Column | How Hechin Haokip is helping Manipur’s displaced communities cope with trauma

Hechin Haokip, 47, says the world turned upside down three years ago. That’s when an underlying divide between Manipur’s majority Meitei community and its tribal Kuki-Zo people cracked open almost overnight, creating a deadly crevasse that has displaced thousands and segregated the State.

“A lot of people I have worked with for 10-15 years, who spoke the same language when we talked about discrimination or human rights violations by the State, began talking so differently after the conflict broke out,” she says.

“Now it seems like human rights have become community rights.” Two months before the violence began, Haokip, the founder of a 20-year-old community organisation called Centre for Women and Girls (CWG), was at an NGO conference in Bangkok.

CWG works with different ethnic communities in the hill districts of Chandel and Tengnoupal on issues of gender equity, child rights, peace processes and livelihoods. In Bangkok, people kept asking her where she was from and then telling her she didn’t look Indian.

“I am from a very small State called Manipur,” she would say.