The Führer fiddles while Manipur burns
The inaction of the central government, they believe, only proved its complicity and confirmed their suspicions. Professor Kham Khan Suan Hausing, head of the department of political science at the University of Hyderabad, shared similar suspicions of complicity with Sudha Ramachandran, South Asia editor of The Diplomat.
He recalled that in October 2022, the chief minister inaugurated the Chandrakirti Memorial Park on the Indo–Myanmar border at the very same site where the Zo chief Go Khaw Thang was ‘treacherously’ captured before being killed in Imphal in 1872 while in the custody of the Meitei monarch Chandrakirti.
Tribal land around the Chivu Salt Lake (in Tonjang village on the Indo–Myanmar border) was also acquired and declared a ‘protected’ site. The state government claimed this was the place where Thangjing, a Meitei god, was intermittently sighted. Similar sacralisation projects were implemented in the Koubru hills in Kangpokpi district by invoking Mount Koubru as a laipham (the seat of the Meitei god Lainingtho).
