Imphal, Feb 22: In a significant decision, a bench of the Manipur High Court on Wednesday modified its own March 27, 2023 order, ordering the removal of Paragraph 17 (iii), which had instructed the Manipur government to consider the inclusion of Meiteis in the list of Scheduled Tribes.
The contentious paragraph said that the State government “shall consider the case of the petitioners for inclusion of the Meetei/Meitei community in the Scheduled Tribe list, expeditiously…”, a direction that the Supreme Court of India had called into question when tribal bodies appealed the High Court’s order last year.
This direction is said to have triggered the ongoing ethnic conflict between the Meiteis and the tribal Kuki-Zo communities in the State.
When the order was made public and within days of the violence breaking out, tribal bodies such as the All Manipur Tribal Students’ Union were quick to appeal the entirety of the March 2023 order in the High Court.
The appeal filed by the tribal bodies remains pending before a Bench headed by Chief Justice Siddharth Mridul, and is set to come up for a hearing on Thursday.
The review petition of the Meitei petitioners was, in the meantime, heard and decided by a Bench of Justice Golmei Gaiphulshillu, which dismissed the tribal bodies’ application to be impleaded in the case and delivered its order on Wednesday.
The March 2023 order of the Manipur High Court’s Single Judge Bench of then-Acting Chief Justice M.V. Muralidharan had caused widespread unrest and protests from all tribal communities in Manipur the moment it was made public in April. Within weeks, the agitation spilled over into violence in the form of the ongoing ethnic conflict.
