Rage, rage, rage…

I cannot, I just cannot help but be political anymore.

Let me frame that right- I cannot help but feel political rage….

That’s the thing about a war-torn state. 

The evils of Politics, of Big Bad Men in Suits are no longer distant stories but very real realities.

It gets you thinking… about a lot.

So, what do I write about first?

Where do I begin

Should I start with rage? because where do i put away all this rage!?!?

Or Should I start with attempting to refresh the collection memory?

Should I once again try to explain the complex and knee-deep state of turmoil Manipur has been in ever since the 3rd of May,2023.And how the Chief Minister of the time,blinded by his racist and communal hatred, accompanied by his army of same-faced devils(they refer to themselves as the Arambai Tenggol)

led a genocidal campaign against the Kukis(Kuki-Zos/Kuki-Zomi-Hmars/ whatever fits).The perfect targets/ the perfect scapegoats for this particular hate monger- a people with no land to their name, a recognised Scheduled Tribe of India, yet  called “illegal” by the Government on their own ancestral soil. (But mind you, any institution, any intellectual, any human being who so easily dismantles a fellow human being’s identity is guilty of indifference and systematic hate.)

Yes Genocidal. 

Genocidal because I cannot find any other word suitable enough to describe what happened in and around the state capital, all from the 3rd of May,2023 and throughout that year and even onto the next two years-targeted killings and arson based on identity and ethnic background. A targeted violence based on Identity. A violence that persists, an evil that will continue for as long as it is allowed to.

This is the final cruelty of the hate-monger and his chorus of intellectuals;they never need to get their hands bloody. They supply the rhetoric-“illegal”,”encroacher”, “narco-terrorist”, “foreigner" and others supply the fire. The Chief Minister's speeches became marching orders. His silences became permission. His patronage of the black-shirted militia was the state signing a blank cheque for carnage.

And the world watched. Institutions saw 60,000 displaced. They saw 4,786 homes burned. They saw women paraded naked, gang-raped, filmed for circulation. They saw the Supreme Court dispatch judges to relief camps nearly two years later, shocked that people were still living in tents. They saw a militia summon legislators to a fort and force them to swear oaths, effectively running a parallel government. They saw all of this.

And still there are those who ask: "But what about both sides?"

That is the question that finishes the work the arsonists started. It places the perpetrator and the victim on equal footing. It suggests moral equivalence between a state-backed militia with looted automatic weapons and a terrified community defending its surviving children in a relief camp. It refuses to name what happened-a genocidal campaign enabled by the state, directed at a people whose only crime was existing on land that someone else wanted.

To claim identity is not evil. To claim identity is to say: I was here. My people were here. We are still here. The evil is in the machinery built to deny that claim-the speeches, the classifications, the armed cadres, the internet blackout, the police who looked away, the courts that took well over two years to visit camps or even open investigations. The evil is in any argument that begins by dismantling another human's right to name themselves and ends by excusing their destruction.

The chaos that Manipur is, is detrimental to everyone that calls it home.

A chaos that has been enabled

A chaos that is burning bright

A chaos that continues.

Or should I start with the decision of  “Popular Government” that has revoked the President’s Rule in Manipur, making headlines everywhere.

With the appointment of a new Chief Minister along with two new Deputy Chief Ministers, the scars of War are reopened again. 

Not even a week into these new political appointments, Manipur sees fire yet again.

Homes set ablaze yet again, accusations made between communities yet again and hatred dividing us further yet again.

If this situation reflects anything, it reflects the utter failure of the LEADERS, of the government, of the state.

The past two and a half years have been painful and winding, with well over 200 deaths, multiple accounts of rape and sexual violence, 7000 homes burnt to ashes, 360 churches burnt and 42,000 people displaced.

Or Should I start with the recent chain of violence. The Ambush and murder of Three church leaders, pastors who were killed on their way back from Lamka after attending the first ever United Baptist Convention Assembly.

Hours after this attack, hundreds of PRs and condemnations followed, ideologies and nomenclature inserted yet again, hatred and communal violence fueled yet again. The repeated cycle of violence and unending dismantling of humanity is the familiar scene of Manipur. 

What followed after this is a case of moral apathy on all sides; an inevitable consequence and effect of War.

Human hostages held on varying ends, innocent men, women and children taken as instruments of liability against each other. 

We have lost our sense of critical critique and empathy, we have lost our ability to direct our grievances where it actually matters; not against one another but against the greater evil; governments and institutions who have the power of action who vehemently choose inaction. When we learn to direct our anger in the right direction and ask for accountability from whom it actually matters; maybe then, that would be the first step towards unlearning the inserted patterns of apathy.

Therefore, while we witness (once again) the dirt of Politics and power relations unfolding.

We must not forget to ask, we must not forget to question, in the midst of the chaos-

Who benefits from all this turmoil?

Who benefits from certain political ideologies that insert and demand intolerance and

indifference against one another?

Who benefits from us turning a blind eye to accountability, and demanding accountability

from whom it truly matters?

Who benefits from ripping communities apart?

Not you, not me…It is the same-faced devils, the musky devils that reign from their black mansions. May we never forget that.

From our very own Leaders who would betray the homeland and its people to keep their

hands dirty and wet with power,

To the ones in the Centre who spare no care for the pain of Manipur,

And to every political and social ideology caught in between this War,

The recent chain of events are a bloody reminder that all the devils dine together.

And it is out duty to resist, to persevere and to remember.

Oppression, time and time again throughout history feeds off forgetfulness,

therefore may we remember. Remember to fight and Remember to Hope.

Edward Said’s words echo in mind as I write this:

“Humanism is the only - I would go so far as saying the final- resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.”

I also think fondly of Hosea’s words ( Hosea Khawbung) , a peer, a friend and most importantly a poet.

“The hills, where my people come from.

The hills, where my home is: the hills,

where my first known progenitor, Vungdang Khawbung, built his hut in Parbung. The hills, where my mother was born. The hills, where I read my first ever poem.

The hills, where I belong, just seem to have never known peace and that slow ministry of quiet living.

…

The 3 Bills Protest, Churachandpur, 2015.

3rd May, 2023, Manipur.

This is my land, my hills, my modern history.

That is to say: one drunk man, one politician, can be, anytime, a spark that might light up a forest fire.”

The image of a child, an innocent child fleeing his home in Litan Sareikhong, Ukhrul District, Manipur, as yet another displacement event rendered his entire Village destroyed to smoke and ashes.

​⁃A stark reminder that the state is drowning in the disease of communal hatred.

How long? how much longer will children have to flee, how much longer will the perpetrators of this walk free?

How many more villages have to burn?

How many more lives do we lose until we release who the real enemy is?

How much longer until we can all work to recover our Home?

I do not know where to start…

And I definitely do not know where to go from here,

But what I do know is that Resistance is necessary.

So, I must write, I must remind myself again and again to Rage, to Rage and to rage.

To rage against the systems that oppress Humanity, to rage against systems that pin us against each other,

to rage against systems that dismantle empathy,

To rage against the systems that allow arson to engulf the terrain.

To rage, to hope and to remember

In the midst of it all.

This War has taken from us all too much, 

What more do we have to lose?

I would like to end with Auden’s own ending lines to his long poem, “September 1, 1939” which marked the  beginning of World War II.

as a reminder that all we have are ourselves..

"All I have is a voice

To undo the folded lie, 

The romantic lie in the brain 

Of the sensual man in the street 

And the lie of Authority

Whose buildings grope the sky:

There is no such thing as the State

And no one exists alone;

Hunger allows no choice

To the citizen or the police;

We must love one another or die."

To write, is to be etched into history, 

To write well and right in the age of war, is a duty.