Riding a Tiger in Manipur

There is a popular folk tale in Manipur, titled Tapta, which explains how Manipur Chief Minister N Biren Singh’s politics has metamorphosed over the last few years. Long ago, goes this story, a woman lived in a hut in a forest with her child. One rainy night, a tiger out hunting crept into the stable where she kept a horse. It crouched in a corner, awaiting his chance to kill it. Meanwhile, a thief also prowled the house, hoping to steal the horse. When her child suddenly started crying, the woman said, “Be quiet—the tiger is coming!” But the child didn’t stop crying.

Then the woman heard raindrops splashing in a puddle by her door and had a brainwave. She made up a word, “Tapta”, and said, “Listen now—Tapta has come to get you.” Scared, the baby stopped crying and slept off.

But the crouching tiger had also heard the woman, and thought, “Tapta” must be a monstrous creature, scarier than even him. “The child didn’t stop crying on hearing my name but Tapta’s,” it mused, thinking it wise to leave. But it was dark, and the fleeing tiger stumbled against the thief, who mistook him for a horse and climbed on his back.

The tiger froze, thinking monstrous Tapta had got him. And the thief started beating him with a stick to get him to gallop away. The tiger sprang from the stable and raced into the night, carrying away the thief. When dawn broke, the thief saw he was riding a tiger, not a horse. Afraid it would kill him, he grabbed the low branch of a tree to escape, while the tiger ran off.

This folk tale is believed to have originated in Manipur and travelled to China and Korea, where it melded into regional variations and flavours. The moral of the story is evident in any language or culture—he who rides a tiger would find it hard to dismount. Indeed, the Chinese proverb is believed to be rooted in this Manipuri folk tale. It symbolises the impossibility of taming a beast one has unleashed.

And so it goes, perhaps without saying, that Manipur’s Chief Minister seems trapped in a situation akin to the thief who rode the tiger thinking it a horse.

Insurgency-torn Manipur has Meites who make up around 53% of the population, followed by Naga ethnic groups at 24%, and the Kuki/Zo tribes, known as Chin-Kuki-Mizo people, at 16%. A former footballer, Biren Singh, also a Meitei, debuted in the Manipur Assembly in 2002 on the Democratic Revolutionary People’s Party ticket from the Heingang seat. He later joined the Congress, retained his seat in 2007, and became a minister in the then Congress government. In 2015, he joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and became the chief minister in 2017 when it won the majority in Manipur with its allies. In 2022, Biren Singh led the BJP to victory on its own and became the chief minister again.

But far from the liberal values he once espoused in ethnically diverse Manipur, Biren Singh has now emerged a clear hero of the Meitei majority. In a way, he is Manipur’s version of what Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adiyanath represent in the context of the Hindus and Muslims in Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh.

Biren Singh and Narendra Modi

There are striking similarities between Modi, Biren Singh, Adityanath and their Assamese counterpart, Himanta Biswa Sarma. All of them became chief ministers during the Modi era at the Centre. Adityanath is known for stoking Hindu majoritarian sentiments, such as by changing the names of cities and towns with Mughal connections and selectively targeting minorities—not fostering harmony.

Similarly, Biren Singh has been accused of favouring his community, as evidenced by the allegations against Manipur Police, of perpetrating attacks against the Kukis or looking away when they were attacked during the ethnic clashes since May.

Trinamool Congress Member of Parliament in the Rajya Sabha Sushmita Dev, who joined a 21-member team of parliamentarians that visited violence-torn areas of Manipur on 28 and 29 July, met the two women from the viral video, who were paraded in the early days of the violence. On returning, she said, “The government has ordered CBI probe and all, but what about the policemen who were watching all that was happening and didn’t do anything?” Dev told The Indian Express newspaper. She said that one of the women in the video told her that the police “ran away from the scene”, abandoning them.

Biren Singh has emerged for the Meiteis of Manipur as Modi emerged after the 2002 Gujarat riots as the “Hindu Hridaya Samrat—Emperor of Hindu Hearts”. Though Adityanath was Member of Parliament from Gorakhpur numerous times, he was barely known before he became the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh in 2016. Once upon a time, Bihar’s Lalu Prasad Yadav and Uttar Pradesh’s Mulayam Singh Yadav pulled Adityanath’s leg and called him the “Sadhu Baba” in the Lok Sabha. But he has emerged as a Hindutva icon, too.

Put bluntly, Singh has developed along similar lines in Manipur. Like the thief in the Tapta tale, he has embarked on a ride on the tiger of communalism. Now, there’s no telling when or where this tiger will come to a halt, or what branch will offer him, or Manipur’s people, any chance of safety.

Bihar Connection

The ‘Tapta’ tale has a variant in Bihar, too. A folk figure named Tiptipwa features in a story titled “The Feat of Tiptipwa” in this author’s book, The Greatest Folk Tales of Bihar. In Bihar’s version of the tale, an old woman rears a horse she guards against predators in the wild. When a tiger and a thief prey on the horse, the woman invokes Tiptipwa to scare away the tiger. The rest of the story is the same—the thief clambers on the tiger’s back and catches a branch to escape.

However, in Bihar’s version of this story, the thief cannily befriends other small animals who make the tiger’s life living hell.

Perhaps their conscious or subconscious memories of such a tale make the leaders of the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) alliance in Bihar aggressive against the BJP on the Manipur issue. Bihar Chief Minister and de facto INDIA convener Nitish Kumar’s repeated salvos against Modi and the BJP over the Manipur issue, and the Rashtriya Janata Dal’s Rajya Sabha Member of Parliament Manoj Jha, who joined the 21-member team to the strife-torn state, are certainly keen to get the country’s rulers off this tiger.

The author is a senior journalist, media educator, and researcher in folklore. The views are personal.