There comes a point in every conflict when the question is no longer who started it. The question becomes why those in power allowed it to continue for so long.
Manipur crossed that point long ago.
Since May 2023, homes have been burned, families displaced, women attacked, villages destroyed and communities forced to live behind ethnic lines inside the same country. What began as a conflict between Meiteis and Kuki-Zo groups has become something far more dangerous: a failure of the Indian state to act as a neutral protector.
Manipur is not only facing violence. It is facing abandonment.
More than 200 people have been killed. Tens of thousands have been displaced. Many still live in relief camps, unable to return safely to the homes they fled. But numbers alone cannot explain the depth of this crisis.
This conflict is rooted in history, land, identity and mistrust. Manipur had its own monarchy and political institutions before joining India. The 1949 merger is still seen by many as a wound. For decades, Delhi treated much of the northeast through a security lens. Militarisation, AFSPA, alleged abuses and counterinsurgency left scars that never fully healed.
Today’s violence stands on that broken ground.
The Meiteis dominate the Imphal Valley, the political centre of Manipur. Kuki-Zo and Naga communities live mostly in the hills. Disputes over land, tribal status, forest rights, migration and political control kept building for years. When violence erupted, many victims did not see the administration as neutral. They saw it as absent at best, partisan at worst.
That is why the crisis became so poisonous.
Nothing exposed the failure more brutally than the assault on Kuki-Zo women who were stripped and paraded by a mob in May 2023. India woke up only after the video surfaced weeks later. But the women had already suffered. Their families had already buried their dead. Their fear was real before the rest of the country decided to look.
That remains Manipur’s question: why did it need a viral video for India to notice?
New Delhi speaks of a rising India — strong, confident and global. Manipur tells another story: citizens unable to return home, women unable to depend on the state, families trapped in camps, villages divided by ethnicity, and security forces unable to restore trust.
This is not national integration.
This is managed fracture.
So, is Manipur slipping from India’s hand?
Yes — but not in the way people imagine. India still has the army, the constitution and the political machinery to control Manipur. But states are not lost only through maps. They are lost when citizens stop believing the government sees them as equal. They are lost when people trust armed groups more than police. They are lost when relief camps feel safer than home.
By that measure, Manipur is already slipping.
Control is not belonging. Territory is not consent. A constitution cannot force people to feel protected by a state that has failed them.
Manipur does not need to be controlled. It needs justice. It needs safety. It needs accountability. It needs freedom from fear, militarised rule and the feeling of being treated as a frontier instead of a homeland.
A country is not held together by soldiers alone. It is held together by trust.
And in Manipur, that trust has been broken.
India may keep Manipur on its map. But maps do not prove loyalty. Administration does not prove belonging. Silence does not prove peace.
The real danger for India is not that Manipur disappears from its map tomorrow.
The real danger is that many of its people already feel lost.
And when people no longer feel protected, respected or heard, freedom stops being a dream.
It becomes the only way forward.
About the Author
