This representative image was generated using Google Gemini. For more than three years, the Manipur conflict has been narrated as a tragedy between communities. The story usually begins with ethnic tensions, proceeds through mutual distrust, and ends with New Delhi portrayed as a patient mediator trying to restore order. It is a convenient narrative. It is also incomplete. The central question that India has spent years avoiding is deceptively simple: can the Government of India honestly claim to be a neutral arbitrator in a conflict whose institutional foundations it helped construct? To ask this question is not to absolve any community, armed group, political actor, or local institution of responsibility. It is to recognise that the Indian state is not an external observer. It is a constitutional actor whose decisions, policies, agreements, security doctrines, and political calculations have shaped the terrain upon which the conflict unfolded. Under Articles 355 and 256 of the Const...