India’s Northeast Is on the Brink. Where’s Modi?
The Indian leader talks a good game of tolerance and statesmanship on the world stage. At home, a brutal ethnic conflict is boiling over.
Shops and cars burned in Churachandpur, Manipur
Photographer: Arun Sankar/AFP/Getty Images
This is India’s hidden war. Angry mobs have burned thousands of homes and razed hundreds of churches. More than 120 people are dead and nearly 60,000 displaced. Upward of 4,700 weapons have been looted from armories, including AK47s, rocket launchers and mortars. They are now being used by civilians and village defense groups to attack each other and the estimated 24,000 military, police and internal security forces embroiled in this conflict in the northeastern state of Manipur.
There have been reports of beheadings as armed gangs swept through villages, and many fear tensions could escalate further, spilling into the neighboring states of Mizoram, Assam and Nagaland — and to Myanmar, where the military junta is increasingly conducting air strikes on civilians. Then there’s India’s tense border with China, from where the army’s 57th Mountain Division has been taken and redeployed to help quell Manipur’s ethnic strife.