Asif Iqbal
“The state is not a neutral arbiter. It is the organised power of one class to suppress another – and when the class is a community, the suppression wears the face of order.” ~ Arundhati Roy, The Doctor and the Saint, 2017
On the morning of May 5, 2026, a blast rocked an area near the Iroisemba oil pump on the outskirts of Imphal. There were no casualties. There rarely are in these minor detonations – and that is precisely the point. In Manipur, violence no longer announces itself with the drama of pitched battle or the spectacle of mass atrocity. It has settled into something more insidious: a low-grade, persistent burn that the Indian state has learnt to manage rather than extinguish. Three years after the May 2023 outbreak that divided the state between the valley-dwelling Meitei and the hill-dwelling Kuki-Zo, Manipur continues to exist not in peace but in a state of fragile, armed exhaustion.
The arithmetic of the conflict remains staggering. Over 260 dead and sixty thousand displaced, with thousands still crowded into relief camps where, three years on, basic rehabilitation remains a bureaucratic aspiration. On May 3, the anniversary of the first killings, Kuki groups formally observed what they now call “Separation Day”, demanding a Union Territory carved from the hills, while Meitei organisations rallied for territorial integrity. Two communities, two narratives – and one state that can no longer credibly claim to hold them together.
What is unfolding in Manipur is not insurgency in the classical sense. There is no single armed movement with a coherent political programme marching on the state capital. What exists instead is something harder to defeat: ethnic partition in slow motion, sustained by looted weapons, community militias, and a state machinery that – at least in its recent past – cannot be described as a disinterested umpire. The Kuki National Army and Zomi Revolutionary Army hold the hills. Arambai Tenggol and Meitei Leepun, nationalist militias with documented proximity to the previous administration, hold influence in the valley. Some groups have signed peace deals with New Delhi; others, including Kangleipak Communist Party/ Kanglei Yawol Kanna Lup (KYKL), persist.
The political architecture around this conflict demands closest scrutiny. Narendra Biren Singh, the BJP Chief Minister who presided over the first two years of the crisis, resigned in February 2025 – not from conscience but under pressure of leaked audio recordings in which he appeared to stoke communal sentiment against Kuki communities, characterising them as illegal immigrants. President’s Rule followed. His successor, Yumnam Khemchand Singh, assumed office in February 2026 and convened peace talks in March, though results remain invisible. Three years of ethnic violence have produced precisely zero criminal convictions. Not one person – whether a militia commander or a mob leader – has been prosecuted for the killings, the displacements, the burnt churches and torched homes. The Supreme Court monitors the investigation. That it must do so at all is a verdict in itself.
BJP’s defenders will argue, not without foundation, that the central government did respond: Army deployments were swift, President’s Rule was imposed when state governance collapsed, and Home Ministry policy shows no evidence of deliberately targeting either community. The argument is fair as far as it goes – and it does not go very far. The failure in Manipur is not one of commission by the Centre but of structural omission: a political culture that for two years allowed an elected Chief Minister to operate with documented communal bias, a state police force credibly accused of partisan conduct, and a rehabilitation apparatus that after three years still cannot tell sixty thousand displaced people when they may return home. The Army can maintain a ceasefire, but cannot manufacture trust.
Here lies the sharpest irony of the Manipur crisis: the demand for a separate Kuki-Zo Union Territory, dismissed by Meitei groups as partition and by nationalist commentators as separatism, is an acknowledgement that the Indian state’s promise of equal citizenship has already broken down in the hills. When communities build armed village defences because they distrust the police, when weapons looted from state armouries become the primary guarantee of physical security, the Republic of India’s formal sovereignty over that territory has become nominal. The demand for administrative separation is not the cause of Manipur’s fracture; it is the symptom – the political recognition of a de facto division that the May 2023 killings made permanent in the minds of those who lived through them.
The skill training programmes continue and anti-drug drives proceed. The NRC planning – promoted by the previous government partly as a mechanism to classify Kuki communities as undocumented Myanmarese refugees – remains on the agenda. These are the instruments of normalcy deployed in a situation that is not normal. They signal administration, not reconciliation.
Three years ago, Manipur burnt in ways the Indian media covered for a week before moving on. Today, a bomb detonates near a petrol pump in Imphal, and the news cycle barely registers it. That is not peace, that is habituation – the point at which a society has been traumatised long enough that its suffering no longer reads as emergency. The central government would do well to understand that habituation is not resolution. The fire in the hills has not gone out. It has simply been left to burn slowly, and slow burning fires consume the most.
The question Manipur poses to the Indian Republic will not be resolved by any peace talk. It is whether a constitutional democracy can allow three years to pass – sixty thousand displaced, two hundred and sixty dead, zero convictions – and still call the resulting silence governance.
History has a name for this. It is called abandonment!
Asif Iqbal is a freelance researcher and strategic analyst based in Lahore, with a focus on South Asian affairs. Seldom tweets @asifash.
