For the past 11 months, Manipur has been locked in an ethnic conflict. The conflict that has killed more than 219 people, injured 1,100 and displaced 60,000 is frequently oversimplified as a struggle between the Hindu Meitei and Christian Kuki-Zo communities, mirroring the religious polarisation seen in communal conflicts and assaults on religious minorities in various parts of India.

But,  an assessment prepared by Assam Rifles officials, which is the Union government’s paramilitary force, has highlighted a completely different set of factors that are unique to the conflict in Manipur. Assam Rifles is the oldest paramilitary force in the country and shoulders the primary responsibility of maintaining law and order in the Northeast along with other armed forces.  It has a chequered history. 

The Reporters’ Collective reviewed the assessment, made in a PowerPoint presentation, which lays part of the blame on the state government headed by chief minister N Biren Singh and his “political authoritarianism and ambition”.

This report is the first candid internal assessment of the situation in Manipur by a federal agency to come out in the public domain. It holds significance as Prime Minister Narender Modi this month, in the run-up to a general election, had asserted that the federal government’s timely intervention had led to a “marked improvement in the situation in Manipur”.

In the presentation, Assam Rifles officials talks of Chief Minister’s "hard stance" on "war on drugs", “state forces’ tacit support” in the violence, the “dismemberment of law-and-order machinery”, Meitei Revivalsim among others.

It highlights the impact of “illegal immigrants” from neighbouring Myanmar and the consequent demand for a national register for citizens to check the migration, along with the demand for ‘Kukiland’.

Additionally, the report points out that armed groups from the Kuki-Zo and Meitei communities are arming people and intensifying tensions, contradicting the leaders' attempts to present the conflict as ordinary citizens volunteering for self-defense against the other community.

Assam Rifles, in the presentation, sees the conflict divided into three phases: “initiate”, “mutate” and “stalemate”. It lays out how the nature and character of violence have changed through these stages. We took the findings of the report and ran it against a touchstone -- our reporter’s findings and views gathered as part of her ground reporting  over six months during the conflict -- to give us an unbiased reading of the report.

Read part 1 of the series on Manipur conflict by Angana Chakrabarti published in Al Jazeera