Elusive peace: In India’s Manipur, bombs and mortars are civilian weapons | Politics

Imphal, India – Every time 13-year-old Selina Mairembam tries to write or eat with her right hand, the pain and the scars remind her of the day she was nearly killed by a bomb.

She was knocked out instantly. When she woke up, there was blood everywhere. For a moment, she thought she was dead.

Talkative once, Selina now barely speaks. Holding out the jagged pieces of bomb shrapnel that tore through her arm, she whispers to me, “I’m always scared. I don’t want to be scared.”

Selina is the great-granddaughter of Mairembam Koireng Singh, the first chief minister of the northeastern Indian state of Manipur. On September 7, 2024, while she was helping a priest arrange a ritual for her grand-aunt’s death ceremony, a “big rocket” came out of nowhere. She remembers no flash, only the deafening sound – so loud she thought her ears had been blown off.

The improvised bomb struck the house of the former chief minister in the heart of Moirang town, near Loktak Lake, the largest freshwater lake in northeast India.

Selina survived with severe injuries, but the missile killed 72-year-old RK Rabei, a priest and event manager. His bloodied body was found by his daughter-in-law and granddaughter. Four-year-old Gianna Rajkumari often wakes up at night, screaming – haunted by the image of her grandfather’s mutilated body.

Palmei Houjellu, Gianna’s mother, was nine months pregnant at the time. The 35-year-old from Moirang had gone with her daughter to attend the ritual organised by her father-in-law.

Just minutes before the attack, Houjellu and Gianna had stepped out for a short five-minute trip home to fetch a few things for the ceremony. That saved them.

A day later, Houjellu gave birth to a baby boy. But even as she cradles new life, death still lingers in their home.

“My daughter saw her grandfather’s bloodied body,” she said. “She still wakes up screaming at night. She keeps asking, ‘Who killed Nana? Why?’ And I have no answer for her.”

“Did she deserve this?”

Hovjellu belongs to the Meitei community, the largest ethnic group in Manipur, a state devastated by a deadly ethnic conflict over the past two years. The violence was sparked by a dispute over an affirmative action measure. On April 14, 2023, the Manipur High Court directed the state government to recommend Scheduled Tribe status for the Meitei community – a decision later criticised by the Supreme Court.

In response, tribal communities that already had these benefits organised protest rallies on May 3, while the Meitei community held counter-rallies and counter-blockades. Clashes soon erupted between Kuki and Meitei groups near the border of Churachandpur and Bishnupur districts, followed by widespread arson and destruction. The conflict has never fully subsided – more than 260 people have been killed, and more than 65,000 have been displaced.

Amid growing public pressure and the threat of a vote of no confidence from the opposition Congress party in the state legislature, Chief Minister N Biren Singh – a footballer-turned-politician who is Meitei and has been accused of inflaming tensions in the state – resigned in February.

Like the bomb that struck Hovjellu’s father-in-law, a wide range of mortars, grenades, homemade rockets, and thousands of weapons with lakhs of rounds of ammunition have landed in the hands of warring communities over the past 20 months.

Security forces have managed to prevent new outbreaks of violence in recent weeks, and public anger has claimed Singh’s political scalp. But with hamlet after hamlet armed and the state’s credibility at an all-time low, military experts and local communities say Manipur is a tinderbox that could explode at any time, again.

‘Never happened before’

A senior security official who has witnessed the Manipur conflict since it first erupted in 2023 told Al Jazeera on the condition of anonymity:

“Within no time, right before our eyes, we saw a state slipping into an unprecedented conflict. We felt helpless because these are our own people.”

The official called it a failure of the state – marked by a lack of will and intent to act decisively.

“Two ethnic groups are virtually at war, and security forces are caught in the middle, trying to defuse tensions as intermediaries. Our priority has always been to prevent violence and maintain peace on the ground. But had the state taken a more decisive approach early on, so many weapons would not have fallen into civilian hands, and mass displacement could have been avoided.”

Major Digvijay Singh Rawat, another decorated Indian soldier belonging to the 21st Battalion of The Parachute Regiment (Special Forces), is the recipient of the Kirti Chakra – an award given for extraordinary courage and valour – for his time with the military in Manipur during the current conflict.

He corroborated the senior official’s account, saying he has never witnessed anything like what he has seen in Manipur. “Even the military avoids using mortar bombs in villages with civilians – even when armed rebels might be hiding there. It is a grave human rights violation [to use such weapons in civilian areas],” he said. “But in Manipur, we saw an unprecedented use of mortars, bombs, and all kinds of improvised explosives by civilians – powered by underground groups on both sides – without any fear.”

“This has never happened before in any part of the country – civilians launching this kind of war against each other.”

The bombs often didn’t kill as many people as bullets have, only because civilians did not know how to fire them with precision, he says. “But bombs flying in broad daylight did their job – they created grave fear,” Rawat says.

According to the state government, more than 6,000 arms, 600,000 rounds of ammunition, and more than 28,000 bombs and explosives – including 51mm mortars, 2-inch mortars, hand grenades, stun grenades, tear gas shells, picket grenades, and so on – were looted from police stations and state armouries in Imphal and the hills since the violence erupted.

So far, only 2,500 weapons, fewer than 3,000 explosives, and less than 40,000 rounds of ammunition have been recovered, including those surrendered in the past week. Most of these are single-barrel and double-barrel firearms, country-made weapons, and .303 rifles – not the more sophisticated weapons like AKs and INSAS rifles that were stolen. Security officials estimate that more than 3,000 looted weapons and hundreds of thousands of ammunition rounds still remain unaccounted for.

Many of the weapons recovered and surrendered since the conflict began are far more advanced than those looted from state armouries. These include M4s, M16s, sniper rifles, machineguns, and handguns smuggled from Myanmar and Bangladesh. However, neither side has surrendered the more sophisticated weapons they are known to possess.

Besides this, both sides also improvised their own local weapons and heavy arms. Kuki-Zo fighters have been found using improvised rockets made from galvanised iron and metal pipes, known as “pumpi”, while Meitei fighters have developed their own makeshift wheeled mortars.

The result: Civilians, armed with looted weapons and trained by fighter groups, have launched mortar and bomb attacks on each other. Villages were set on fire overnight. The bodies of civilians – including charred women, beheaded men, and children with their skulls crushed – lay scattered.

Al Jazeera has accessed videos of men – both Meitei and Kuki – cheering as they fired mortars and tested homemade rockets at each other. Security officials have verified the authenticity of these videos. Al Jazeera has also confirmed that many young Meitei and Kuki civilians died after their bombs and rockets exploded while they were launching them because they did not know how to fire them properly. Even in India’s northeast, which has a long history of ethnic violence, this – citizens using heavy arms against each other – is a first.

And no one has been spared.

‘This war was not worth it’

42-year-old LS Mangboi Lhungdim, a Kuki singer-songwriter from the town of Churachandpur, had never held a gun before the conflict broke out. Amid the fighting, he became a village volunteer and helped to transport essential supplies to the front line.

In August 2023, he left for the “frontline” (the unofficial border within the state where Meiteis and Kukis fought each other) near Khosabung village, between Churchandanpur and Bishnupur districts, about 25km (16 miles) from his home, on one such assignment. He never came back.

Lhungdim died at three in the morning on 31 August while being evacuated from Khosabung. Seanboi Vaiphei, the deputy superintendent of the Churachandpur district hospital, told us they did not have adequate resources to treat him in Churachandpur. So with the help of some civil society organisations, he was rushed to Aizawl, the capital of the neighbouring state of Mizoram, a 16-hour drive from the hill district. Tertiary care hospitals in Meitei-majority Imphal have been inaccessible for Kukis.

“He was hit by a mortar bomb. When we reached the hospital, my kids and I could not even recognise his face. My kids had to see his exploded body,” said Neimnilhing Lhungdim, his wife.

“This war was not worth it.”

Autopsies of victims accessed by Al Jazeera revealed injuries that experts say are clear indicators of the heavy weaponry being used in the conflict: deep splinter wounds with metal fragments embedded 5-6cm inside soft tissue; blast injuries causing complete loss of limbs; skulls shattered beyond recognition; internal bleeding in multiple organs, a sign of shockwave damage from explosions.

A senior official at a leading medical institute in Imphal confirmed that early in the conflict, staff started noticing “a shift in the type of bullet injuries” as they received “bodies with sniper and splinter wounds – used for shooting and killing from a much greater distance”.

On the other side of the border, a hospital official in Churachandpur, speaking on condition of anonymity, revealed that the medical facility had received bodies “with severe splinter injuries from bombs or mortars – something we had never encountered before”. Both officials requested anonymity because they are not authorised to speak to the media.

What’s worse, there’s little hope that victims will see justice. Many police complaints, seen by Al Jazeera, list the accused as “Kuki militants” or “Majority Meitei community and Arambai Tenggol” – a Meitei armed militia that has been accused of major excesses during the conflict – which the police say is as good as “unknown persons”.

This story of death by bombs spans Manipur.

Neikim, 55, lost her oldest son, Richard Hemkholun, to the conflict.

Richard, a political science graduate from the Indira Gandhi National Tribal University in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, died on the same day as LS Mangboi while serving as a village volunteer guarding Khoirentak Khunou village in Churachandpur district. His mother told us, “We had no other option but to make our son a village volunteer – not to kill, but to protect our people. The other side did the same.”

Today, after losing the only earning member of the family, Neikim works as a contractual labourer on a small piece of land with her husband in Churachandpur, who cannot walk properly, earning less than a dollar per day.

“I wish this war had never started. I wish the government had done something – anything,” Neikim said, as she wiped the dirt off her son’s college degree and the guitar he used to play.

‘No one won this war’

Amid this devastation, an audio tape leaked last August prompted a political uproar. In it, a voice that is purportedly that of Singh, the chief minister at the time, boasts about using bombs and asks security officials to use explosives covertly.

Singh, who belongs to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which rules both federally and in Manipur, has insisted that the tape is doctored, though an analysis by Truth Labs Forensic Services, a private nonprofit, said that comparisons with samples of Singh’s public speeches showed that there was a 93 percent match.

If the tape proves to be accurate, it would be a damning indictment of the complicity of Singh’s government in driving the conflict, experts say.

Al Jazeera sought a response from Sharda Devi, a BJP leader from Manipur, about the Truth Labs report on the tape, but she did not reply.

Meanwhile, following Singh’s resignation, the Modi government has imposed federal rule over the state of Manipur. Since then, armed fighters from both the Meitei and Kuki-Zo sides have surrendered some of their weapons, but most of them still remain unaccounted for. A 14-day ultimatum by the governor to voluntarily surrender weapons ends on March 6.

The fighters on both sides have pleaded for immunity from prosecution. But the state itself faces a grim reality: In most cases, there’s no record of who committed which crime. Was it a civilian-turned-armed village volunteer, an armed militia member, or a rebel from an underground group?

For families like Houjellu’s and Neimnilhing’s, the government’s steps towards establishing peace are too little, too late.

A frail 63-year-old Paulianthang Vaiphei, father of Pausondam Vaiphei – the third bombing death in Churachandpur – struggles to speak, his voice heavy with grief after losing his only son. Pausondam, just 29 years old, was a member of the Kangvai village council.

According to the First Information Report (FIR) filed at Churachandpur police station, he was killed in heavy shelling near Kangathei village on August 31.

“What stopped the government from acting sooner?” Paulianthang asks, his voice breaking. “If they had intended to really de-weaponise the state from day one, maybe we wouldn’t have seen this scale of violence and mass displacement. No one won this war. Only Manipur lost – its people, its peace, its future.”