Overlapping territorial claims and ethnic conflict in Manipur

Abstract

The current engagement of the government of India with various insurgent groups in Manipur’s hill areas makes it imperative to revisit certain problems related to local ethnicity construction and, more importantly, to specifically address burning issues of overlapping territorial demands. The article argues that such overlapping territorial claims, which have their roots in colonial processes of ethnicisation, need to be tackled as a matter of urgency. Such competing claims arose only after colonially constructed categories of local people who shared local living spaces began to claim exclusive ownership of the entire territory of certain administrative units. Challenging the presence of other groups by settlerising these respective ‘others’ has resulted in recent attempts at ethnic cleansing, which violates basic principles of India’s ‘unity in diversity’. Since local land ownership was traditionally neither attached to a tribe or ethnic group, but rather to the entire village community, a return to that pattern seems advisable. Thus, it is argued, shifting from a ‘tribe-district’ approach to ‘village community/village land’ approaches in dealing with the impasse of overlapping territorial claims offers scope for a sustainable reconciliation.