Manipur Under BJP: A Three-Year Failure of Political Will
Three years after ethnic violence erupted in Manipur, the state remains partitioned, heavily militarised, and still bleeding. The latest round of killing at least nine people dead in roughly 24 hours across Kamjong, Kangpokpi and Ukhrul on 9–10 October 2026—occurred while Chief Minister Yumnam Khemchand Singh was in Delhi meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah. The timing is not incidental. It captures the pattern that has defined the BJP’s handling of the crisis: high-level meetings, fresh force deployments, and public appeals for peace that have produced neither accountability nor a durable political settlement.
The original Meitei–Kuki-Zo violence that began in May 2023 under then Chief Minister N. Biren Singh has already claimed well over 250 lives and displaced tens of thousands. Buffer zones and security saturation reduced direct valley-hill fighting, but they also froze a de facto ethnic partition. Instead of using that relative calm to push serious negotiations on land, representation and autonomy, the Centre allowed the situation to fester. When a new BJP government took office in February 2026 after nearly a year of President’s Rule, a new fault line opened between Nagas and Kuki-Zos. Dozens more have died since. Houses continue to be burned. Highways are repeatedly blocked. The hills are no longer a secondary theatre; they are now an active third front.
Delayed Engagement and Selective Silence
Prime Minister Modi’s first visit to Manipur after the May 2023 outbreak came late, after prolonged criticism of his absence from the state. The pattern of limited top-level political ownership has continued. The state government under Khemchand Singh has secured meetings in Delhi and public assurances of central support. Yet the same period has seen repeated killings, including of civilians and village guards, and the continued presence of unrecovered weapons looted from state armouries in 2023. Officials have repeatedly cited the deployment of additional central forces as evidence of seriousness. Force can separate communities for a time. It does not reverse the incentives that armed groups and local actors have to settle scores when they believe the state will not hold them to account.
Civil society groups, including Naga organisations, have demanded the abrogation of the Suspension of Operations (SoO) agreements with Kuki armed groups under the Kuki National Organisation and United People’s Front. These arrangements, periodically renewed, were meant to freeze hostilities and open political talks. Instead, critics across communities argue they have allowed groups to retain operational capacity while ground-rule violations go insufficiently punished. State-level resolutions and cabinet positions in the past called for withdrawal from the pacts. The Centre has largely continued the framework. The result is a peace process that looks active on paper while violence on the ground expands to new ethnic pairings.
Political Costs Deferred, Not Avoided
The BJP has already paid an electoral price. In the 2024 Lok Sabha election, the party lost both of Manipur’s seats. Biren Singh’s eventual resignation and the imposition of President’s Rule came only after prolonged unrest and internal political pressure. The formation of a new government in 2026 was presented as a reset. The re-emergence of large-scale Naga–Kuki violence within months suggests the reset was largely administrative. Deputy Chief Ministers drawn from different communities and the resumption of some inter-state bus services are positive signals, but they do not address the core issues of territorial control, impunity, and the absence of a credible political negotiation that all major groups accept as legitimate.
Myanmar’s civil war has added a cross-border dimension, with armed cadres and weapons entering Manipur’s border tracts. This is a genuine complication. It is also one that has been visible for years. Treating it primarily as a law-and-order spillover rather than a reason to accelerate internal political resolution has left the state exposed on multiple fronts. The Centre’s stated goal of ending Northeast insurgency by 2029 looks increasingly aspirational while Manipur continues to generate new cycles of ethnic armed confrontation.
The Record So Far
Three years on, the measurable outcomes under successive BJP arrangements in Manipur are clear: hundreds dead, large-scale displacement that has not been reversed, incomplete arms recovery, an expanding set of ethnic fault lines, and a peace architecture (SoO, buffer zones, force deployment) that has contained but not resolved the conflict. Meetings in Delhi and condemnations of the latest killings do not change that ledger.
A harder political approach would have prioritised early, sustained engagement by the highest levels of government, transparent accountability for major acts of violence regardless of community, and a willingness to renegotiate or end arrangements that no longer serve their stated purpose. That path was available. The record since May 2023 shows it was not taken with the urgency or consistency the situation required. Manipur’s continuing violence is not an unavoidable legacy of ethnic complexity alone. It is also the product of political choices made and deferred under the BJP’s watch at both the state and central levels.
