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Extortion a way of life in
Manipur
By Ranjit Devraj
IMPHAL, India - When the Manipur AIDS
Control Society (MACS), which distributes World
Bank funds for fighting HIV, was served notice in
February to cough up US$50,000 or shut shop, it
was a sign that nothing was exempt from extortion
by militant groups in this northeastern state that
borders Myanmar.
"We are all compelled to
pay 10% of our salaries to the militants," a
senior police official told IPS, asking for
anonymity not only because of service rule
requirements, but also because he risked a bullet
in the thigh, the trademark first warning of
Manipur's militant groups. There is no second
warning.
Because the "boys" have a system
of revenue intelligence that would shame the most
diligent of tax officials, bargaining is pointless
and risky. And the gruesome enforcement methods
guarantee a 100% recovery.
Said a MACS
official: "The UGs [short for underground groups,
as they are locally referred to] have detailed
information on exactly how much money is coming in
from the National AIDS Control Organization [NACO]
in New Delhi and calculate precisely how big a
bite they can put on us without actually forcing
us to shut shop."
Paying up is one thing,
but satisfying all of the 25 different banned
militant groups that operate in Manipur is
another. "The current demand has come from a
consortium of groups which say they were left out
earlier," said the MACS official.
Armed
militancy in Manipur began with opposition to the
merger of the territory into the Indian Union in
1949 put up by the Hindu Meitei community. This
deteriorated into ethnic warfare for dominance
with Christian, Naga and Kuki tribes and smaller
ethnic groups such as the Peites and Muslim
Pangals and splinter groups soon formed around
individual leaders.
Phanjoubam Tarapot,
journalist and author of the book Bleeding
Manipur, published in 2003, believes that the
state, which has a population of about 250,000
people, now has around 20,000 militants who
collect at least $25 million every year in
extortions.
Though MACS cannot admit to
making payments - that would make them vulnerable
to prosecution on charges of colluding with
proscribed "terrorist" groups thus jeopardizing
their funding - NACO and MACS are certain to work
out a way to "adjust" the funds they have to pay
up in their books just as they have done before.
While the matter of predatory militant
groups extracting large sums of money from
officials and government departments has been an
open secret for years, the central government has
only in recent months begun to tackle the practice
identified as the real reason why development has
remained stunted in much of India's troubled
northeast.
"The allegation of connivance
of All-India Service officers [members of the
elite central bureaucracy] siphoning off
government funds may be true because of threats to
the lives of the officers and their families,"
said the minutes of the Committee of Secretaries
that met in the national capital New Delhi in
February to discuss the issue.
So far, the
committee headed by B K Chaturvedi, cabinet
secretary and India's top-most ranking bureaucrat
has not come up with a remedy for the systematic
extortions beyond sagely concluding that "since
the officers were forced to comply with the
extortion demands under threat to life, the
solution would have to be realistic and
practical".
On the ground, Imphal
residents point to the deplorable state of the
roads built with inadequate material and the
concrete flyovers made painfully narrower than
originally specified because the militants had
taken their bite out of the contractors.
India is keen to develop Manipur and other
northeastern states as windows to the "tiger
economies" of Southeast Asia and the Far East but
analysts say this can happen only if the
extortions by militant groups that dictate life in
these parts are stopped.
"There are no
easy solutions. But it is no good mindlessly
pumping money into states like Manipur because
that would only foster the militant groups, made
up mostly of young unemployed men and women, and
then sending in the army to fight them," said Prof
Ganganath Jha, an expert on the northeast who
teaches at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New
Delhi.
Jha said the $2.3 billion special
package earmarked for development work in the
northeast in India's annual central budget,
operative from April 1, was fine, but there was a
real need to ensure that the funds benefited
ordinary people rather than gangs of extortionists
masquerading as liberators of the people and
protectors of local culture.
Since the
beginning of March several restaurant owners have
received bullets in their thighs for allowing
young girls and boys to use their premises as
rendezvous points and not heeding warnings
released through local newspapers and local cable
television that such "immoral activity" was "alien
to Manipuri culture" and therefore impermissible.
The Kanglei Yawol Kanna Lup, one of
several militant groups that represent the Hindu,
Meitei community that dominates Imphal valley, has
also issued warnings against women not wearing the
traditional phaneksi (sarong) and blouses.
Another chauvinistic group with the muscle
and bullets to back their diktats, the Meitei Erol
Eyek Loinashillon Apunba Lup has ordered all local
newspapers to switch from the Bengali script -
which is regarded as Indian - to Mayek script that
resembles Burmese but ironically is also of Indian
origin as all scripts are in the Indochina region.
Not to be outdone in the "moral and
cultural policing" department, the rival
Kangleipak Communisty Party in February abducted G
J Demonte, the principal of a missionary-run
school, on charges of taking bribes from students
in return for allegedly helping them to "cheat" on
their school final examinations.
Among the
many victims of the self-appointed, moral and
cultural police in March was the principal of an
engineering school who was dragged out of his car
and shot in the thigh on charges of "admission
irregularities". Other victims of such arbitrary
shootings include sex workers, drug addicts and
even people afflicted by HIV just because the
militant groups deemed them a menace to society.
"We have opposed these vigilante shootings
just as we have opposed army atrocities," said W
Munindrokumar, who leads the People's Rights
Organization (PRO) that works closely with Amnesty
International to stop widespread human rights
violations by both state and non-state actors.
"The fact is that the militant groups are
turning out to be the equivalent of the Taliban in
Afghanistan and are at least as guilty of human
rights violations as armed forces personnel," the
PRO chief said.
In a report on Manipur
released this year, Amnesty urged "armed
opposition groups to abide by the minimum humane
standards of international humanitarian law" and
also "refrain from deliberate and arbitrary
killings of civilians, torture, ill-treatment and
hostage-taking".
Joykumar Singh,
additional director general of police in Manipur,
believes that the militant groups are "out to gain
cheap popularity when everybody knows that they
are as corrupt or as immoral as anybody else".
At the moment the PRO is putting its
energies into getting scrapped the Armed Forces
Special Powers Act (AFSPA) which gives the army
sweeping powers to arrest, detain indefinitely and
even summarily shoot anyone suspected of being
involved with the militant groups while enjoying
immunity from prosecution.
While the law
sounds draconian, the AFSPA enjoys secret support
from many leading local politicians as well as
local people who fear that removing it altogether
would leave everyone at the mercy of roving bands
of militants, each supporting the interests of a
narrow ethnic or tribal group in Manipur's highly
composite society.
Irene Salam, who
teaches psychology at the Manipur University,
believes that the root of the problem lies in the
dearth of worthwhile employment for young people
and a lack of enterprise among them.
"There is no dignity of labor in Manipur
society and every young person wants a white
collar job handed out on a platter when the state
already has a bloated bureaucracy. Also it is
pointless to expect private enterprise to pick up
in the state so long as the extortions continue,"
she told IPS.
For now, wearing battle
fatigues and joining the militant groups to fight
for the cause of independence from India offers an
exciting if risky career for young people. And
then there are the easy pickings from extortion.
(Inter Press
Service) |
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