A nine-member delegation of Kuki-Zo groups met a team of officials from the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) on Wednesday, where they raised the scrapping of the Free Movement Regime (FMR) with Myanmar, and the January 24 Kangla Fort incident in Imphal when Arambai Tenggol, a radical Meitei group, administered oath to elected representatives to “protect the integrity of Manipur”.
The meeting that was led by A.K Mishra, Adviser, Northeast, Ministry of Home Affairs, and Intelligence Bureau officials, lasted three hours.
The tribal delegation also raised the issue of continued power outages in the hill districts of Churachandpur and Pherzawl.
MHA officials assured the delegation that their issues would be conveyed to the higher authorities.
The tribal bodies have been seeking an appointment with Union Home Minister Amit Shah but no meeting has been scheduled yet.
A delegate who attended the meeting said that the demand for a separate administration for the Kuki-Zo people still exists and they would continue to press for it.
The meeting comes days after Manipur Chief Minister N. Biren Singh met Mr. Shah in Delhi on February 3.
On Tuesday, Mr. Shah said that the government had decided to construct a fence along the 1,643 km border with Myanmar, effectively ending the FMR.
Under the FMR, every member of the hill tribes, who is either a citizen of India or a citizen of Myanmar, residing within 16 km of either side of the border, can cross the border on the production of a border pass, usually valid for a year, and can stay up to two weeks per visit.
India and Myanmar share an unfenced border and people on either side, including the Kuki-Zo people, have familial and ethnic ties that prompted the arrangement in the 1970s. The FMR was last revised in 2016
Mr. Singh has on several occasions in the past attributed the ongoing ethnic violence in the State to the unregulated movement of people from across the border.
Manipur has been affected by ethnic violence between the tribal Kuki-Zo people and the Meitei community since May 2023. More than 200 people have been killed and thousands displaced from their homes.
