KANGVAI, India (AP) — Zuan Vaiphei is armed and ready to kill. He is also ready to die.
Vaiphei spends most of his time behind the sandbag walls of a makeshift bunker, his fingers resting on the trigger of a 12-gauge shotgun. Some 1,000 yards ahead, among a field of tall green grass and wildflowers, the enemy, armed and ready, peers from the parapets of similar sandbag forts.
“The only thing on our minds is whether they will come towards us. Will they come and kill us? So if they happen to come with guns, we have to forget everything and protect ourselves,” says the 32-year-old, his voice barely audible amidst the deafening chirping of cicadas in the village of Kangvai, which lies in the foothills of India’s remote northeastern state of Manipur.
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Dozens of such fortifications mark one of the many front lines that are uncharted and nonetheless divide Manipur into two ethnic zones – between people from hill tribes and those from the plains below. There, in the midst of endless bamboo and oak groves, young men walk by with guns slung over their shoulders.
“Our mothers, our sisters, they fast for us and pray to God,” says Vaiphei, who is standing at the entrance to his bunker with a copy of the Bible next to him.
Two months ago, Vaiphei was teaching economics to students when simmering tensions between the two communities erupted in bloodshed so horrific that thousands of Indian troops dispatched to quell the unrest were all but paralyzed.
The two warring factions have formed armed militias, exposing the ethno-nationalist rifts that have long threatened to deepen instability in India’s troubled north-eastern region.
Tucked away in the mountains bordering Myanmar, Manipur was once ruled by a patchwork of kings and tribal alliances. It seems a different world from the rest of India, a culture heavily borrowed from East Asia. Manipur is also a state that has never fully reconciled itself to central rule, and some guerrilla groups are still trying to break away from India.
Historically, there have been occasional ethnic clashes between different groups, mostly consisting of the minority Christian Kukis and the predominantly Hindu Meiteis, who form a slim majority in the state. But no one was prepared for the killings, arson and outbursts of hatred that followed in May after the Meiteis demanded special status that would allow them to buy land in the hills populated by Kukis and other tribal groups, as well as a share of government jobs.
Police armories were looted. Within days, both sides were armed to wreak havoc.
Witnesses interviewed by The Associated Press described how angry mobs and armed gangs invaded villages and towns, burning down houses, massacring civilians and driving tens of thousands from their homes. More than 50,000 people have fled to overcrowded aid camps. Those who fought back were killed, sometimes beaten to death or beheaded, and the injured were thrown into raging fires, according to witnesses and others with firsthand knowledge of the events.
The deadly clashes, which the authorities conservatively estimate killed at least 120 people, continue despite the presence of the army. Isolated villages are still being riddled with gunfire. Vast swaths of land have turned into ghost towns, burned by fires so fierce that tin roofs have melted and buckled. Burned buildings and churches stare at the narrow dirt roads. In frontline quarters, women join night patrols with lit torches.
Manipur is India’s invisible war – barely visible on the country’s myriad TV news channels and newspapers, a conflict hidden behind a blanket internet shutdown that the government says has been used to fuel the violence by spreading disinformation and rumours. The internet ban has disrupted communications in Manipur, locking out reporters and leaving the state’s 3.7 million residents searching for a bit of information.
“It comes the closest to a civil war in any state in independent India,” said Sushant Singh, a senior fellow at the Center for Policy Research in India and an Indian Army veteran. He said the armed civilians were not organized as militant or terrorist groups, but “they are local people, people of one ethnicity fighting another ethnicity.”
The conflict has also divided state forces, with many defecting to their communities with their weapons and, in some cases, more sophisticated weapons such as snipers, light machine guns and mortars. A number of former army soldiers and police officers were shot by both factions.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose Bharatiya Janata party governs Manipur, has responded to the unrest with silence for nearly two months. Modi’s powerful Interior Minister, Amit Shah, visited the state in May and tried to broker peace between the two sides. Since then, state lawmakers – many of whom fled after their homes were torched by mobs – have converged in New Delhi to find a solution.
However, the state government has given assurances that Manipur is returning to normal. On June 25, Prime Minister N Biren Singh said the government and armed forces had “broadly brought the violence under control over the past week”. However, Singh’s visit to a front line on Sunday coincided with fresh clashes that have left three dead, officials said.
In a way, the bitter struggle between the two factions is fueled by deep-rooted issues that have been simmering for years.
Meiteis have long blamed the Kuki minority for the state’s rampant drug problems and accused them of harboring migrants from Myanmar. The government, made up mostly of Meiteis, also appears to be cracking down on Kukis after Singh claimed some of those involved in the recent clashes are “terrorists”.
However, India’s top military officer, General Anil Chauhan, who visited the state in May, took a different view, saying: “This particular situation in Manipur has nothing to do with counter-insurgency and is primarily a clash between two ethnic groups.”
Some Meiteis fear the hill tribes are using illegal drugs to fund a war meant to kill them. On the other hand, the Kukis, concerned for their security, now seek federal rule over the state and administrative autonomy for the community.
Such concerns gave way to violence on May 3 when clashes first erupted in Manipur’s Churachandpur district and soon spread to other parts of the state as wild mobs attacked village after village.
It reached the home of A. Ramesh Singh on May 4 in Phayeng, a predominantly Meitei village about 17 kilometers (10 miles) from the state capital, Imphal.
The day before, Singh had held a vigil outside his village, whose more than 200 residents expected hordes of kukis to descend from an adjacent hill. Singh, a former soldier, carried a licensed handgun, his son Robert Singh said.
On the night of the raid, Singh fired shots, some in the air and others at the crowd, but was hit in the leg. Wounded and unable to walk, he watched as his village was looted before being kidnapped along with four other people and dragged up the hills, his son said.
The entire village gathered in a nearby open area and prayed for the return of their neighbors.
“We didn’t know if he was dead, but we prayed. We’ve been praying for him to come back,” Robert, 26, said at his home one afternoon recently.
Robert joined in the search for his father, calling his name as they climbed the hill. Nobody answered.
The next day, Robert learned that his father’s body had been found in a grove. He was shot in the head.
“Please save us. “This is our last word to the world,” pleaded Robert, clasping his hands and having his head shaved in a sign of death.
Singh’s body was cremated according to Hindu rituals and the remains were buried in a nearby tomb. On a recent afternoon, his wife Lilapati Devi and Robert trudged up to pay her respects. As Singh’s grave became visible from afar, Devi began to howl and called out her husband’s name. “Are you at peace, my love?” she wailed.
The fear of the victims also echoes quietly in hundreds of aid camps where displaced Kukis – who have suffered most of the deaths and the destruction of homes and churches – are taking refuge.
Kim Neineng, 43, and her husband had enjoyed peace in Lailampat village for years. He worked the fields. She sold the products in the market. Love welded them together.
On the afternoon of May 5, Neineng went outside her home to check for noise. Out of breath, she stormed in and told her husband what she had seen: a Meitei mob, many of them armed, had entered her village, shouting and cursing at them.
Neineng’s husband knew what it meant. He asked her to flee with her four children and not look back, promising that he would take care of the cattle and their home. She quickly packed her things and ran to a nearby relief camp.
A day later, more of her neighbors arrived at the shelter and told Neineng what had happened to her husband.
When the mob reached their house, the husband tried to reason with them, but they didn’t listen. They soon began beating him with iron bars. More armed men came and chopped off his legs. Then they picked him up and threw him into the raging fire that had already engulfed his house.
Neighbors found his charred body on the burned ground.
“They tortured him and treated him like an animal with no humanity whatsoever. When I think about his last moments, I can’t understand what he must have felt,” Neineng said, barely able to utter words.
No one in Neineng’s relief camp wants to return home. But she says she would still like to revisit the site where her husband was killed one last time.
“Maybe I’ll just feel his presence. So that his soul can find peace,” she said.
Manipur’s war and ugliness represent horror for the victims and mean something deeper: this remote region is slowly crumbling.
Two months into the conflict, hundreds of roadblocks and sandbag bunkers line the highways in the torn country of Manipur. Most of these imaginary borders are controlled by the warring communities. Those left unattended were taken over by Indian forces using binoculars to peer on either side, where armed gangs in camouflage were spinning motorbikes.
Surveillance drones sometimes circle high above the checkpoints. Belonging to the wrong ethnic group cannot pass. Convoys carrying food and other essential supplies are escorted by the army. A curfew applies.
Some villagers have built bamboo fortifications around their houses and carved the edges in the shape of spears to keep mobs out. Others have painted their ethnicity on the doors of their homes for fear of being burned for mistaken identity.
Gunfire is followed by long pauses as the armed opponents pause to smoke and drink beer.
Still, there are signs things could get worse as both sides vie for control of or retake villages – a guerrilla tactic that has sometimes resulted in deadly gunfights, the use of mortar shells and, in one case, a car bombing in which three people were critically injured.
Both Kukis and Meiteis ask questions they thought they would never ask: Should they take up arms and fight too?
Vaiphei, the economics teacher who took up arms, is certain it will be a long struggle. For everyone killed, someone else will take their place, he says.
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Associated Press journalists Altaf Qadri and Shonal Ganguly contributed to this report.