The Lift Line
Manipur now has a Meitei Chief Minister, a Kuki Deputy Chief Minister and a Naga Deputy Chief Minister. It also has four more Naga civilians dead in Kangpokpi. Power has been shared. The State has not been.
Why This Editorial Matters for Your Exam
Manipur is the country’s most demanding live case study in internal security and federalism at once, and it is unusually rich because it now contains almost every instrument the Indian state possesses: Article 356 imposed and revoked, Article 355, a Suspension of Operations agreement, an ongoing Naga peace process, Scheduled Tribe classification litigation, Article 371C, and a humanitarian displacement crisis. Examiners like Manipur precisely because a good answer has to hold internal security and constitutional design in the same frame.
GS Paper 2: Federalism; issues and challenges pertaining to the federal structure; mechanisms for the protection of vulnerable sections; the role of the Union in States. GS Paper 3: Linkages between development and the spread of extremism; internal security challenges; role of security forces.
Background and Context
Manipur’s demography is the starting point of every explanation. The Imphal valley occupies roughly a tenth of the State’s area and holds the majority of its population, predominantly the Meitei community. The surrounding hill districts cover about nine-tenths of the area and are home to the Naga and Kuki-Zo tribal communities. Land law reinforces this: valley land is transferable, hill land is protected, and the Meitei community’s demand for Scheduled Tribe status, which would allow land acquisition in the hills, is the single most combustible issue in the State.
The current phase of violence began in 2023, on 3 May, when a Tribal Solidarity March in the hills, called against the prospect of Scheduled Tribe status being extended to the Meitei community, escalated into clashes that have not fully stopped since. The State has since been effectively partitioned along buffer lines, with populations displaced into relief camps by community.
President’s Rule under Article 356 was imposed in February 2025 and revoked in February 2026, when an elected government returned under Chief Minister Yumnam Khemchand Singh, with Deputy Chief Ministers drawn from the Kuki and Naga communities. That deliberately inclusive arrangement is the backdrop against which the editorial’s argument must be read, because it removes the easy explanation that the violence continues for want of representation.
The newer element is the Kuki-Naga fault line. It matters disproportionately because the Naga question is not confined to Manipur: it runs through the Framework Agreement of 2015 between the Government of India and the NSCN (Isak-Muivah), and any deterioration in Naga-Kuki relations inside Manipur feeds directly into a national negotiation.
The Analysis
The editorial’s first contribution is to name the mutation. Public understanding of Manipur is still organised around Meitei versus Kuki. That framing is now incomplete. Kangpokpi, a Kuki-dominated district, sits between Naga-dominated Senapati to the north and the Meitei-majority valley districts to the south. It is therefore the pressure point at which all three communities meet, and it is where the newest killings have occurred.
The second contribution is to show the reprisal chain as a chain. The sequence given is specific: the murder of Kuki-Thadou church pastors in May, followed by retaliatory abductions on both sides, followed a month later by the recovery of the bodies of six Naga men, followed now by the killing of four Naga civilians in Kangpokpi. Each act is presented by its perpetrators as a response to the previous one. This is the defining property of reprisal violence: it becomes self-financing, requiring no fresh grievance to continue, only a memory of the last incident.
The third is the blockade economy, which is where conflict becomes governance failure. Blockades imposed by Meitei, Kuki and Naga groups have turned highways into contested space. In a State where National Highway 2 (Imphal to Dimapur) and National Highway 37 (Imphal to Jiribam) are the only meaningful supply arteries, a blockade is not a protest, it is a siege. Supplies stop, food and fuel prices rise, and access to healthcare fails. Because Kangpokpi straddles the main route, the district that is most contested is also the one whose closure hurts everyone else most, which gives every armed group a permanent instrument of leverage and every other community a permanent grievance.
The fourth is the humanitarian figure, and it deserves to be the most-cited number in any answer on Manipur. Right to Information data show that more than 700 internally displaced people have died in relief camps. These are not battle deaths. They are the deaths that accumulate when people live for three years in temporary shelter without adequate healthcare, nutrition or sanitation. A conflict is conventionally measured by its casualty figure; this number is a reminder that the larger toll is usually indirect, delayed and uncounted.
The fifth and most analytically important point is the editorial’s conclusion about representation. The State government is as inclusive as its composition can be made. It has still found little success. The editorial’s explanation is exact: political representation alone cannot resolve the conflict when the communities remain socially segregated. Power-sharing operates at the level of the cabinet. Segregation operates at the level of the road, the market, the school and the hospital. If the second is not addressed, the first floats above a society that has already partitioned itself.
Data and Institutions Vault
Prelims-grade facts:
The current sequence:
- May 2026: Kuki-Thadou church pastors murdered; retaliatory abductions on both sides follow
- June 2026: bodies of six Naga men recovered
- Late August 2026: four Naga civilians killed in Kangpokpi district
Key figures:
- Conflict duration: more than three years, the origin being 3 May 2023
- Deaths of internally displaced persons in relief camps: more than 700 (per Right to Information data)
Political timeline (background):
- 3 May 2023: Tribal Solidarity March; violence begins
- February 2025: President’s Rule imposed under Article 356
- February 2026: President’s Rule revoked; elected government restored
- Chief Minister: Yumnam Khemchand Singh (Meitei), with Deputy Chief Ministers from the Kuki and Naga communities
Geography for Prelims:
- Imphal valley: about 10 per cent of area, majority of population, predominantly Meitei
- Hill districts: about 90 per cent of area, Naga and Kuki-Zo communities
- Kangpokpi lies between Senapati (Naga-dominated, north) and the valley districts (Meitei-majority, south)
- Lifeline highways: NH-2 (Imphal to Dimapur), NH-37 (Imphal to Jiribam)
- Manipur borders Nagaland, Assam, Mizoram and Myanmar
- Loktak Lake, the largest freshwater lake in the North East, with its floating phumdis and Keibul Lamjao National Park, the only floating national park, home to the Sangai deer
Constitutional and legal instruments:
- Article 355: duty of the Union to protect States against external aggression and internal disturbance
- Article 356: President’s Rule; imposed February 2025, revoked February 2026
- Article 371C: special provision for Manipur; the Hill Areas Committee of the Legislative Assembly
- Article 342: specification of Scheduled Tribes; the Meitei ST demand runs through this route
- Manipur (Hill Areas) District Councils Act, 1971: Manipur’s hill areas are not under the Sixth Schedule, unlike Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram
- Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958: in force in parts of the State
- Inner Line Permit: extended to Manipur in December 2019
Peace-process instruments:
- Suspension of Operations (SoO) agreement with Kuki militant groups, first signed in 2008, with ground rules on designated camps and weapons in double-locked storage
- Framework Agreement, 2015, between the Government of India and the NSCN (Isak-Muivah); the Naga National Political Groups (NNPGs) are the parallel track
- Kuki National Organisation (KNO) and United People’s Front (UPF) are the two SoO conglomerates
The Debate
The case for patience is genuine. The inclusive government has been in office only since February. Ethnic reconciliation after three years of killing is measured in years, not months, everywhere it has been attempted, and no democratic instrument stronger than a representative State government exists to be tried. Judging the formula this early risks discarding the one approach that has not yet been given time.
The case for urgency is that the reprisal cycle does not wait. Each unpunished killing lowers the threshold for the next and widens the set of parties with a claim to revenge. The expansion from a two-community to a three-community conflict happened during the period of restored government, which is evidence that time alone is not working in the direction reconciliation requires.
The sharpest disagreement is over sequencing. One view holds that a political settlement on land, identity and Scheduled Tribe status must come first, because the violence is downstream of unresolved status questions. The other, which the editorial endorses, holds that the immediate objective must be a framework in which people can safely move, trade and live as neighbours, with the harder questions deferred. The second view is the more defensible, because negotiations over identity conducted between populations that cannot physically meet have no constituency capable of ratifying them.
There is a real tension in the disarmament question too. Enforcing the Suspension of Operations ground rules and cracking down on extremist elements is necessary, but selective enforcement against one community would confirm the partiality that each side already alleges. Simultaneity is not a nicety here; it is the whole of the legitimacy.
Diagram-in-Words
How to Think About This
The transferable frame is that ethnic conflict is sustained by segregation, not merely expressed by it, and that representation and reconciliation are different goods.
Power-sharing solves the question who governs. It does not solve the question who trusts whom. When populations are physically separated, each community’s information about the other comes entirely from rumour and from the last atrocity, because the ordinary corrective of daily contact has been removed. This is why inclusive cabinets can coexist with continuing killings, and it is a finding that generalises well beyond Manipur.
Test it against the standard comparisons. Northern Ireland’s Good Friday Agreement delivered power-sharing in 1998, and the peace walls are still standing decades later, which is the same gap in a more studied form. Bosnia’s Dayton settlement created a functioning representative formula over a society that remained segregated. In each case the sequence that worked was: stop the killing, restore movement, rebuild contact, then negotiate status.
For an Indian answer, add the federal layer. Manipur’s hill areas are governed not under the Sixth Schedule but under the Manipur (Hill Areas) District Councils Act, 1971, with Article 371C providing a Hill Areas Committee in the Assembly. The autonomy instruments available in Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram are therefore weaker here, which is one structural reason hill communities have historically sought remedies outside the State framework.
For GS4, the ethical core is impartiality under conditions of suspicion. When every community believes the State is partial, the only way to establish impartiality is symmetrical and visible enforcement, including against the group the enforcing officer belongs to. Justice that is merely fair is insufficient; it has to be demonstrably fair to people predisposed to disbelieve it.
Way Forward
Identify and prosecute the perpetrators of the Kangpokpi killings, and do it visibly and symmetrically. The editorial’s first demand is also the minimum test of State capacity. Every unprosecuted killing is an argument for private revenge.
Make highway movement the first measurable deliverable. Convoy security on NH-2 and NH-37 is a concrete, auditable objective on which the State government can be judged monthly, and it directly relieves the food, fuel and healthcare crisis.
Empower civil society and church leadership as interlocutors. In a segregated society, the institutions that still hold cross-community legitimacy are rarely political. Women’s organisations and church bodies in Manipur retain reach that parties do not.
Enforce the Suspension of Operations ground rules and disarm militant groups, simultaneously across communities. Sequential disarmament will be read as disarming one side, and will fail.
Address the relief camps as a public health emergency in their own right. More than 700 deaths in camps is not a byproduct of the conflict; it is a separate, fixable failure of nutrition, healthcare and sanitation delivery.
Separate the immediate from the eventual. Safe movement, trade and coexistence now; land, identity and Scheduled Tribe status through a deliberate process later. Attempting the second before the first has produced three years of evidence about how that ends.
PYQ Linkage and Practice
Connects to standing UPSC themes on internal security challenges in the North East, the role of the Union under Articles 355 and 356, Sixth Schedule and alternative autonomy arrangements, and development-extremism linkages.
Practice question: “Inclusive political representation is a necessary but insufficient condition for ending ethnic conflict. Critically examine this proposition with reference to the situation in Manipur since 2023.” (250 words)
Sources: The Indian Express, Ministry of Home Affairs
Source: Breaking Manipur's Cycle of Reprisal: A New Fault Line Opens — Ujiyari.com | Free UPSC & State PCS Editorial Analysis
