [Kukis and Meiteis] don’t know each other at all. We’re completely separated.”

This is the first of a two-part series of on-the-ground reports from the violence-hit areas of Kuki and Meitei.