The Long Road Home: Ten Ways to Resolve the Manipur Conflict
Three years. Over 250 dead. 60,000 displaced. A Chief Minister who cannot drive to half his state, a Centre that treated Article 355 less as a constitutional responsibility than as an administrative ambiguity¹, and a peace formula consisting of two additional deputy ministers. What follows is neither a catalogue of grievances nor a utopian peace plan. The following ten-point framework is an attempt to identify what can be done now, what will require sustained political will, and what demands a deeper rethinking of the institutions that have failed Manipur. The framework proceeds from people and communities to questions of governance, security, justice, and ultimately the state’s political future.
This ten-point framework is comprehensive because it operates across multiple scales simultaneously: individual attitudes, community institutions, constitutional design, governance, security, economics, geopolitics, and accountability. Most discussions on Manipur focus narrowly on law and order or ethnic grievances. This framework also recognises that the conflict is not a single problem but a layered crisis involving competing identities, failed institutions, transborder realities, and constitutional breakdowns.
| LENS | The Human Foundation |
| LEVEL | Individual |
| TIME FRAME | Achievable Now |
| 01 | |
| Acknowledge the other community’s grief as real: the precondition for everything that follows. | |
Every durable peace process, from Northern Ireland to Rwanda to post-apartheid South Africa, has had to begin at the personal level of the person before it could function at that of the political. In Manipur, the valleys and the hills have been consuming entirely separate information ecosystems since May 2023, with different WhatsApp groups, social media platforms and pages, different perpetrators, different victims, and different women carrying the weight of both. Civic organisations, churches, student bodies, and local leaders in hill and valley communities must build formal structures for cross-community testimony: not reconciliation tourism, but sustained, documented, uncomfortable listening rooted in empathy².
The latest developments make this more urgent, and more difficult. On 7 April 2026, a bomb attack in Tronglaobi, Bishnupur district, killed two Meitei children: a five-year-old boy and a five-month-old infant girl, and critically wounded their mother. The valley’s grief was real and raw. So was the suspicion that followed, and the retaliatory violence it triggered. Meanwhile, in the hills, on 13 May, over 38 people were abducted by armed groups from the Kuki and Naga communities in Kangpokpi and Senapati districts, following an ambush that killed three church leaders who had been trying to broker peace between the two communities. Peacemakers were killed for attempting exactly the kind of cross-community listening this essay advocates. Drone attacks on Tangkhul Naga villages near the Myanmar border have since marked a further tactical escalation, raising the spectre of the conflict metastasising beyond its original ethnic fault lines.
Each community, processing its own dead, finds it harder to hold space for the grief of the other. That is precisely why the structures must be built and not after the shooting stops, but alongside it. This requires no Act of Parliament. It requires only the political courage that has been conspicuously absent for three years. Which is to say, it may be the most ambitious item on this list after all.
| LENS | The Human Foundation |
| LEVEL | Individual |
| TIME FRAME | Achievable Now |
| 02 | |
| Pressure groups must present transparent, enforceable roadmaps, or be recognised for what they functionally are. | |
The Coordinating Committee on Manipur Integrity (COCOMI) on the valley side and the Indigenous Tribal Leaders Forum (ITLF) and Kuki-Zo Council on the hill side have functioned as the real political authorities during this conflict, more trusted, more obeyed, and more consequential than any elected government. Which, to be clear, is not a high bar. The honest objection to calling on these bodies to present roadmaps is: who enforces it? The answer is neither the state nor the courts. It is their own constituents. The enforcement mechanism is a political cost: the civil society, student bodies, women’s groups, and journalists in both communities must make the absence of a written roadmap publicly, repeatedly, and expensively embarrassing for these bodies. This is not idealism but the only leverage that does not require state authority, which in Manipur is currently distributed across several armed groups and two governments, neither fully in control.
The recent record is instructive. In March 2026, the new Chief Minister, Yumnam Khemchand, held talks with Kuki-Zo Council representatives in Guwahati, which was the first such engagement in nearly three years, but no formal agreement was reached. The council called it a beginning; so did the Chief Minister. Beginnings without timelines are a genre Manipur knows well. Meanwhile, the Kuki-Zo Council had, in February 2026, imposed a social boycott on Kuki-Zo MLAs who participated in forming the new government, only to lift it in late April after internal deliberations, a sequence that illustrates both the council’s disciplinary reach over its own community and its capacity to reverse course without public explanation. Kuki-Zo groups have called for any political agreement to be finalised and formally signed before the current assembly’s tenure ends, warning that further delay will only deepen uncertainty and mistrust. That is a roadmap demand. It is also, notably, unaccompanied by a public document specifying what that agreement must contain, by when, and what the consequence of failure would be. The same deficit applies to COCOMI. Slogans about territorial integrity are not roadmaps.
The role of the individual citizen is specific: stop treating pressure group membership as a substitute for democratic accountability, and start demanding answers to the oldest question in politics. Then what? Movements that cannot answer that question are not peace actors. They are permanent grievance managers, just as there are people having self-serving political motives, with a structural interest in the conflict’s continuation.
| LENS | The Human Foundation |
| LEVEL | Gendered Justice |
| TIME FRAME | Achievable Now |
| 03 | |
| Centre women in the peace process: not as symbols of suffering, but as non-negotiable participants at every dialogue table. | |
Women in Manipur have borne the disproportionate weight of this conflict and received almost none of its political attention. They have been the primary victims of sexual violence used as an instrument of ethnic terror. The July 2023 video that finally forced national media to acknowledge the conflict documented precisely this. They make up the majority of the 60,000 displaced persons managing survival in relief camps with inadequate sanitation, healthcare, and security. And in a bitter irony, the Meira Paibi³, the Meitei women’s collective, credited with driving out the Indian Army during the 2004 protests, have in this conflict been documented participating in mob violence against Kuki-Zo communities, a fracture in a movement’s legacy that demands honest reckoning. The International Crisis Group concluded in a 2025 report that the movement, which had maintained a largely positive public image for decades, interceded in the 2023 conflict in ways that aided Meitei militant and militia activity and seriously complicated efforts by security forces to restore order. This does not erase the Meira Paibis’ history, but it means that history can no longer be invoked as a shield against scrutiny. The movement contains multitudes of protectors, aggressors, and everything between and any honest peace architecture must reckon with that complexity rather than flatten it for convenience.
In 2026, Manipur is glued together by weariness and the largely unnoticed work of its women. Kuki-Zo women’s organisations have continued to document displacement and assault from the hills, producing testimony that formal peace processes have yet to formally receive. Women from the two communities have not met across the buffer zones. Their grief has not been heard in the same room. Recent scholarship argues that women’s agency in conflict zones must be understood through a lens that embraces both emancipatory potential and internal tensions, which is precisely the kind of nuance that a formal seat at the table, rather than a symbolic invitation, would require negotiators to engage with rather than paper over.
Women’s organisations from both communities, including Kuki-Zo women’s groups that have documented displacement and assault, must be given formal seats, not courtesy invitations, at every negotiating table. UN Security Council Resolution 1325⁴ on Women, Peace and Security provides the international framework. The gap between endorsement and implementation is, at this point, a political choice. A peace process designed exclusively by the people who started the conflict is, historically speaking, not the most reliable architecture.
| LENS | The Central Government as Accountable Party |
| LEVEL | Political / Federal |
| TIME FRAME | Achievable Now |
| 04 | |
| The Government of India must move from arbitrator to accountable party, and must answer the question it has spent three years avoiding. | |
The conflict has been consistently framed as a dispute between two communities that Delhi is patiently attempting to mediate. This framing is analytically incomplete and politically convenient. The Union Government is not a neutral arbitrator parachuted into a local quarrel⁵. It is a constitutional actor with binding obligations under Articles 355 and 256, a participant in decades of ceasefire arrangements and Suspension of Operations agreements, the architect of counter-insurgency strategies that shaped the armed landscape of the hills, and the manager of the Myanmar border whose porousness became a propaganda weapon. Many of the institutions that structured this conflict were designed, funded, and supervised by Delhi itself. The Arambai Tenggol did not acquire weapons from police armouries in a security vacuum. The SoO framework did not produce armed patronage networks without central knowledge. The Framework Agreement with the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Isak-Muivah) was not negotiated without consequences for Manipur’s territorial imagination.
To frame Delhi as a referee presiding over other people’s violence is not a neutral position. It is self-exculpation. With President’s Rule now lifted and a new government installed, the real question is whether Delhi’s management of this transition signals a genuine effort to bring peace or simply a tactical move to deflect criticism. The Governor of Manipur, Ajay Kumar Bhalla, served as Union Home Secretary for five years and oversaw the ministry during the formative period of the conflict. His institutional memory of every central decision taken since May 2023 is unmatched. That memory has not been made public.
The central question a peace process must force into the open is direct: What political end-state does New Delhi actually want for Manipur? Does it want a genuinely integrated, multi-ethnic state with enforceable hill autonomy? Does it want a managed low-intensity conflict that keeps eastern India governable on central terms? Or does it want the path of least political resistance, which is to keep the current arrangement, adjust the Cabinet cosmetically, and wait for the next election cycle? A peace process cannot succeed if the most powerful stakeholder refuses to define its preferred outcome. The immediate, achievable demand is full transparency: a published account of every central intervention since May 3, 2023, covering what was ordered, by whom, when, and with what result⁶. If the Chief Minister cannot drive to Churachandpur, the least the state can do is explain in writing who is in charge of the road.
ENDNOTE 6
The Central and State governments have established several judicial, administrative, and investigative bodies to handle the Manipur crisis. A three-member Commission of Inquiry (judicial panel) notified by the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) to probe the 2023 Manipur ethnic violence was given a fifth extension in May 2026. The BS Chauhan Commission shall now submit its report to the Centre ‘as soon as possible but not later than 20 November 2026.’ The Justice Gita Mittal Committee (Supreme Court panel), which is responsible for overseeing relief and rehabilitation, has so far filed over 40 reports and its tenure has been extended until 31 July 2026. The progress rating of the Special CBI Investigation Teams (criminal prosecution) and the Unified Command (security operations) have been moderate. One of the most crippling weaknesses of the central intervention is that almost every peace and administrative initiative has suffered from a profound deficit of mutual trust. A similar impediment has been the severe lack of a unified, cohesive roadmap between the panels operating out of Delhi and those on the ground in Imphal. The National Investigation Agency (NIA) fits into a completely different, much more aggressive legal bracket. The MHA has officially handed over more than 15 high-intensity, national-security-linked cases to the NIA since the conflict erupted in May 2023. In terms of final courtroom convictions, zero cases have reached a final verdict. (As of 8 June 2026)
Singh‑chronising Security
Imphal, Jun 1 (PTI): Amid continuing security challenges in Manipur, the Centre has undertaken a major administrative reshuffle. Rajiv Singh, the state’s Director General of Police, has been appointed Secretary (Security) in the Cabinet Secretariat. In his place, senior IPS officer Mukesh Singh assumed charge as Manipur’s new police chief on Monday, an official statement said. Mukesh Singh succeeds Rajiv Singh, a 1993-batch Tripura-cadre officer who had taken over the Manipur Police at the height of the ethnic conflict in June 2023.
| LENS | Institutional Restructuring |
| LEVEL | Constitutional / Governance |
| TIME FRAME | Medium-term |
| 05 | |
| Consolidate the broken architecture of hill governance into one enforceable framework. | |
Hill governance in Manipur is not ungoverned but rather it is multiple-governed by overlapping and mutually undermining frameworks that have never been reconciled into a single enforceable structure. The Hill Areas Committee under Article 371(C) has been consulted when convenient and bypassed when not. In August 2015⁷, the Okram Ibobi government rushed three bills through the Assembly in an emergency session without referring them to the HAC, what tribal organisations called a grave constitutional blunder and what triggered deadly violence across Churachandpur. Eight years of nominal commitment and a killing that left nine people dead in police firing later, the committee remains structurally powerless. The constitutional choice is binary: full Sixth Schedule status, already operational in Meghalaya, Mizoram, and Assam’s hill councils, or a restructured 371(C) with enforceable legislative autonomy, independent budgetary allocation, and binding deadlock resolution. A decision must be made.
The 2026 tripartite formula of a Meitei Chief Minister with Kuki-Zo and Naga deputy chief ministers is not a substitute for this. A Chief Minister who requires security clearance to visit the districts governed by his own deputies is not, in any meaningful sense, governing those districts. What separates symbolic portfolios from actual power-sharing is enforceable legislative autonomy.
Any restructuring of hill governance must explicitly account as well for the unresolved territorial and autonomy claims under the Naga Peace Accord between the Government of India and the NSCN(IM). The prospect of a Greater Nagaland incorporating Naga-inhabited areas of Manipur has never been formally withdrawn. Its final text has never been made public. Negotiations have stalled repeatedly on the NSCN(IM)’s demand for a separate Naga flag and constitution, neither conceded nor formally refused. Designing new hill governance institutions while a parallel territorial negotiation of this magnitude remains unresolved risks creating competing constitutional futures for the same geography. Manipur’s Naga communities in Senapati, Ukhrul, Tamenglong, and Chandel districts, the Kuki-Zo communities whose territories partly overlap these areas, and the Meitei community watching both negotiations with alarm are all stakeholders in a process that currently excludes them all. Resolving the Framework Agreement transparently, with the central and state governments and all hill communities formally consulted rather than informed after the fact, is a precondition for any stable institutional architecture in the state. The government is simultaneously managing two separate territorial conflicts in the same hill areas, without clarifying how they relate to each other, and without resolving either one.
| LENS | Institutional Restructuring |
| LEVEL | Transitional Justice |
| TIME FRAME | Medium-term |
| 06 | |
| Build a transitional justice framework drawing on multiple models, and be honest about what consociationalism cannot do in India’s political context. | |
Across the world, Germany’s Round Table Talks and Two Plus Four Treaty (1989 to 1990)⁸ resolved competing sovereignty claims through multilateral negotiated frameworks. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1995)⁹ offered conditional amnesty for full public testimony. The Good Friday Agreement or the Belfast Agreement (1998)¹⁰ built institutional ethnic parity first, with mandatory coalition, community vetoes, and proportional representation, making past violence processable because the structural conditions producing it were dismantled.
Manipur requires elements of all three: TRC-style community testimony, structured ethnic consultation at the institutional level, and a multilateral negotiating table. Full consociationalism¹¹, with binding community vetoes, faces resistance from the Union government’s centralisation doctrine and is unlikely to be conceded in the near term. The realist version is a structured consultative framework with enforceable ethnic representation in decisions directly affecting hill and valley territories, achievable within existing constitutional authority without a new amendment. Over 6,000 FIRs have been filed since May 2023. The prosecution rate suggests competing priorities.
A peace agreement ultimately succeeds or fails on one question: can displaced people return home safely? The 60,000 people currently in relief camps are not an abstraction. They are the daily evidence that the conflict is not over, and their continued displacement is itself a political variable, sustaining ethnic separation, deepening economic disruption, and providing armed groups with a grievance to manage. Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Colombia all discovered that displacement is not resolved automatically by ending violence. Property restitution, safe return corridors, and reconstruction require dedicated frameworks created before the ceasefire, not improvised after it.
Concretely: a Safe Return Commission, jointly constituted by hill and valley representatives with independent monitoring capacity, must map destroyed villages and disputed properties before political negotiations conclude, since delay systematically disadvantages the weaker party. Compensation frameworks for property that cannot be physically restored must be legally established and independently funded. Reconstruction of destroyed villages in both hill and valley areas must be treated as a public works programme, not as charity, with community employment requirements built in. Security guarantees for returnees must be verified by a monitoring body with the authority to halt return movements if conditions deteriorate, not merely to report that they have. The model here is the Colombia peace process¹², which built transitional justice and return mechanisms simultaneously rather than sequentially, and which still took over a decade to produce partial results.
The Manipur government’s current return policy consists, as far as the public record shows, of periodically announcing that return is possible. The 60,000 people in camps appear not to have received this announcement. The implementation risk is that transitional justice processes can be captured by dominant communities to produce selective accountability. The composition of any truth body must guarantee multi-ethnic investigative authority with independent appointment mechanisms, not government nomination. Return mechanisms face the additional risk that security guarantees are made by the same state institutions that failed to provide security in the first instance.
| LENS | Economic Restructuring |
| LEVEL | Economic |
| TIME FRAME | Medium-term |
| 07 | |
| Build economic interdependence, while being honest that illicit trade and armed patronage networks will actively resist every step of it. | |
The hills and valleys are not economically isolated. They are economically dependent on each other in ways the conflict has now severed, to the detriment of both. Valley traders relied on hill forest produce, transit routes to Myanmar, and hill district markets. Hill communities depended on Imphal for manufactured goods, medical services, and financial institutions. The conflict has substituted this interdependence with parallel, ethnically segregated economies, which is to say poorer economies for everyone involved. Reconstruction requires deliberate economic reintegration: joint hill-valley trade corridors; employment schemes targeting the 18 to 35 demographic that militant recruiters depend on; and land use frameworks that address hill communities’ documented anxiety about valley encroachment into protected tribal land. Poppy cultivation in the hills, cited by the former Chief Minister Nongthombam Biren as justification for security operations and by Kuki-Zo communities as a survival crop in the absence of alternatives, cannot be addressed by aerial surveillance. Crop substitution programmes with guaranteed purchase prices, modelled on tested Nagaland and Mizoram interventions, are available and currently unfunded. The absentee representation problem requires structural correction: virtually all 20 hill district MLAs lived and worked out of Imphal during normal times. Constituency residency requirements, decentralised development offices in hill district headquarters, and community-level audit panels with independent disbursement authority are the corrective.
The honest caveat is that illicit trade networks in narcotics, timber, and arms are not incidental to the conflict. They are partially constitutive of it. Armed groups on both sides derive revenue from these networks. State officials are embedded in them. Economic reintegration schemes that do not account for the organised interests profiting from continued ethnic separation will be systematically undermined by those interests. Development funding has previously been routed through institutions whose leadership had financial stakes in the conflict’s continuation. This is not a coincidence to be managed around. It is a political economy to be confronted. To manage risk for successful implementation, joint trade corridors require physical security guarantees across ethnic lines. Without prior demilitarisation progress, they become contested infrastructure, another resource to fight over rather than a bridge between communities.
| LENS | Economic Restructuring |
| LEVEL | Security / Geopolitical |
| TIME FRAME | Medium-term |
| 08 | |
| Demilitarise and engage the full regional neighbourhood: Myanmar, Bangladesh, and China are not background context, they are active variables. | |
The Suspension of Operations framework, designed as a disarmament pathway, became instead a legitimisation pipeline for armed ethnic militias. By the time violence erupted in May 2023, SoO-covered Kuki-Zo groups and non-SoO Meitei outfits like the Arambai Tenggol both operated with sufficient state adjacency to make the question of who the state was fighting genuinely unanswerable. This is not incidental. The entrenched interests of armed groups, and the state’s structural reliance on them as counter-insurgency proxies, mean that SoO termination will face organised resistance from within the security establishment itself. That reality must be named, not assumed away. Credible demilitarisation requires the termination of SoO agreements tied to verifiable disarmament timelines, independent weapons surrender verification, and symmetric coverage of Meitei and Kuki-Zo armed outfits simultaneously, not sequentially.
The weapons problem compounds this. Approximately 1,000 firearms looted from police stations and state armouries since May 3, 2023 remain unaccounted for despite repeated state appeals for their return. In the context, Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s 2029 deadline¹³ for eradicating insurgency from eastern India and Kashmir reflects the broader strategic doctrine: Kautilyan statecraft employing Sham (persuasion), Dam (monetary incentive), Danda (force), and Bhed (the diplomacy of division). The Arthashastra is an admirable text. As a 21st-century ethnic conflict management instrument, the invoices are beginning to arrive. When all’s said and done, demilitarisation is perhaps the most delicate subject that can be raised in Manipur, which is one of the most militarised regions in the country. Albeit, no serious observer is suggesting the sudden withdrawal of security forces from a landscape saturated with weapons, insurgent networks, and mutual distrust.
The regional dimension is not a footnote but is a load-bearing wall. Myanmar’s civil war continues to generate Chin-Kuki refugee flows that feed the demographic anxiety narrative on the valley side. Bangladesh’s political volatility, and the Rohingya displacement pressures it creates, affect India's entire eastern border security calculus. China’s strategic interest is also hard to ignore. Beijing has historical ties to Naga insurgent groups and monitors the Manipur corridor carefully¹⁴. Because India’s connectivity to Southeast Asia must pass through Myanmar, developments in Manipur are often visible through developments on the Myanmar side of the border.
Engaging Myanmar’s National Unity Government and the Chin National Front on documentation and border protocols, establishing joint border management frameworks with Bangladesh, and treating the region's frontier communities as strategic assets rather than security liabilities are all available foreign policy moves. They require inter-ministerial coordination, not constitutional amendment. There will definitely be implementation risks. The state’s reliance on armed groups as counter-insurgency instruments creates institutional constituencies for the SoO’s continuation. Demilitarisation that threatens these arrangements will encounter bureaucratic and political resistance from within the security apparatus, not only from the armed groups themselves.
| LENS | Education, Media, and the Civic Imagination |
| LEVEL | Education / Media |
| TIME FRAME | Medium-term |
| 09 | |
| Reform education and information, but do not pretend that curriculum design is politically neutral, because in India it never has been. | |
Valley and hill children are now growing up on entirely different accounts of May 2023. Without intervention, this divergence becomes the next generation’s justification for the next round of violence. A revised school curriculum for Manipur, covering the state’s plural history, the Naga political movements, the Kuki-Zo migrations, and the Meitei civilisational claims without ethnic ownership contests disfiguring the account, is within the authority of the state government and requires no constitutional amendment. Inter-community student exchange programmes allow young people to accumulate personal evidence against ethnic stereotypes.
On the information side, Manipur’s digital misinformation ecosystem has been documented as among the most intense in the region¹⁵. Independent, community-funded fact-checking bodies operating in Meitei, Kuki-Zo languages, and English are achievable through civil society and press freedom organisations without state funding. The honest caveat is that curriculum design in India has rarely been politically neutral. A curriculum including an honest account of the Naga movement, the Framework Agreement’s territorial implications for Manipur, and the contested history of Kuki-Zo settlement in the hills will face political pressure from multiple directions simultaneously. A government that has struggled to protect citizens from physical violence will not be asked to produce a curriculum that challenges everyone’s preferred ethnic narrative. It will merely be asked to tolerate educators who try. The safeguard is process: curriculum development must be conducted through a multi-community, academically led commission with published working documents and public comment periods. Independent journalism in Manipur has been systematically chilled since 2023. Restoring press freedom, including the withdrawal of sedition-adjacent charges against journalists covering the conflict, is a prerequisite for any information reform to mean anything.
The operational risk lies in curriculum reform which in India’s federal politics has a reliable trajectory. Whichever community feels its narrative is underrepresented will mobilise against it. The process architecture matters more than the content in the first instance: a credible, transparent, multi-ethnic drafting process is the only thing that can produce a text with cross-community legitimacy.
| LENS | The Long Horizon |
| LEVEL | Federal / Structural |
| TIME FRAME | Structurally difficult |
| 10 | |
| A regional federal rationalisation is intellectually necessary and politically inconvenient, and both of these things are worth saying plainly. | |
This rationale is rated structurally difficult not because it is wrong but because it runs directly against the current Union government’s governing philosophy. Manipur is administered through overlapping, contradictory, and routinely broken frameworks: the Sixth Schedule, Article 371(C), Inner Line Permits, Autonomous District Councils, and dozens of bilateral SoO and ceasefire agreements assembled over decades with no coherent architecture. Political scientist Sanjib Baruah’s concept of the region’s “durable disorder”¹⁶ captures this precisely: the frameworks produce manageable instability, which suits a central government that prefers negotiation to devolution.
Rationalising this architecture into a coherent, rights-based federal structure for the region is the intellectually correct long-term answer. The BJP’s governing consensus holds that centralised federalism, with a strong Union and diminished regional autonomy, serves national security, economic uniformity, and cultural cohesion. The eastern India region, in this framework, is best understood as a series of administrative units that happen to have their own languages, histories, and ethnic configurations, details which need not complicate the larger national integration project. Manipur, three years in, is the empirical case against that position. A state that cannot be governed from its own capital is not an advertisement for the centralisation thesis. This item is placed last not because it is least important, but because it cannot be the first move. Points 1 through 9 must create the conditions, in community trust, institutional credibility, economic interdependence, and a shared civic vocabulary, without which any restructuring of federal architecture simply produces a new set of frameworks to be routinely broken.
Where Manipur Goes From Here
If there is a lesson from the past three years, it is that Manipur’s crisis cannot be resolved through administrative improvisation, security management, or symbolic political gestures. Durable peace requires moving from recognition to reform: recognising each other’s grief, demanding accountability from both governments and armed actors, bringing women into the centre of decision-making, rebuilding governance, pursuing justice, creating shared economic interests, addressing the regional dimensions of insecurity, and confronting competing histories without pretending they do not exist.
None of these measures is sufficient on its own. Together, however, they offer a path from managing conflict to transforming it. Some can begin immediately. Others will take years. All require political courage that has so far been in short supply.
The road home is long because the conflict is not merely about territory, ethnicity, or security. It is about rebuilding trust in a state where trust has collapsed. Until that work begins in earnest, peace will remain an announcement rather than a reality.
1 The Hindu (Restoring constitutional order in Manipur) and The Indian Express (President’s rule imposed in Manipur: What is the provision, its history) noted that the Centre was exercising the powers of Article 355 (controlling state police and deploying central paramilitaries) without accepting the formal constitutional accountability that comes with declaring it.
2 In peace studies, empathy is a dual cognitive-affective mechanism that de-escalates intractable conflicts by bridging “empathy gaps” caused by ingroup bias. Structured empathy humanises adversaries, shifting perceptions from monolithic enemies to entities with legitimate anxieties. This psychological shift allows mediators to uncover underlying interests such as security and identity beneath rigid political positions. Ultimately, mutual empathy lowers defense mechanisms and fosters strategic trust, expanding the zone of possible agreement (ZOPA) necessary for sustainable accords. Reference: Halpern, J., & Weinstein, H. M. (2004). Rehumanizing the Other: Empathy and Peace Building. Human Rights Quarterly, 26(3), 561–583.
3 In the Meitei-Kuki conflict, the Meira Paibi have transitioned from historic community guardians to highly controversial political actors. While framing their actions as civilian defense, they have been heavily criticised for blockading security forces, checking identities, and obstructing central military movements, thereby deeply deepening the conflict’s ethnic divide.
4 UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (UNSCR 1325), adopted unanimously on 31 October 2000, establishes the foundational international framework that links gender equality directly to the maintenance of global peace and security. It is widely celebrated as the historic launching pad for the global Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda.
6 The Central and State governments have established several judicial, administrative, and investigative bodies to handle the Manipur crisis. A three-member Commission of Inquiry (judicial panel) notified by the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) to probe the 2023 Manipur ethnic violence was given a fifth extension in May 2026. The BS Chauhan Commission shall now submit its report to the Centre ‘as soon as possible but not later than 20 November 2026.’ The Justice Gita Mittal Committee (Supreme Court panel), which is responsible for overseeing relief and rehabilitation, has so far filed over 40 reports and its tenure has been extended until 31July 2026. The progress rating of the Special CBI Investigation Teams (criminal prosecution) and the Unified Command (security operations) have been moderate. One of the most crippling weaknesses of the central intervention is that almost every peace and administrative initiative has suffered from a profound deficit of mutual trust. A similar impediment has been the severe lack of a unified, cohesive roadmap between the panels operating out of Delhi and those on the ground in Imphal. The National Investigation Agency (NIA) fits into a completely different, much more aggressive legal bracket. The MHA has officially handed over more than 15 high-intensity, national-security-linked cases to the NIA since the conflict erupted in May 2023. In terms of final courtroom convictions, zero cases have reached a final verdict.
7 On 31 August 2015, amid Meitei protests for an Inner Line Permit, the Manipur Assembly passed three bills: (i) the Protection of Manipur People Bill, (ii) the Land Revenue (Seventh Amendment), and (iii) the Shops and Establishments (Second Amendment). Tribal groups opposed the 1951 residency baseline, fearing disenfranchisement and encroachment. Violence erupted in Churachandpur, where nine protestors were killed and ministers’ homes torched. In defiance, tribal bodies withheld the burial until mid‑2017, when the bills lapsed without presidential assent.
8 Germany’s Round Table Talks and Two Plus Four Treaty (1989–1990): When the Berlin Wall fell, East German citizens and the communist state negotiated the transition together at a Round Table. The Two Plus Four Treaty then gave reunified Germany full sovereignty. A divided nation became one without firing a shot.
9 South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1995): Apartheid ended but wounds remained. The TRC offered perpetrators amnesty in exchange for full public confession. Victims testified. Atrocities were named and recorded. It chose acknowledgment over punishment as the foundation for coexistence.
10 The Good Friday Agreement (1998) or the Belfast Agreement: Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland had fought for thirty years. The Agreement created a power-sharing government, required paramilitary groups to disarm, and let people identify as Irish, British, or both. Violence formally ended.
11 Consociationalism is a model of governance for deeply divided societies, be it ethnic, religious, or linguistic lines. It is built on elite cooperation rather than majority rule. Power is shared across communal groups through coalition governments, mutual vetoes, proportional representation in institutions, and autonomy for each segment. Arend Lijphart, its principal theorist, argued that in plural societies, winner-takes-all democracy deepens conflict. Stability comes not from integration but from structured coexistence that each group is secure enough in its guaranteed share that violence becomes unnecessary.
12 Colombia’s 2016 peace agreement between the Government of Colombia under President Juan Manuel Santos and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) created the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, a transitional justice tribunal empowered to investigate atrocities, compel testimony, and impose “restorative” rather than punitive sentences on those who confess fully. The model’s central insight is that acknowledgement, not imprisonment, is the currency most victims actually want.
13 In February 2026, speaking at the 79th Foundation Day celebrations of the Delhi Police in the national capital, Union Home Minister Amit Shah had laid out an ambitious internal security roadmap, declaring that terrorism and insurgency in Jammu & Kashmir and the Northeast would be completely eradicated by 2029, while Maoist violence across the country would be eliminated this year itself.
14 A cumulative record across news reports, think-tank analyses and peer-reviewed articles makes the strategic case clearly: (i) Reconfiguring Security: India's Act East Policy and Its Impact on Manipur by Atchareeya Saisin, Siriporn Somboonboorana, Somrak Chaisingkananont, Rajen Singh Laishram, ScienceDirect; (ii) How India’s China Challenge Is Reshaping Its Domestic and Foreign Policy: China-India geopolitical competition has notably shaped Indian domestic and foreign policy for decades – as it still does by Aadil Brar, The Diplomat; (iii) Building Corridors of Influence: India’s and China’s Infrastructure Initiatives in Myanmar and Thailand by Sreeparna Banerjee, Observer Research Foundation
15 Media and Policy Analysis and Advocacy Loisang. (2024, January). ‘National’ Media and Manipur Mayhem: The Fourth Estate as a Site of Information War: A Study on Media Coverage of the Crisis in Manipur. MAPAAL; South Asians for Human Rights (SAHR): Fabricated Reality: The Role of Social Media during the Manipur Violence in 2023 (Published March 2026)
16 Sanjib Baruah’s concept of “durable disorder” describes Northeast India’s conflicts not as temporary crises awaiting resolution but as a self-perpetuating political condition. Insurgency, militarisation, weak governance, and political uncertainty become enduring features of the regional order. The disorder remains durable because successive governments have learned to manage rather than solve it, while the resulting system generates patronage, sustains security structures, and enables difficult constitutional questions about autonomy, identity, and self-determination to be deferred indefinitely.
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| Manipur, Ongoing (Image credits: EPA/BBC, middle: Reuters/Independent, above: Altaf Qadri/AP Photo/Al Jazeera) |
References
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