Recap: Kuki Militants, SoO Agreements and the Fallout!
❗️Kuki Militancy: KNF, KNA were formed in 1987 and 1988 respectively, originally to begin Kuki nationalist movements while the rest of the other militant groups were mostly formed in the late 1980s and 1990s to take control of various Kuki dominated areas, mainly for electoral manipulation and extortion.
These groups fought against each other for a larger share of the extortion money and larger area of electoral influence.
❗️Assam Rifles and Manipur Police intervened in this internecine violence and sometimes engaged with them purely from a law and order perspective, no direct reported confrontations.
❗️Credit to Assam Rifles: AR was able to bring about 25 of these warring groups under two umbrella groups UPF and KNO, and able to control the fighting to some extent. One may ask, why 2 groups, why not 1? Because of their history, they lack trust among each other.
👉 UPF - led by Thanglianpao Guite, a former Burmese MP, as General Secy and Thangboi Kipgen, the husband of Dy CM Nemcha Kipgen, as President
👉KNO - formed in Burma in 1988 and currently led by PS Haokip, born in the Somra Tract region of Burma and the official author of Zalengam book, the blueprint of creating a Kuki Lebensraum, a Kuki only land called Kukiland. PS Haokip considers the Kukis as a lost tribe of Israel!
❗️Incentives of forming UPF and KNO: It reportedly included:
1. Rs 5000/month stipend for each cadre, to start with (later increased to 6000). It was a large amount in 2005, particularly in a poor state like Manipur having a large number of educated unemployed youths. Why such large amount, just to give up extortion?
2. Signing SoO agreements with AR and a promise that the State govt would be brought in to make it tripartite and do political negotiations for them.
❗️2008 - SoO became tripartite. Pressure to state govt before accepting to join:
1. Dissident MLAs camping in Delhi from Nov 2007 to remove CM O. Ibobi
2. Pressure from high command in Delhi to win Outer Manipur LS Seat in 2009, the seat that they lost in the previous 3 terms. Winning this seat means aligning with Kuki militants in SoO.
Were these pressures created deliberately? Remember the promise AR made to the Kuki militants.
❗️Flawed SoO monitoring mechanisms: the state govt, in spite of having state’s law & order responsibility, is unable to take any action when the Kuki SoO militants violate any terms of agreement because the Joint Monitoring Group included the militants themselves, with their permission required to take any action over themselves! Perhaps the Manipur govt was too weak or too busy managing its own position!
❗️Fallout: SoO agreements with its flawed monitoring mechanisms not only legitimised the militant groups to exhort and take the people in the direction they wanted, be it poppy plantation or bringing people illegally from the Golden triangle region to be employed in the poppy cultivation and drug manufacturing or encroaching reserved forests … while the govt remains mute spectators, unable to take any action even if they wanted to!
Over the years, nearly 2 decades, the militants and their mentors and orchestrators become untouchable with their own private army and running an illegal parallel system!
The video below where Paolienlal Haokip
@paolienlal, reportedly one of the main architects of the current crisis, conducting a private business in May 2026 guarded openly by a private army!
Abrogate SoO To Bring Peace In Manipur
@YKhemchandSingh @VeteranLNSingh @AmitShah @Bimol_Akoijam
