Does Arambai Tenggol’s decision to surrender arms reflect a changed reality in Manipur?

On Thursday, a caravan of pickup trucks loaded with ammunition and arms rolled into the 1st Manipur Rifles compound in Imphal.

The weapons were being surrendered by the Arambai Tenggol, an armed Meitei group alleged to be at the forefront of the violence against the Kuki-Zomi community since May 2023, when ethnic clashes broke out in the state.

In the initial months of the ethnic conflict, over 6,000 weapons and thousands of rounds of ammunition were looted from police stations and state armouries in Imphal and the hill districts of Manipur. Security experts have repeatedly flagged the challenge posed by arms finding their way into the hands of civilians. Till September, about 1,200 weapons looted from armouries had been recovered in security operations.

On February 20, newly appointed Manipur Governor Ajay Kumar Bhalla urged all communities in the state to surrender the looted weapons and ammunition within seven days, adding that no punitive action would be taken against those who complied within the deadline. Similar calls from the state government had not yielded much results in the past.

This time, the ground appeared to have shifted. On the last day of the deadline, the Arambai Tenggol group surrendered 246 weapons, the largest such voluntary surrender of illegally held weapons so far in the state….

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