Myanmar people seeking shelter in India’s northeastern Manipur state have been scapegoated for local bouts of ethnic conflict, in contrast to the largely warm reception in neighbouring Mizoram state.
By ANT PWEH AUNG | FRONTIER
Daw Thandar Soe has lived as a refugee in a village in India’s Manipur state for over two and a half years.
A staunch supporter of the National League for Democracy, the 50-year-old had been targeted by the military regime in her native Tamu Township, bordering Manipur in Myanmar’s northwestern Sagaing Region, for her role in the party’s 2020 general election campaign. The NLD went on to trounce the military’s proxy party, prompting the armed forces to seize power in February 2021 on spurious grounds of electoral fraud.
Soldiers arrived at her home village to arrest her at around noon on December 20, 2021, Thandar Soe recounted to Frontier in a telephone interview, asking to be identified by a pseudonym for security reasons. Fortunately, she saw them coming. Leaving everything behind, she fled on a motorcycle and crossed the Myanmar-India border into Manipur.
When she first arrived in the Manipur village where she now lives, there were only three Myanmar refugees, including herself. The village head arranged temporary accommodation for her in an unoccupied house.
Some of those early arrivals in Manipur were able to rent houses and apartments in villages and towns. As vacant properties filled and more people kept arriving from across the border, the Manipur government declined to provide them with fresh shelters, or to grant them permission to build temporary housing.
However, some village-level authorities near the border were willing to bend the rules, giving the new arrivals permission to build makeshift huts. In a forest near the village where Thandar Soe lives, more than 200 refugees now occupy 68 huts with bamboo matting and thatched roofs. The settlers came not just from Tamu, but also from cities and towns in central Myanmar.
Thandar Soe said many refugees suffer from skin diseases and a lack of clean drinking water, but can access healthcare from mobile teams run by the Burma Refugee Committee-Kabaw Valley. The organisation was formed by a coalition of elected Myanmar parliamentarians and NLD party members, as well as military officers, public school teachers and state healthcare professionals who left their posts to join the Civil Disobedience Movement against the 2021 coup.
U Thang Sei, who was elected in 2020 to represent Tamu Township in Myanmar’s upper house of parliament and now serves as chair of the refugee committee, told Frontier that Indian NGOs used to provide food aid to refugees in Manipur, who number more than 8,000 according to the United Nations.
He said the aid stopped when conflict erupted in May last year between Meitei Hindus living in the Imphal Valley, who form the majority in Manipur, and the Christian Kuki community from the surrounding hills, over an affirmative action controversy. The conflict, which has seen phases of violence since then, has left over 220 people dead and displaced about 60,000.
Besides diminishing food aid, the conflict has also turned the refugees into political scapegoats. Although Thandar Soe is ethnic Bamar, many of them are Chin, with close ethnic ties to the Kukis of Manipur, who have provided them with aid out of solidarity. The state authorities, however, largely come from the opposing Meitei community and view the new arrivals with suspicion.
The Manipur government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, has complained about the “large number of illegal migrants” from Myanmar and claimed that the violence between the Meitei and the Kuki “was fuelled by influential illegal poppy cultivators and drug lords from Myanmar settling in Manipur”.
Some, including Manipur’s chief minister, N Biren Singh, have overtly aligned the problems with ethnicity. “My government wants to cull out the illegal immigrants who are involved in drug trafficking and terrorism,” Singh said in an interview with India Today. “The fact that the illegal immigrants belong to the Kuki community doesn’t make all Kukis bad.”
Because it’s unclear who exactly is a “good” or “bad” migrant, Singh’s rhetoric alarms refugees like Thandar Soe. “We are in a dangerous position,” she said. “The fear is that we might be caught between Manipur’s authorities and local armed groups.” Some of these armed groups are from the Kuki community, which puts the refugees under even greater suspicion.
‘Living in constant terror’
“None of the allegations made by the Manipur chief minister about the refugees are true,” said Thang Sei of the refugee committee, adding that Singh was unjustly “accusing and blaming us for the conflict between Kukis and Meiteis in the state.”
Thang Sei explained that after the ethnic conflict began, the Manipur government tightened restrictions on Myanmar refugees, refusing entry for some and arresting others who were already in India. It is also targeting refugees in a biometric registration drive.
Kim Aye Aye is one refugee who has suffered from the hardening measures. The 41-year-old Kuki woman, who also asked to be identified by a pseudonym to protect her safety, was a member of the Tamu Township Education Department who joined the CDM after the coup. She fled Tamu town with her husband and five children on May 6, 2021, due to armed clashes in the area, she told Frontier by phone. The family found sanctuary in a village in Manipur near the border, where the Kuki headman allowed them to build a temporary hut.
She said more than 300, mostly Kuki, refugees now occupy nearly 80 such huts in the village. However, the settlement was stormed early in the morning of January 16, 2022, by Indian soldiers and Meitei militiamen, who called through loudspeakers for all male refugees to come out from their huts. “If not, we will shoot you,” they warned.
They then arrested 85 of the male refugees, alleging they were resistance fighters from Myanmar. Kim Aye Aye’s husband was away from the village at that time, working as a carpenter in Moreh, the border town opposite Tamu. However, her elder brother, who had fled from Myanmar later in 2021, was in the village and among those arrested. She said none of them were resistance fighters, but just civilians fleeing conflict back home. They were all sent to Imphal Central Prison, where 53 remain – including the elder brother.
Shaken by the raid, the remaining refugees fled the village for a time. “For over a month, our community hid in the forest, fearing further raids,” she said. “The harsh conditions took a toll on us, especially the children. We had to silence their cries to avoid detection, living in constant terror of being captured.”
India for Myanmar, a post-coup campaign group formed by individuals and organisations from both countries, says a total of 211 Myanmar refugees have been imprisoned in Manipur and the neighbouring state of Assam since the 2021 coup. Of these prisoners, more than 130 continue to languish behind bars.
“Although some refugees have served their jail terms, the prison authorities have not released them,” said Salai Dokhar, who co-founded India for Myanmar, adding that the inmates were being taken advantage of.
“Jail authorities in Manipur and elsewhere are behaving like black marketeers, exploiting the refugees for money. They charge them even for phone calls to their families, which are officially allowed once a week.” Frontier could not independently confirm these allegations.
But despite the conditions, many of the prisoners dread release because it means deportation to Myanmar, where conflict continues to rage and junta authorities are on the lookout for dissidents. On May 2, Chief Minister Singh announced on social media that 77 detained “illegal immigrants” from Myanmar would be deported in a “first phase”.
On June 16, 66 prisoners from Myanmar began a hunger strike at the Imphal jail to protest their planned deportation into the hands of the junta. The strikers refused their catered meals and other provisions, subsisting only on the vegetables they grew at a garden in the jail. Some of them got very ill from the lack of nutrition, said Salai Dokhar.
India for Myanmar announced on July 3 that the detainees had agreed to temporarily suspend the hunger strike after 18 days while awaiting the results of negotiations. The jail authorities agreed to request the Indian government that the prisoners be released within India and allowed to return to Myanmar in a manner of their choosing. Frontier was unable to confirm by press time whether any breakthrough had been achieved.
A Mizo welcome
In contrast, authorities in the neighbouring Indian state of Mizoram have welcomed refugees, even pushing back at attempts by the Indian central government to restrict or expel them. The state borders Myanmar’s Chin State, where most of Mizoram’s over 40,000 refugees come from, and its government is led by members of the Mizo ethnic group which, like the Kuki community, is closely related to the Chin.
Ten Myanmar refugees in Mizoram told Frontier that state officials scrutinise and record the personal information of each Myanmar refugee that arrives there. However, they have also provided temporary shelters to the new arrivals, who then receive aid from local Mizo volunteer groups.
Joseph, a Chin Christian pastor, fled Chin’s war-torn Matupi Township on May 2 with his wife and four children, prompted by warnings from a local armed resistance group that war was coming to their town. They had to abandon their home and 10 acres of farmland, with no one to manage it in their absence.
The family travelled for five days before crossing into Mizoram. Indian officials at the border gate documented their personal details and intended destination, before granting them permission to travel to Sihhmui village, where some of their relatives lived.
“Fear of imminent death was a constant companion back in Myanmar,” Joseph recounted. “Here in Mizoram, that fear has vanished. We can move freely without restrictions imposed by the state government.”
The village contains two camps where the Mizoram government has built more than 100 huts and provided electricity and drinking water to just under 500 refugees. U Thang Kim, who leads one of the camps, told Frontier that most of the inhabitants came from Matupi.
However, he said the help provided by state authorities has its limits. The supply of electricity and clean water to the camps is unreliable, and refugees have few job opportunities or ways of getting food outside of the limited handouts. Some of them therefore struggle to pay for their children’s education, which costs 1,200 rupees (US$14.30) a month per student at the local high school.
Free movement in doubt
Besides the effect on refugees, India’s response to the post-coup influx could also reshape the lives of communities living either side of the border.
In 2018, the Indian government, as part of its Act East policy, implemented the Free Movement Regime, allowing residents along the 1,643 kilometre India-Myanmar border to travel visa-free up to 16km within each other’s territory. The agreement was a boon to communities like the Chin or Kuki, as well as the Naga, who historically live either side of the border, and it helped to boost local trade.
In January, however, India’s home minister, Amit Shah, said the government was “reconsidering India’s FMR agreement with Myanmar and will soon end the free movement into India”.
“Indian authorities say they are shutting down the FMR because of the trafficking of weapons, narcotic drugs and people from Myanmar through the forests on the border,” Thang Sei said. “But the Manipur authorities mostly want to stop the growing influx of Myanmar refugees. They are afraid they will settle in their territory permanently and not return to Myanmar.”
However, Salai Dokhar said the FMR had been suspended during the COVID-19 pandemic and had not been reintroduced in Manipur because of the Meitei-Kuki conflict.
At the same time, opposition from border-based communities has seemingly delayed the formal scrapping of the regime. Objections have been particularly strong in Mizoram because of the Mizo-Chin connection.
To accompany the planned ending of the FMR, Shah also said in January that the India-Myanmar border would soon be “fenced”. He followed up on February 6 by posting on X that Modi’s government is “committed to building impenetrable borders”.
“It has decided to construct a fence along the entire 1643-kilometer-long Indo-Myanmar border,” he wrote, adding that a 10km stretch in Moreh, Manipur, had already been fenced.
Thang Sei confirmed to Frontier that the fencing in Moreh town has been lengthened from about 5km to more than 11km since 2021. However, given the severity of the terrain and the remoteness of some areas along the border, building the entire fence would be a nearly impossible task that, even if successful, would take years to complete.
But regardless of Manipur state policy and the future of the FMR, events back in Myanmar prevent Thandar Soe from safely returning home and resuming her old life.
Before fleeing Myanmar, she owned a home and a grocery shop stocked with goods worth about K50 million ($10,000 at the market exchange rate). In June 2022, clashes between the regime troops and pro-democracy People’s Defence Forces resulted in the seizure and burning of her grocery store by members of a pro-junta militia. The militia now controls her village, and she has heard that some of its members are even residing in her house.
Thandar Soe said that if she had to return to Myanmar, she would move to an area across the border where armed resistance groups are strong.
“I’ll move to Khampat south of Tamu town, where PDFs are in control,” she said, referring to a Sagaing town bordering Chin that was seized by resistance groups in November last year. “The PDFs are fighting for our liberation. But if I go to Khampat, I might be killed by a bomb dropped from an airplane. Whether I die will be out of my hands.”
Likewise, Kim Aye Aye said, “I am longing for my home in Tamu”, but she feels that any safe return “depends on the success of the revolution”.
“Uncertainty about the future fills my nights with sorrow and despair,” she said. “Unable to provide for my five children, including sending them to school, I am overwhelmed by helplessness.”
