How Valley Leaders and Bureaucrats Sold Out Their People

The ethnic carnage that has torn Manipur apart since May 2023—with over 300 lives lost, thousands displaced, and communities segregated into valley and hill enclaves—is not merely a sudden clash of identities. 

It is the bitter harvest of decades of bureaucratic and legislative decisions that systematically marginalized the Meitei community, confining them to a shrinking valley while extending protections to hill areas. 

These decisions, often made in the Manipur Secretariat and the Legislative Assembly during the critical post-merger decades, were not imposed solely by distant Delhi bureaucrats. They were enabled, supported, and even championed by Meitei-dominated governments and elected representatives who held sway in a valley-heavy Assembly.

From 1949 onward, the state political theatre was overwhelmingly controlled, mostly by Meitei leaders. The 60-member Assembly has always allocated 40 seats to the valley (predominantly Meitei) and only 20 to the hills, ensuring numerical dominance for Meitei MLAs and Chief Ministers, for decades. 

Yet, during the formative years of the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond—when key classifications of hill areas, district reorganizations, and tribal protections were formalized—these leaders failed spectacularly to safeguard Meitei interests. Instead, they acquiesced to or actively facilitated measures that entrenched the hill-valley divide, restricted Meitei land rights, and perpetuated a system where the meitei community was progressively boxed into 7-8% of the state's total land.

Even today, in late 2025, several Kuki-Zo organizations and their leaders persist in demanding a separate Union Territory equipped with full legislative powers. They routinely cite the 1969 district reorganizations and the expansive 1972 definitions of "Hill Areas" under the Presidential Order as irrefutable evidence of a longstanding, officially recognized distinct administrative and territorial status for the hills—one that, in their view, justifies permanent separation from valley-dominated governance.

This perspective, however, glosses over the critical legal framework provided by the Manipur Hill Areas (Acquisition of Chiefs' Rights) Act, 1967, which, if properly enforced, would have introduced uniform land governance statewide, eliminated hereditary chieftainship, and undermined the foundational arguments for viewing hill regions as inherently separate entities warranting autonomous or divided administration. 

The ultimate responsibility for allowing this Act to be sabotaged and buried lies squarely with successive Meitei-dominated governments and elected representatives who, despite holding overwhelming legislative power in a valley-skewed Assembly of 40 valley seats against 20 hill seats, chose political expediency over assertive integration and equity.

After the Territorial Assembly passed the Bill in early 1967, the Chief Commissioner reserved it for Presidential consideration as required under Section 25 of the Government of Union Territories Act, 1963, and forwarded it with a positive recommendation to the Ministry of Home Affairs on February 28, 1967. 

The detailed chronology of the 1967 Act's passage and subsequent suppression reveals a meticulously followed legal process that was abruptly derailed under suspicious circumstances, highlighting the depth of internal resistance and elite complicity. 

This 1967 Act's enactment followed every constitutional requirement with precision. Passed by the Territorial Assembly, it was reserved for Presidential consideration under Section 25 of the Government of Union Territories Act, 1963. The Chief Commissioner forwarded it with recommendation on February 28, 1967, to the Ministry of Home Affairs. After consultations and clearances from the Planning Commission, Ministry of Law, and Department of Agriculture, Home Minister Vidya Charan Shukla recommended it on June 12, 1967. 

Also Read: Why the Army Remains Our Only Hope for Lasting Peace in Manipur?

The President assented on June 14, 1967. The next day, June 15, the Ministry returned two authenticated copies to the Chief Commissioner. On June 20, 1967, the Secretariat-Law Department notified the Act and published it in the Manipur Gazette Extraordinary No. 61-E-50—bringing it into immediate force.Months later, on September 29, 1967, the Ministry telegraphed for ten copies; Manipur complied on September 30, with receipt confirmed October 8. Everything appeared routine.

This meticulous adherence to protocol exposes that the Act was fully and properly enacted, ready for operationalization.The derailment came swiftly and dramatically during a narrow window of political instability. Following the resignation of the Speaker of the Manipur Legislative Assembly, President's Rule—often described in local accounts as an "animated suspension" of democratic processes—was imposed from October 25, 1967, to February 18, 1968, lasting exactly 116 days. 

Almost immediately upon the imposition of central rule, approximately 300 Kuki chiefs orchestrated a highly visible and coordinated protest campaign against the Act, framing it as an assault on their traditional authority. In a move that remains extraordinary and unexplained to this day, the government authorities seized and removed all available copies of the Act from circulation, ensuring that no printed versions remained accessible in any administrative department or section of the Manipur government. 

This effective erasure from official records meant that subsequent administrations could claim ignorance or unavailability when pressed on implementation. Compounding the suspicion of targeted sabotage, the Home Secretary of the Government of Manipur during this critical period was T. Kipgen, a member of the Kuki community, whose position would have placed him at the heart of internal decision-making regarding law and order responses to the protests. 

From that moment onward, the 1967 Act vanished into obscurity, never operationalized despite its binding status, leaving Manipur as the sole Northeastern state where hereditary chieftainship endures into December 2025—a system that has facilitated unchecked village expansions often linked to demographic shifts and resource disputes fueling the current conflict.

The true transformative power of the Manipur Hill Areas (Acquisition of Chiefs' Rights) Act, 1967 lies in Section 19, which extends Parts I and II of the Manipur Land Revenue and Land Reforms (MLR&LR) Act, 1960 to the hill areas through a series of precise amendments that took effect on June 20, 1967. 

Most crucially, it deleted the phrase “except the hill areas thereof” from Section 1(2) of the MLR&LR Act, thereby removing the longstanding exclusion that had kept modern land reforms confined to the valley.

 Additionally, it redefined "Hill Areas" in clause (j) of Section 2 to mean only those areas declared as such before the commencement of the 1967 Act—explicitly tying the definition to the Gazette notification dated May 10, 1963 (published May 15, 1963, under No. 19/3/62/Pol).Under this binding 1963 classification:
Hill Areas comprised solely: (1) Tamenglong Sub-Division, (2) Ukhrul Sub-Division, and (3) Mao Sadar Sub-Division excluding the Sadar Hills Development Block.
Valley Areas included: (1) Imphal West, (2) Imphal East, (3) Thoubal, (4) Bishnupur, (5) Churachandpur, (6) Jiribam, (7) Tengnoupal, and (8) the Sadar Hills Development Block in Mao Sadar Sub-Division.
These amendments were accompanied by resident-friendly safeguards, such as continued access to timber, firewood, and other natural products for domestic and agricultural use, ensuring the extension of reforms did not unduly disrupt local livelihoods.

These changes were reaffirmed upon Manipur's attainment of full statehood through the Manipur (Adaptation of Laws) Order, 1972, and remain legally binding today, as the subsequent Manipur Legislative Assembly (Hill Areas Committee) Order, 1972 contained no clause superseding the earlier legislation.

By sidelining the 1967 Act, subsequent administrative actions—beginning with the 1969 district reorganization (Gazette order dated November 12, 1969) and culminating in the 1972 Hill Areas Committee Order—introduced an expansive and arbitrary redefinition of "Hill Areas" that encompassed approximately 92 percent of Manipur's total land area. 

This included pulling southern sub-divisions such as Chandel, Chakpikarong, and Tengnoupal out of the Central district and designating entire directional revenue districts (North, East, West, South) as protected hill zones. 

This reclassification lacks any rational basis in geological mapping, physical topography, or ethnographic consistency, and stands in direct contradiction to the amended MLR&LR Act as modified by the 1967 legislation.

The current practice of relying on the 1972 definition for imposing land ownership restrictions on non-tribals and for constituting the Hill Areas Committee is, therefore, legally infructuous and unsustainable. 

The HAC's composition—comprising all MLAs whose constituencies lie "wholly or partly" in hill areas—suffers from a fundamental defect due to the absence of any clear explanation or criteria for the phrase "wholly or partly," rendering its structure unenforceable under strict legal scrutiny.

Furthermore, Meitei villages established in what are now designated hill districts prior to the 1949 Merger Agreement retain grandfathered rights. These pre-existing settlements are unaffected by the hill exclusions in the MLR&LR Act, 1960, or by the protective provisions of Article 371C, preserving historical continuity that later expansive classifications cannot retroactively erase.

This suppression directly enabled the later administrative shifts that Kuki-Zo groups now invoke to justify separation. By ignoring the 1967 Act's extension of the Manipur Land Revenue and Land Reforms Act, 1960, to hill areas—with its fixed reference to the narrower 1963 hill definitions that explicitly classified Churachandpur, Tengnoupal, and other southern zones as valley—the 1969 district reorganization and the 1972 Hill Areas Committee Order were allowed to impose arbitrary, expansive boundaries covering over 90 percent of the state's territory. 

Unfortunately, Valley leaders, beginning from CM Mairembam Koireng Singh in 1960s, Mohammed Alimuddin in the early 1970s to Okram Ibobi Singh in 2000s never challenged this contradiction or demanded enforcement of the 1967 precedence, despite their legislative majority. Their silence—whether born of national party pressures, fear of tribal electoral backlash, or narrower personal calculations—amounted to a generational betrayal that confined the Meitei community to an overcrowded valley while granting sweeping protections elsewhere.

Early post-merger leadership in the transitional union territory phase failed to anticipate how inaction on unifying reforms would jeopardize long-term Meitei interests. The state administration oversaw the conception and passage of the 1967 Act aimed at democratizing hill land and extending MLR&LR provisions using narrower 1963 definitions. 

However, it did not press aggressively for operational notifications or counter emerging protests, allowing enforcement opportunities to slip away during subsequent central rule when the Act's copies were seized. This early passivity—perhaps stemming from fragile alliances or focus on immediate stability—established a pattern of prioritizing short-term harmony over confronting entrenched hill systems, indirectly entrenching dual governance that confined the majority community to limited valley space, consequences evidently unforeseen at the time.

Successive coalition governments in the early 1970s, tasked with consolidating new state institutions, coincided with the 1972 Hill Areas Committee Order that expansively redefined protected territories to cover over 90 percent of the land, overriding the still-binding 1967 framework. Despite numerical advantages, these administrations did not contest the central order or reconcile it with dormant unifying reforms. 

Prioritizing coalition survival through accommodations without reciprocal integration demands allowed Article 371C mechanisms to reinforce separation rather than function as safeguards within a cohesive state—a shortsighted choice during statehood's infancy that entrenched imbalances and sown resentment for future generations.

The most extended period of such inaction occurred under prolonged Congress rule under Okram Ibobi Singh, from the early 2000s to 2017, when a single administration enjoyed unprecedented stability and multiple full terms. This regime, nonetheless deepened divisions through decisions favoring political calculus over reconciliation. 

His decisions actively exacerbated the hill-valley divide. In 2008, his government passed the Third Amendment to the Hill Areas District Councils Act, explicitly aligning definitions with the expansive 1972 Order and solidifying non-tribal land restrictions without invoking the 1967 Act's precedence. 

Again, in late 2016, months before elections, Congress government created seven new districts—including hill ones like Kangpokpi, Pherzawl, Noney, Kamjong, and Tengnoupal—ostensibly for efficiency but widely seen as vote-bank engineering to fragment tribal blocs. This provoked prolonged Naga blockades and intensified mistrust. Throughout his long tenure, marked by allegations of valley favoritism, Ibobi never operationalized the 1967 Act to democratize hill governance or clarify pre-merger Meitei foothill rights. 

Another blunder under Okram Ibobi Singh was that controversial re-inclusion of "Any Kuki Tribes" in the state's Scheduled Tribes list in 2003—via the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Orders (Amendment) Act, 2002—despite longstanding concerns from the Thadou community, the largest recognized tribe in Manipur, that such a vague umbrella category would enable misuse, identity confusion, and potential exploitation by non-indigenous claimants. 

Over nearly six decades since the suppression of the 1967 Act, neither elected representatives nor local bureaucrats—many of whom proudly claim to be "sons of the soil"—have taken any meaningful steps to revive this dormant law. Its enforcement would have democratized hill governance by abolishing hereditary chieftainship and extended modern land reforms while clarifying historical Meitei foothill rights dating back to pre-merger times. Instead, successive valley-dominated administrations allowed the Meitei community to become progressively confined to a shrinking valley, hemmed in by expansive and arbitrary hill protections.

This prolonged inaction stemmed from a mix of party loyalty to national high commands in Delhi, fear of alienating tribal votes crucial for Lok Sabha elections, and, in some cases, narrower personal or political interests. Such shortsightedness blinded leaders to the gradual strangulation of Meitei living space and the mounting resentment it bred. 

Today, that resentment has erupted into armed segregation, entrenched mistrust, and vocal demands for territorial separation—consequences that could have been averted had the 1967 Act been honored and implemented as originally intended.

While elected Meitei leaders and the valley elite in the Secretariat and Assembly hesitated, compromised, and often subordinated local unity to national party directives from Delhi, ordinary Meiteis consistently displayed remarkable patriotism and resilience. In 1965, the Hunger Marchers faced lethal police firing yet persisted in demanding accountability amid severe food shortages. In the 1980s, students and civil society organizations risked their lives in the anti-foreigner movements to safeguard indigenous identity against perceived demographic threats. 

Similarly, the hard-won inclusion of Manipuri in the Eighth Schedule in 1992 was achieved through relentless grassroots agitations, hunger strikes, and cultural mobilization by common citizens, not through proactive initiatives from the Assembly or its leaders. These episodes highlight a stark contrast: the people's unwavering commitment to Manipur's integrity versus the elite's prolonged inaction on unifying reforms.. 

These grassroots triumphs prove that the Meitei people were never weak or lacking in resolve—the fatal weakness lay in our elected representatives who held power but failed to wield it for unity.

However, amid this despair, a constitutional and legal solution exists—one that has lain dormant for nearly six decades: full enforcement of the Manipur Hill Areas (Acquisition of Chiefs' Rights) Act, 1967. Had this Act been operationalized from its official commencement on June 20, 1967, Manipur today would likely have uniform land laws, abolished hereditary chieftainship, and a far less rigid hill-valley administrative divide. 

In essence, the 1967 Act provides a pre-existing, constitutionally sound framework for equitable land governance across Manipur—one that successive administrations have chosen to ignore at the state's peril. Reviving it offers the clearest path to dismantling the artificial divisions that sustain today's conflict. It also offers the most viable path to reconciliation and unity.

The Pandora's box was opened not by external forces alone but by internal betrayal from those entrusted with power. Common Meiteis fought valiantly for their land and identity; it is time their leaders—past and present—match that courage by correcting historical wrongs and choosing unity over division. Only then can Manipur emerge whole from the ashes of conflict.