Suspected militants set fire to several homes in the abandoned Khoikai Kuki village in Kamjong district on 21 October, after residents had already fled the latest round of Kuki-Naga clashes. More than 50 people have died and dozens of houses have been burnt since the Naga-Kuki violence erupted in early 2026, spreading across Tamenglong, Noney, Kangpokpi, Ukhrul and Kamjong. The Director General of Police visited Kamjong that day. A Joint Action Committee called a statewide sit-in and shutdown for 22 October. The Federation of Haomee planned a noise protest. Transfers, visits, deployments and bandhs are the familiar tools of a state that has run out of answers.
The 2023 Meitei-Kuki-Zo conflict never ended. It simply metastasised. After three years of killings, arson and mass displacement, the hills have opened a second front between two communities that previously shared space, if uneasily. Armed groups, including factions linked to the NSCN-IM and Myanmar-based outfits, operate with lethal ease. Buffer zones and ceasefires exist on paper; on the ground they have become maps for selective impunity. The new BJP government under Chief Minister Yumnam Khemchand Singh, installed after a year of President’s Rule, has added a Kuki-Zo and a Naga deputy chief minister. It has not produced a political process that addresses land, autonomy or the demilitarisation of the hills.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Centre bear the decisive responsibility. The double-engine government has treated Manipur as a security management problem rather than a political failure. Additional forces on top of the tens of thousands already deployed, SP transfers, and ritual condemnations do not substitute for sustained dialogue, enforcement of existing agreements, or a clear political settlement. When conflict spreads across five districts in under a year, the question is not which local commander or district official failed. It is who allowed an unresolved ethnic war to spawn a second one while claiming normalcy was returning.
The response remains procedural theatre. Accountability does not. Until the Centre treats the multiplication of violence as a failure of political will rather than an operational inconvenience, Manipur will keep opening new fronts.
