India's AIDS Funds Being Stolen By Militants On Burma Border

by Ranjit Devraj

(IPS) -- When the Manipur AIDS Control Society (MACS), which distributes World Bank funds for fighting HIV, was served notice in February to cough up $50,000 or shut shop it was a sign that nothing was exempt from extortion by militant groups in this northeastern state that borders Burma.

"We are all compelled to pay ten percent of our salaries to the militants," a senior police official told IPS asking for anonymity not only because of service rules requirements but also because he risked a bullet in the thigh, the trademark first warning of Manipur's militant groups. There is no second warning.

Because the "boys" have a system of revenue intelligence that would shame the most diligent of tax officials, bargaining is pointless and risky. And the gruesome enforcement methods guarantee a hundred percent recovery.

Said a MACS official: "The UGs (short for underground groups as they are locally referred to) have detailed information on exactly how much money is coming in from the National AIDS Control Organization (NACO) in New Delhi and calculate precisely how big a bite they can put on us without actually forcing us to shut shop."

Paying up is one thing but satisfying all of the 25 different banned militant groups that operate in Manipur is another. "The current demand has come from a consortium of groups which say they were left out earlier," said the MACS official.

Armed militancy in Manipur began with opposition to the merger of the territory into the Indian Union in 1949 put up by the Hindu Meitei community. This deteriorated into ethnic warfare for dominance with Christian, Naga and Kuki tribes and smaller ethnic groups such as the Peites and Muslim Pangals and splinter groups soon formed around individual leaders.

Phanjoubam Tarapot, journalist and author of the book 'Bleeding Manipur' published in 2003 believes that the state, which has population of about 250,000 people now has around 20,000 militants who collect at least $25 million every year in extortions.

Though MACS cannot admit to making payments -- that would make them vulnerable to prosecution on charges of colluding with proscribed 'terrorist' groups thus jeopardizing their funding -- NACO and MACS are certain to work out a way to 'adjust' the funds they have to pay up in their books just as they have done before.

While the matter of predatory militant groups extracting large sums of money from officials and government departments has been an open secret for years, the central government has only in recent months begun to tackle the practice identified as the real reason why development has remained stunted in much of India's troubled north-east.

"The allegation of connivance of All-India Service officers (members of the elite central bureaucracy) siphoning off government funds may be true because of threats to the lives of the officers and their families," said the minutes of the Committee of Secretaries that met in the national capital New Delhi in February to discuss the issue.

So far, the committee headed by B.K. Chaturvedi, cabinet secretary and India's top-most ranking bureaucrat has not come up with a remedy for the systematic extortions beyond sagely concluding that "since the officers were forced to comply with the extortion demands under threat to life, the solution would have to be realistic and practical."

On the ground, Imphal residents point to the deplorable state of the roads built with inadequate material and the concrete flyovers made painfully narrower than originally specified because the militants had taken their bite out of the contractors.

India is keen to develop Manipur and other north-eastern states as windows to the 'tiger economies' of Southeast Asia and the Far East but analysts say this can happen only if the extortions by militant groups that dictate life in these parts are stopped.

"There are no easy solutions. But it is no good mindlessly pumping money into states like Manipur because that would only foster the militant groups, made up mostly of young unemployed men and women, and then sending in the army to fight them," said Prof. Ganganath Jha an expert on the north-east who teaches at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi.

Jha said the $2.3 billion special package earmarked for development work in the northeast in India's annual central budget, operative from April 1, was fine but there was a real need to ensure that the funds benefited ordinary people rather than gangs of extortionists masquerading as liberators of the people and protectors of local culture.

Since the beginning of March several restaurant owners have received bullets in their thighs for allowing young girls and boys to use their premises as rendezvous points and not heeding warnings released through local newspapers and local cable television that such "immoral activity" was "alien to Manipuri culture" and therefore impermissible.

The Kanglei Yawol Kanna Lup (KYKL), one of several militant groups that represent the Hindu, Meitei community that dominates Imphal valley has also issued warnings against women not wearing the traditional 'phaneksi' (sarong) and blouses.

Another chauvinistic group with the muscle and bullets to back their diktats, the Meitei Erol Eyek Loinashillon Apunba Lup (MEELAL) has ordered all local newspapers to switch from the Bengali script -- which is regarded as Indian -- to Mayek script that resembles Burmese but ironically is also of Indian origin as all scripts are in the Indochina region.

Not to be outdone in the 'moral and cultural policing' department, the rival Kangleipak Communist Party abducted in February, G.J. Demonte, the principal of a missionary-run school on charges of taking bribes from students in return for allegedly helping them to 'cheat' on their school final examinations.

Among the many victims of the self-appointed, moral and cultural police in March was the principal of an engineering school who was dragged out of his car and shot in the thigh on charges of "admission irregularities."

Other victims of such arbitrary shootings include sex workers, drug addicts and even people afflicted by HIV just because the militant groups deemed them a menace to society.

"We have opposed these vigilante shootings just as we have opposed army atrocities," said W. Munindrokumar, who leads the People's Rights Organization (PRO) that works closely with Amnesty International to stop widespread human rights violations by both state and non-state actors.

"The fact is that the militant groups are turning out to be the equivalent of the Taliban in Afghanistan and are at least as guilty of human rights violations as armed forces personnel," the PRO chief said.

In a report on Manipur released this year, Amnesty urged "armed opposition groups to abide by the minimum humane standards of international humanitarian law" and also "refrain from deliberate and arbitrary killings of civilians, torture, ill-treatment and hostage-taking."

Joykumar Singh, Additional Director General of Police in Manipur believes that the militant groups are "out to gain cheap popularity when everybody knows that they are as corrupt or as immoral as anybody else."

At the moment the PRO is putting its energies into getting scrapped the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) which gives the army sweeping powers to arrest, detain indefinitely and even summarily shoot anyone suspected of being involved with the militant groups while enjoying immunity from prosecution.

While the law sounds draconian, the AFSPA enjoys secret support from many leading local politicians as well as local people who fear that removing it altogether would leave everyone at the mercy of roving bands of militants, each supporting the interests of a narrow ethnic or tribal group in Manipur's highly composite society.

Irene Salam who teaches psychology at the Manipur University believes that the root of the problem lies in the dearth of worthwhile employment for young people and a lack of enterprise among them.

"There is no dignity of labor in Manipur society and every young person wants a white-collar job handed out on a platter when the state already has a bloated bureaucracy. Also it is pointless to expect private enterprise to pick up in the state so long as the extortions continue," she told IPS.

For now, wearing battle fatigues and joining the militant groups to fight for the cause of independence from India offers an exciting if risky career for young people. And then there are the easy pickings from extortion.