By Balakmen Suting
Recently, I read an anecdote about a farmer who drops a lifeless pig into a dry well. This story refuses to leave me alone. According to the story that I read, there were around 70 rats which smelled the dead meat of a swine and jumped into the well blindly. In the beginning, everything went on well, everything was easy and sufficient for all and there was nobody to raise a question. To their ignorance, the wells have a long wall. The food that was one relished by all the rats, has run out and their belly started asking for food again. The rats start to think about themselves and about their wellbeing, they forget of being together or being a community. They started challenging each other, they brawled. This melee led to the killing of each other in that chaotic well. Out of hunger, they started devouring one another until only one remained. He hunkered down at the base, his eyes gone red, he endured, surviving only by becoming a monster he never used to be.
With the slaughter over, the farmer lowered the rope to retrieve the final beast. He cast it out into the fields, sending a changed creature back into the world where it once belonged.
The farmer’s act was born of cold calculation, not kindness. He knew a profound truth: a rat that has tasted the blood of its own kind will never go back to fields of green, eating grains etc. but it will hunt other rats, serving as the perfect, ruthless guardian of his harvest.
Born in this beautiful land of North East India, hearing this tragic story of this community of rats, did not make me ponder about the rats itself, but I thought of us.
Candidly, I want to lead with my personal observations before adding anything else.
I have sat in the classroom where the students from the hills and students from the plains refused to acknowledge each other, an institution where groupism was very strong. This is not out of sheer personal account but because somewhere in their lifetime, they had been taught that this groupism was natural, even important and necessary. I have witnessed someone from the hills of this beautiful land mock or mimic the accent of someone from the plain, casually, the way you mock something you have been told does not quite count. I have seen communities or sub tribes separated by nothing more than a slight difference in pronunciation of vernacular words or a river. They automatically distrust each other just because they always have.
The people I met in my region usually argue fiercely about which region is better, which state is superior, which tribe or community deserves more, which language and culture should be dominant. While the infrastructure stays unserved and the roads which are the backbone of the society remain broken or unattended, the schools stay with one or only two teachers, the hospitals with less numbers of doctors and nurses, and the youth keep leaving the region for a better country or state. We quarrel, wrangle, and fight over the pig. While the farmer who plans all these watches from above the well.
Spanning over two decades of my life, I accepted this as simply the way things were. These divisions felt old and antique. They felt, somehow, like they belonged to the land itself. It was only later, after I began reading history and paying closer attention to whose interests our conflicts actually served, that I started asking the question I should have asked decades earlier.
Who benefits when we cannot stop fighting and hating each other?
The honest answer to that query commences not with any of our tribes, communities, but with the East India Company.
When the British arrived in this subcontinent, their most durable weapon was not military. It was administrative. The colonial census was conducted systematically from the mid-1800s onwards, it did something that no war could have done: it froze identity. Communities that had lived in shifting, overlapping, complicated relationships with each other such as trading, intermarrying, negotiating, occasionally fighting, then trading again were suddenly given fixed labels. You are this tribe. You belong to this community. You speak this language. You belong to this religion. You are in this category, and this category will determine what rights you can claim, what schools you can enter, what political voice you will have.
Once a category becomes a resource gate, people will die defending it. It is like a wild fire that cannot be extinguished. They had no choice. The British had not invented our differences. But they weaponised those differences in a way that outlasted their own departure.
In the North East, this was not a vague policy. It was drawn on actual ground. A British historian named George Watt, who was personally involved in marking the administrative boundary between the Naga Hills and Manipur, wrote in his own records that the communities on both sides were “so intimately related that they can with difficulty be separated.” He admitted it. He wrote it down. And then the line was drawn regardless.
The Zeliangrong people found themselves divided across three separate administrative units. The Konyak Nagas found a national border cutting through land their families had farmed for generations. Hill communities and plain communities that had always had tangled, human, complicated relationships were placed in separate boxes and told, in effect, that their survival required excluding the other.
That is how you build a well. You do not need to push anyone in. You just have to remove every other option.
In May 2023, Manipur showed the country and the country largely looked away, what a well that has been filling for eighty years looks like when it finally overflows.
I was a student of Bachelor of Business Administration at the time when the violence between the Meitei and the Kuki-Zo communities that broke out on May 3 of that year did not end in days or weeks. I used to read in the newspapers during those days regarding the outbreak in the land of jewels. By November 2024, the official death count had reached 258. More than sixty thousand people had been displaced from their beloved homes. Around four hundred churches were damaged or destroyed. Over one hundred and thirty temples were vandalized. Eleven thousand individual complaints were submitted to the government’s inquiry commission. Nearly five thousand six hundred weapons went missing from state armoires, finding their way into civilian hands.
Two communities that had shared the same state, the same school examination boards, the same weekly markets for generations, today live in what can only be described as enforced separation.
And what was the trigger? Not some act of unprovoked violence. Not ancient blood. A court petition asking whether the Meitei community should receive Scheduled Tribe status under the Indian Constitution. A legal category. A government classification first introduced under colonial administration. The Kuki-Zo and Naga communities who depend on those protections to survive as smaller communities in a democratic system that rewards numbers, saw this as a threat to their existence. The Meitei community, classified differently despite their own long history of marginalisation from a national perspective, felt this was a denial of justice.
Both sides were afraid. Both sides had real reasons to be afraid. But while villages burned and families fled into relief camps, nobody was publicly asking why, three quarters of a century after independence, communities in one of India’s most resource-rich regions are still fighting over colonial-era classification boxes. Nobody was asking who in the political class benefits from keeping these communities in permanent competition rather than permanent conversation.
The people with those answers were not in Churachandpur. They were not in Imphal. They were in offices elsewhere, making speeches about peace and waiting for the next election.
But I do not want to leave this only as a story of what has been broken. Because that would be incomplete and, frankly, unfair to the people of this region.
The Naga Mothers’ Association has, for decades, walked into spaces between armed men with nothing but moral authority and the refusal to accept that their children must keep killing each other. In September 2024, nine hundred and two cadres of armed groups in Tripura surrendered their weapons and returned to civilian life. In January 2024, the ULFA – a name that defined an entire era of conflict in Assam, disbanded. These are not small gestures. These are people who had every reason to stay in the well, and chose not to.
I have seen this at smaller scales too. I have seen people from communities that were supposed to be rivals build friendships so genuine that they would drop everything for each other. I have seen mixed marriages that families initially opposed become the quiet pride of both sides a decade later. I have seen young people from six different states of this region sit in a single university canteen and discover, slowly, that they are far more similar than anyone back home had told them.
This too is the North East. The part that does not trend. The part that does not get studied in conflict-resolution seminars. The part that simply continues, stubbornly, to be human.
So let me say this plainly, to anyone reading from this region.The divisions you feel are not all in your head. The grievances are real. The history is real. The graves are real. I am not asking you to pretend otherwise.
But I am asking you to look up from the fight for a moment and ask: who has stayed dry? Who has given speeches calling for calm from the safety of a city far from the burning? Who has won elections on the back of your fear of your neighbour? Who continues to collect power while you and the community across the hill continue to bleed?
The rats in the well were never each other’s real problem. The farmer was. And the farmer is still here, still watching, still very comfortable.
You can be angry; you should be angry. But aim it correctly.
And to the person on the other side of whatever line divides you, the person you have been told, perhaps your whole life, is your natural enemy; I ask only this. Look at what that person is actually living with. Ask whether their fear looks anything like yours. Ask whether you have both been placed in the same well by people who are not in it with you.
We are from the same hills and the same plains and the same stubborn, beautiful, overlooked corner of this country. We have more in common with each other than any administrator in any century has ever wanted us to know.
The well is real. I will not pretend it is not.But the farmer did not make us. And he cannot keep us here.Forgive each other. Not because it is easy or because the wounds are small, they are neither. But because forgiveness is the one thing the farmer cannot use. It is the rope he did not plan for.Climb out. Together. There is enough sky up here for all of us.
