Contesting Territorial Claims: Struggle for the Promised Land

Abstract

Manipur, literally “the land of Jewels”, the last frontier of the Indic civilization in the east, lay traumatized with armed conflicts. It has caught up in triangular conflicts, conflict between the state and non-state actors, the conflict among the non-state actors, and conflict between the relative major ethnic groups of the state.  The conflict that began as civilizational crisis, divided ethnically by the colonial rule and idealized politically by struggle for self-determination has at the end, boiled down to struggle for territorial claims, the Meiteis struggle to preserve the Promised Land of the Hindus, challenged by the Naga’s Greater Nagaland or Nagalim and Kuki’s Homeland.