DM Monitoring
Jiribam/Chennai: Thangman Guite had just finished her dinner on the night of June 6 when she received a phone call.
“They are coming, hide,” is all the 26-year-old school teacher heard.
Several other residents of Vengnuam, a village in Manipur state’s Jiribam district bordering Assam in India’s northeast, received a similar phone call.
Within minutes, Guite switched off the lights of her house and instructed about 15 villagers assembled before her home to run towards the house closest to the nearby forest. She also asked everyone to switch off their phones.
As they huddled in one of the rooms in that house, not even daring to approach the window to have a look outside, they heard voices and gunshots as at least two vehicles, allegedly carrying armed men belonging to Arambai Tenggol, a local militia, began to enter the village.
The huddled villagers ran to the forest, as quietly as they could. While hiding in darkness and fearing being discovered, Guite said she began to have flashes of all those captured and killed in the deadly ethnic violence that has gripped Manipur since May last year.
“I thought we wouldn’t [make it alive], honestly,” Guite told Al Jazeera. Within an hour, she saw smoke billowing from their village.
Early the next morning, soldiers of the Indian army, deployed to contain the violence, arrived.
As Guite made her way out of the forest and entered the village, she discovered her house was among dozens reduced to cinders. The church she prayed at every Sunday had suffered the same fate.
A 40-year-old man was missing. Residents said he had been abducted
The incident at Vengnuam encapsulates the ethnic tensions in Manipur, where clashes between the predominantly Hindu Meitei community, who are in a majority, and the mainly Christian Kuki-Zo tribe have so far claimed more than 220 lives and displaced 67,000 others, according to the government data.
The Vengnuam attack followed tensions in Jiribam district after the decomposed body of Seigoulen Singson, a 21-year-old from the Kuki-Zo community, was discovered weeks earlier. Singson had been missing since May 14.
On June 6, two days after the main opposition Indian National Congress party trounced the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in both the parliamentary constituencies in Manipur, the dead body of 59-year-old Soibam Saratkumar Singh, a Meitei, was found by the locals after he had been missing for more than a week.
The Meitei alleged that Kuki-Zo tribals were behind the murder. Kuki-Zo leaders denied involvement, blaming the killing on rival Meitei armed groups instead.
As the news of the arson at Vengnuam spread, Meiteis living in the area feared a counterattack and requested to be moved to safety by the authorities. Within hours of their evacuation to a relief camp, Lamtai Khunou, a Meitei village, was set on fire.
