As she had in the fortnight gone by, Y Rani Devi opened her tea shop in a nearby market on November 11.
The 60-year-old Meitei woman, who had run this shop in this remote Meitei settlement in Manipur’s Jiribam for 20 years, had no apparent cause for worry.
The market is about 300 metres from the premises of the Borobekra police station, which also houses a camp of the Central Reserve Police Force. There are five other CRPF posts nearby.
Over a hundred Meitei residents from nearby villages had taken shelter in this compound since June, when Jiribam district had turned into another battleground in the ethnic clashes that broke out in Manipur last year. Y Rani Devi and her family, who had lived in Madhupur village till then, were among those displaced by the violence.
At the end of October, as the situation improved, several Meiteis had been allowed by the security forces to re-open their shops in the Jakuradhor market, as long as they returned to the “relief camp” by sunset.
By 2.30 pm on November 11, however, Borobekra was under attack. A group of armed men from the Hmar tribe had arrived at the market and started setting houses on fire.
The Hmars are part of the larger ethnic group of Kuki-Zomi tribes, who have been engaged in a deadly conflict with the majority Meitei community in Manipur since May last year.
“My maa called me on the phone from the shop and asked me to leave,” recalled Sandhya Devi, the eldest daughter of Y Rani Devi, as she sat on the verandah of the relief camp. “‘The Kukis have come’, she said.”
That was the last time she heard her mother’s voice. “The Kukis came and dragged her and took her away in an auto. The CRPF was there but they could not save her,” Devi said.
Many escaped through the backdoor of their shops. “But my mother’s shop did not have a backdoor,” she said.
Y Rani Devi was not alone. In the shop that day were two other daughters – Heitonbi Devi and Thoibi Devi – and their three children, the youngest only eight months old. All of them were taken away.
Later that night, a photograph of the six women and children, huddled together on the ground, went viral. With the police failing to locate them, massive protests against the Manipur government broke out in Imphal valley.
As Scroll reached Borobekra on Sunday morning, another photograph had become viral – that of a body of an elderly woman floating in the Barak river in Assam’s Cachar district, which borders Jiribam.
Sandhya Devi broke down as she said that she had identified the body in the photograph as that of her mother. “We saw in the mobile that the bodies were found in a river,” she said. “Those who killed my mother and sisters should be caught.”
Hours later, the body of a two-year-old, believed to be Sandhya Devi’s nephew, was also found floating in the Barak river, police officials said. This is the fifth body to have been found – all believed to be from the same family – in the rivers around Borobekra since November 15.
Ten of the Hmar assailants were killed in retaliatory fire by CRPF. Their bodies were airlifted to Churachandpur on November 16.
Two senior security officials in Jiribam told Scroll that the raid at Borobekra was “revenge” for an attack by armed Meitei men on a Hmar village on November 7. A 31-year-old woman had been tortured and killed in the incident.
A two-hour journey on a ramshackle road through hilly terrain dotted with Hmar-populated villages and settlements of Bengalis brought us to Borobekra, even though it is only around 27 km from the Jiribam district headquarters.
The signs of the November 11 attack were apparent in Jakuradhor market – broken and burnt shops, motorcycles that had been set on fire, sheets of tin twisted out of shape.
What was palpable at Borobekra was an atmosphere of fear.
“We all want to go to Jiribam town. We will be killed if we don’t leave,” Sandhya Devi said, who remained at the camp with two nephews.
Since the November 11 attack, not one of the 104 Meitei residents has been allowed to leave or step out of the Borobekra police station compound.
“If the CRPF was not there that day, we would have got killed that day,” said H Thabllei, an elderly woman inmate at the camp. “It is not safe to stay here.”
Over the last few months, Meitei villages in the area have emptied out, with many residents taking shelter in Jiribam town.
“The government has not made any appropriate arrangements for our evacuation,” said Rajendra Singh, another elderly man who had been living at the relief camp since June.
He went on to surmise why: “If we leave this area, it will slip into the hands of the tribals, just like Churachandpur and Moreh.”
The conflict in Manipur has not only led to the deaths of at least 255 people and displaced 60,000 of the state’s residents. It has also led to a partition of the state into ethnic enclaves, with members of the Kuki-Zomi-Hmar tribes living in the hills and Meiteis in the Imphal valley. In this corner of Jiribam district, Borobekra is the only remaining Meitei settlement.
A police official posted in Jiribam said that the demand of the residents has been communicated to the Manipur chief minister. “The only way to get to Jiribam is via chopper. The road is long and passes through dense forest and hilly terrain where the tribals live. It is a risky proposition for the Meiteis.”
An Assam Rifles official, however, told Scroll that they were confident of moving out the villagers by road too. “We shifted over a hundred people in the same way in June,” the official said. But they said they have not got any orders from the state government or district administration to intervene.
Kuki-Zomi-Hmar groups have claimed that the individuals killed in the gunfight on November 11 were village volunteers – a term used for armed civilians guarding villages since the ethnic clashes broke out. They also denounced the CRPF’s actions, and accused them of “brutally ambushing, and murdering” the men in a combined operation with the Manipur Police.
However, at least three officials – two from the Manipur Police and one from Assam Rifles – told Scroll that the CRPF initially did not take any aggressive action but asked the armed Hmar men, who had been setting fire to homes, to leave.
That afternoon, a group of 25-30 armed Hmar people came from the Barak riverside and reached the Jakuradhor market, eyewitnesses and the security officials told Scroll.
While some men were on foot, others came in autos and a van.
The market is surrounded by at least five CRPF posts, and the CRPF camp inside the Borobekra police station is less than half a kilometre away.
“First, they burnt down five shops and eight houses,” a police official posted at Jiribam told Scroll. “Then, there was an argument between the CRPF and another group of militants.”
Ranjit, who saw his parents’ house in the market being burnt down that day, said the Hmar men went looking for Meiteis to target.
“They went to the CRPF post and asked about the Meiteis,” said Ranjit. “The CRPF told them not to touch the Meiteis and not to attack or burn the houses.”
Ranjit recalled that the attack was a two-pronged one. While one group of Hmar men set fire to houses, the other engaged with the CRPF.
Another senior police official said: “The CRPF reacted only after the militants tried to attack and fired upon the CRPF post near the market.”
The police and security officials said the armed Hmar men had likely calculated that the CRPF would not strike back or defend the Meiteis.
“That’s why they were taken by surprise,” a security official said. “The CRPF team retaliated and the Hmar militants were killed from the bullets fired from a bulletproof CRPF vehicle.”
Two senior Jiribam-based officials – one from Assam Rifles and one from Manipur police – described the raid at Borobekra as a “revenge attack”.
It was preceded by two attacks on Hmar residents that shattered the fragile peace in the district.
In October, a school in Jiribam owned by a Hmar person was burnt down.
On the night of November 7, a Hmar village was attacked by armed Meiteis, allegedly members of the radical group Arambai Tenggol.
The attack resulted in the grisly death of Zosangkim Hmar, a mother of three. The 31-year-old woman was tortured, allegedly raped and burnt to death by Arambai Tenggol cadres, according to the first information report filed in the case.
“In the last few months, the Hmar people had not been touched by the Meiteis,” the Assam Rifles official posted in Jiribam told Scroll. “It changed with the burning down of the school and the Zairawn incident.”
“They may not have calculated the repercussions of their actions,” the Jiribam-based police official.
Since the murder of the woman in Zairawn, 20 people – 11 Hmar and 9 Meitei – have been killed in the state. Barring one, all the deaths have been in Jiribam.
The new spiral of violence in Manipur has led to a wave of anger against the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party government, with mobs attacking homes of several legislators in Imphal.
All photographs by Rokibuz Zaman.