A global body of the Thadou tribe from Manipur has condemned what it called death threats allegedly made by a Kuki insurgent group that had signed a ceasefire deal with the Centre and the state government. The Kuki National Front’s (KNF) threat to kill leaders of the Thadou tribe is a clear violation of the ground rules of the Suspension of Operations (SoO) agreement, the Thadou Community International (TCI) said in a statement.
A “historic” Thadou Convention was held in Assam’s Guwahati last week, where leaders and delegates of the Thadou tribe had passed a resolution and a declaration asserting the Thadou tribe’s distinct ethnic identity which also has its own language, culture, traditions, and history.
“Thadou is not Kuki, or underneath Kuki, or part of Kuki, but a separate, independent entity from Kuki… Thadou is one of the original 29 native/indigenous tribes of Manipur, India, that were all simultaneously and duly recognised as independent Scheduled Tribes of Manipur under the 1956 Presidential Order, Government of India,” the declaration had said.
In response, the insurgent group KNF in a statement said it was “angered” by the decisions taken at the Thadou Convention that Thadou was not part of Kuki.
“… For a tribe to declare that they are not Kuk-Zo is equal to saying they are a different people, like Tangkhul, Mao, Meitei, Pangal, etc. As we are currently still fighting a war, we don’t want to take extreme actions or kidnapping, death penalty, etc within the community,” the KNF said in the statement.
The TCI, which was one of the organisers of the Thadou Convention, in the statement alleged Kuki groups are dominated and run by Thadou-speaking people who have dissociated themselves from the Thadou tribe, but took up the “new fake tribe called Any Kuki Tribes (AKT)”.
AKTs was “fraudulently added to the list of Scheduled Tribes of Manipur in 2003 for political reasons. Kuki is not accepted by any of the non-Naga tribes in Manipur, except by AKTs,” the TCI said, adding the only Kuki that remains today is AKT.
“We would like to clarify the KNF statement where it states that for a tribe to declare that they are not Kuk-Zo is equivalent to saying they are a different people, like Tangkhul, Mao, Meitei, Pangal etc. The declaration of detachment and disowning of the colonial tag Kuki by Thadou is in fact equivalent to Thadou maintaining its distinct tribe status like the status of Tangkhul or any other distinct tribe,” the TCI said.
The KNF is a signatory of the SoO agreement. The ground rules say their personnel are to stay in designated camps and their weapons kept in locked storage, to be monitored regularly.
Sources in the TCI did not rule out approaching the Assam Rifles, the Ministry of Home Affairs, and the Manipur government to inform them of activities of the KNF that are in clear violation of the SoO agreement. They are also considering running a massive campaign to raise awareness about the Thadou tribe’s distinct ethnic identity, and to work for removing AKT from the Scheduled Tribes list, sources said.