Kuki tribes living in Manipur came from the Burma (Myanmar) as refugees and were later granted ST (Scheduled Tribe) quota in India in 1968
The Kukis are an ethnic group including multiple tribes originally inhabiting the Northeastern States of India, including Manipur, Mizoram and Assam; parts of Burma (now Myanmar), and Sylhet district and Chittagong hill tracts of Bangladesh. Zooming out into the present, when the State of Manipur has been the epicentre of widespread communal clashes since May 3, non-tribal Meitei organisations have described Kuki tribes as "foreigners" and "illegal immigrants". They are holding Kuki-Zomi groups responsible for the ethnic clashes that have claimed more than 120 lives and displaced more than 50,000 people. The Kuki-Zomi groups have denied the allegations, insisting the tribal communities have been systematically targeted for ethnic cleansing. They accuse BJP leader N. Biren Singh’s Government of treating them as "outsiders". [...] Yet today, with sharpened ethnic differences, all three prominent groups in the State are vying for exclusivity, land, and political representation. This can in part be traced back to the fact that the concretisation of tribal identities and nomenclatures in the region happened during the time of the British, who did so for administrative convenience and to fit groups into the distinctions of "civilised" and "uncivilised". Notably, Kuki is not a term coined by the ethnic group itself, the tribes associated with it came to be generically called Kuki under the colonial rule, and were further divided by the British into ‘old Kukis’ and ‘new Kukis’.