Kuki Chief-ship: Look East or West?
Background: The issue merits a heated debate till the sun goes cold. To the Kukis, chief-ship is age-old. Long before democracy replaced monarchy in India, in the Kuki-inhabited regions of the sub-continent’s north-eastern states and its military-ruled neighbour, Myanmar’s north-western frontiers, an unique method of hill-village governance evolved out of environmental compulsions. Good or bad, the situation in the tribal settlements demanded a semblance of self-rule in the near-total absence of proper connectivity to better-civilized societies. That’s how every Kuki village had a chief in the helm of administrative affairs, and the forest-land a chief and his villagers could possibly lay their hands upon came under a particular chief-ship. Attachment to it was purely voluntary.
