TFM Editorial
The People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) report, “Independent People’s Tribunal On The Ongoing Ethnic Conflict in Manipur” released on August 20, 2025, while dense with testimonies and detailed accounts of atrocities, ultimately frames the Manipur conflict through a narrow ethnocentric lens. Its insistence on reading the violence primarily as an outcome of ethnic antagonism between Meitei and Kuki-Zo communities fails to interrogate the material base of the conflict. From a progressive perspective, this is a serious shortcoming. Ethnicity here is treated as a primordial, self-explanatory cause, rather than as a super-structural manifestation of deeper class and economic contradictions unfolding in Northeast India. The reduction of violence to communal binaries eclipses the more pressing issue of class re-alignments, dispossessions, and uneven development in Northeast India in the post globalization period.
The PUCL Report on the Manipur conflict provides an exhaustive account of violence, state complicity, and the suffering of survivors. Yet, from the standpoint of a political economy approach, the report remains analytically constrained. Its interpretative framework is largely liberal–humanitarian, foregrounding ethnicity as the central explanatory category while neglecting the material contradictions of class formation, capital accumulation, and illicit political economies that structure conflict in Manipur.
Ethnocentrism and the Absence of Class
The PUCL frames the Manipur crisis as a zero-sum antagonism between Meitei and Kuki-Zo communities, thereby reproducing what has been conventionally described as the “fetishism of community”. This approach risks naturalizing ethnicity as an immutable force, whereas in political economy approach, ethnic divisions are better understood as super-structural expressions of underlying material relations.
In Manipur, the last three decades of neo-liberal globalization have produced new dynamics of class mobility. There is a visible emergent middle class tied to education, migration, and state patronage on the one hand, and a growing mass of precarious workers and subsistence peasants on the other. By bypassing this political economy of uneven development, the report seems to have collapsed historical materialism into ethno-culturalist identity explanation.
Globalization, Dependency, and Crumbs of Global Capital
It would indeed help to acknowledge how Manipur, a tiny state in Northeast India has been unwittingly integrated into global circuits of unbridled capital and illegal imports that have intensified contradictions. Far from being an isolated ethnic frontier, Manipur has been remade by cross-border flows of drugs, small arms, and informal trade linked to the Golden Triangle economy. Here, crony capitalism—the alleged queer nexus of political elites, security institutions, and ethnic militias—functions as a mode of accumulation. Resources are extracted through corruption, illicit taxation, and land appropriation, while the costs of this accumulation (addiction, displacement, and impoverishment) are borne by the working poor across communities. The PUCL report acknowledges the drug trade but treats it as an external pathology, rather than what can be called “primitive accumulation by extra-economic means” that underwrites elite power in the Northeast.
Civil Liberties and Right Winged Tendencies
The Report’s normative foundation is civil liberties, articulated through the liberal rights tradition. While crucial, this emphasis lacks what Antonio Francesco Gramsci, an Italian philosopher calls a “war of position” against reactionary forces. By uncritically affirming ethnic community rights, the PUCL risks legitimizing what has been termed “passive revolutions”: moments when popular mobilisations are co-opted by elite, authoritarian or even right-winged projects. In Manipur, movements for ethnic rights movements have often functioned as vehicles for ethno-nationalist groups. This means a proto-fascist politics, which paradoxically deepen authoritarian state power rather than advance substantive democracy. See how Manipur is now literally controlled by New Delhi mandarins after one of the most traumatic violence had taken place between 2023 and now.
An alternative position should insists that true democracy—as envisaged in the secular, cross-ethnic solidarities of working people—is not reducible to the rights of highly divisive ethnic blocs but must be rooted in struggles against wanton exploitation, militarisation, and comprador elites.
Need for Materialist Reading of Violence in Manipur
The PUCL Report is invaluable as documentation of atrocities, but it falls short as analysis. The Report’s ethnocentric framing obscures the class antagonisms, dependency relations, and illicit accumulation regimes that drive conflict in Manipur. A correct class reading re-positions the crisis: not as an inevitable clash of ethnicities, but as a conjuncture where global capitalism, external aided local cronyism, and illicit economies intersect to devastate the lives of the marginalized classes. Unless rights discourses are tethered to a political economy of emancipation, civil liberties risk becoming what has been described as abstract formalism that leaves intact the material basis of oppression. Let us not give a chance to classic elitist analytical tools designed to divide the marginalised classes within the so called ethnic communities.
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