The UNLF, a powerful armed group, has a complicated history. Four years after its formation, it splintered for the first time. The 1960s was a turbulent yet transformative decade for Manipur. More than 10 years had passed since the Meitei-ruled, Imphal-based kingdom signed a merger agreement with the Indian Union. But, the Meitei people were yet to reconcile with its terms. They felt slighted by what they saw as a systematic subversion of their unique political antecedents and aspirations by the Indian state.

This overwhelming sense of betrayal, anger and alienation birthed radicalism. The Meitei elite, which had long dominated the now-annulled Manipuri kingdom’s social and political life, began to use the popular discontent to mobilise along ideological and strategic lines. There was one common end tying them all: self-determination.

The means to the end, however, differed. Some preferred non-violent means, others only saw politics through the barrel of the gun. Some thought communism would liberate them, others banked on Meitei nationalism. In November 1964, these choices melted into each other. The United National Liberation Front or “UNLF” was born. The group, led by a Naga president, Kalalung Kamei, a Kuki vice president, Thankhopao Singsit, and a Meitei general secretary (and writer), Arambam Samarendra Singh, sought to establish a sovereign, socialist Manipur.

Ideologically, the UNLF, which appeared multi-ethnic in its original form, wasn’t born out of the blue. The seeds of radical socialism in Manipur were spawned years ago by Hijam Irabot, whose mainstream politics of autonomy eventually blossomed into an underground communist insurgency. By demonstrating the possibility of an armed struggle to get justice, he became a key social and political motif in the modern history of Manipur.

The UNLF, though radical, wasn’t really an armed group at its birth. Somerendra Singh, an intellectual more than a military leader, wanted to focus on political mobilisation. In its original form, the group introduced a new form of radical political practice in postcolonial Meitei society — one that comfortably, and almost unnoticeably, married communism with Meitei nationalism. The outcome was the emergence of an ethnocentric socialist ideology that quickly became the foundational pillar of the insurgent order in Manipur.

But, the UNLF’s relatively moderate modus operandi did not sit well with the radical lot. In 1968, Oinam Sudhirkumar broke ranks and floated the action-oriented “Revolutionary Government of Manipur (RGM)”. The fires of anti-India insurgency and rebel governance in postcolonial Manipur had been lit. Soon, this flame would turn into a wildfire.

The RGM would go on to incubate several more Meitei armed groups. The UNLF remained in the scene, silently bidding for time, building its popular base, and gathering resources. By propping up a popular ethnic challenge to the new Union and collaborating with India’s arch nemesis across the eastern border, the East Pakistani state, the UNLF and RGM were able to grab New Delhi’s attention.

The Indian government did not buy into the Meitei self-determination agenda. Instead, it adopted a programme of political inducements to diffuse Meitei radicalism, starting with granting Manipur full statehood. It did blunt the edge for a while. But, by delaying a solution, New Delhi had already lost ground in Imphal.

The Meitei radical political platform had moved beyond statehood into the domain of self-determination — secession, in Delhi’s eyes. This mismatch of popular aspirations and the government’s conflict management strategy created a new rationalisation for the armed movement to continue.

In fact, through the 1970s and 1980s, it rapidly intensified. A motley group of new Meitei armed groups emerged, drawing a large number of recruits from the Valley and the foothills around it. They were audacious and adaptive. When they lost their bases in East Pakistan after the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971, they simply found new ones or moved back into India.

One group led by N Bisheshwar in 1978 did the unthinkable — cross the northern Himalayan border to get military training from China. His People’s Liberation Army (PLA), set up after their return to Manipur emerged as the top gun in the state’s expanding rebel world. The UNLF’s strategic radicalism seemed to pale before the PLA’s communist daredevilry.

Delhi quickly resorted to a military approach, imposing a state of exception on Manipur through the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) in 1980 and rapidly militarising the Imphal Valley. Instead of quashing it, the heavy-handed counterinsurgency approach only abetted militantism. By 1990, the UNLF also installed a full-fledged armed wing, known as the “Manipur People’s Army.” A low-grade war began.

From the 1990s to present

The next few decades saw the insurgency transform amid a rapidly changing ethnopolitical battlescape in Manipur. A Kuki armed order, led by the Kuki National Front (KNF), emerged in the early 1990s. The Zomi Revolutionary Army (ZRA) followed. The UNLF and its fellow rebel groups were no longer the only cowboys in town.

This insurgent diversification created a complex, multi-actor security order in Manipur. It drew new ethnic lines on the map and generated new forms of insecurity. It also spawned some ostensibly unlikely inter-group alliances. For instance, the Kuki and Meitei armed groups, who had little interest in fighting each other, often joined forces to mobilise resources.

In the summer of 2000, an entire chapter of the UNLF drew down when members of Kanglei Yawol Kanna Lup (Oken group), a rival armed group, gunned down its legendary leader, Aramban Somerendra Singh, in Imphal. He was then replaced by someone who is until this date, one of the UNLF’s best-known faces — Raj Kumar Meghen alias Sanayaima. Singh continues to occupy a central position in the Meitei civil society mind space.

By the time Meghen took over, the UNLF had begun to embed itself deep into Manipur’s political geography. It also found new transnational spaces to operate, such as the Sagaing Region in western Myanmar. Simultaneously, it continued to assert a political programme for self-determination, even calling for a UN-supervised plebiscite and peacekeeping force in Manipur. Meghen reaffirmed these demands after the National Investigation Agency (NIA) arrested him from Bihar in 2010.

As it grew in firepower and influence, the UNLF continued to harass the Indian state with attritional violence while also running parallel political regimes in “liberated zones.” Notably, Meghen also called for a unified, multi-ethnic armed movement against the Indian state. But, the UNLF also began to run on excesses. Coercion and ethnic belligerence began to seep into the psyche of the rank-and-file. The result was a series of ugly convulsions that further agitated Manipur’s delicate ethnopolitical balance.

In January 2006, members of two Meitei armed groups, as alleged by local Kuki-Zo groups, went on a violent rampage in two villages located along the border with Mizoram in southern Churachandpur district. In total, they alleged that the cadres sexually assaulted at least 25 young girls and women from the Hmar tribe. One of the two groups accused of perpetrating the horrific crime was UNLF.

The group also gained notoriety for kidnappings and blockades. Not just that, thanks to differences over territorial limits, the UNLF came into direct confrontation with the powerful National Socialist Council of Nagaland-Isak Muivah (NSCN-IM).

A socialist anti-state insurgency was slowly beginning to look like an inter-ethnic conflict.

Government’s response

Once again, the government’s response was more military than political. At times, there was simply no response. The historical sense of injustice only grew in scope and size, sweeping through the restive, remote hills. In retrospect, it may be fair to say that those tense years portended the violent Meitei-Kuki fallout that we see in Manipur today.

The story of the UNLF isn’t simply one of ideological and military defiance. It also captures a universal tale of what many scholars call “rebel fragmentation”. No major non-state armed group in the world with a multi-decadal history has remained completely unitary. Most of them have broken apart with the passage of time, as leaders grew tired of fighting or preferred to benefit from lucrative ceasefire deals offered by the state.

The UNLF is no exception. Pambei’s unseemly departure from the group in 2021 and his eventual détente with the Indian government, shaped partly by an opaque process steered by current Manipur Chief Minister, N. Biren Singh, shows this. Yet, the rest of UNLF remains as it is, still insistent on a sovereign Manipuri state but beleaguered by the anti-junta war in Myanmar, where it has bases. Even the Pambei faction has yet to pronounce what it wants in exchange for laying down arms. Meghen, who was released from jail in 2019, too remains silent on the “historic” truce.

As the bloody ethnic strife in Manipur rumbles on discreetly, more than six months after it began, the UNLF-Pambei agreement gives both Imphal and New Delhi a showpiece of political victory. But, what does it mean for Valley-based militancy in Manipur? Will it inspire other agreements? What kind of ceasefire regime will it birth? Where do the disarmed cadres go now? Hardly anyone has answers to these questions as of now.

Angshuman Choudhury is an Associate Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. The views expressed are personal