Constitutionally speaking, Manipur—despite her thousand-year history—cannot resolve today’s challenges by endlessly litigating the burdens of the past. The wisdom of constitutional process is the only way forward. The foundational reality is that the state’s constitutional order recognises some thirty-six or thirty-seven communities (perhaps a few more) who have long shared a contested geography despite their differing communal perceptions. Like it or not, they will continue to coexist for centuries.

So the options are brutally clear: live together peacefully, or destroy one another. Emotional rhetoric, sweeping assumptions, communal hostility, and ungrounded political posturing cannot resolve a crisis of this depth. The path runs through constitutional accommodation, democratic negotiation, and the shared protections of Part III.”

Manipur is a small state with a fractured heart. Spread across its hills and valleys are many communities—Meitei, Kuki, Naga, Pangal, and others—whose histories have long intersected through trade, migration, political alliances, cultural exchange, and shared geographies. Yet public discourse has increasingly centred on contested histories rather than shared interdependence.

The result is a slow, obsessive, self-inflicted destruction. Inter-community conflict has become the default language of politics. This, more than any external threat, is the worst form of collective self-harm a people can commit.

Consider the arithmetic of survival. In a nation of 1.46 billion people, every single community in Manipur is a minority—worse, a minority among minorities, a fragment of a fragment. In such a condition, unity is not sentiment; it is strategic necessity. Yet Manipur’s groups have done the opposite. They have weaponised difference, turned neighbours into enemies, and consumed themselves in cycles of hostility.

What has this obsession bought them? Blockaded highways, burnt villages, displaced families, and a generation of children learning to hate before they learn to read. The land that once produced the world’s finest polo players and a unique syncretic culture now produces headlines of gunfights and relief camps.

The socio-economic impact is stark and asymmetrical. For over three years now, the hills have endured extreme hardships and ordeals due to prohibited movement. The National Highways that are Manipur’s economic arteries have become lines of control. This has curtailed access to fundamental rights guaranteed under Articles 19 and 21—freedom of movement, trade, and most urgently, access to healthcare.

Patients from the hills cannot reach Imphal’s tertiary hospitals. Students cannot sit for competitive exams. Traders watch perishable produce rot. The informal economy that once tied hill and valley through barter, labour, and kinship has collapsed. For many citizens affected by prolonged restrictions, constitutional rights increasingly exist more on paper than in lived reality. When geography is weaponised, citizenship becomes conditional.

No community can secure lasting safety through permanent instability for another. Each cycle of vengeance shrinks the space for dialogue. Each atrocity justifies the next. While the communities bleed, the rest of India watches unevenly—sometimes with concern, sometimes with detachment, often without fully understanding the depth of the crisis.

Of course, the roots are real: land rights, reservation policies, migration, historical injustices both real and perceived. Communities have differences and existential fears, real or perceived; these must be resolved through dialogue and constitutional process. But acknowledging roots is not the same as being trapped by them. There is a difference between remembering a wound and reopening it every day. Manipur’s political class—and the non-state actors that shadow them—have too often mastered the latter.

Another tragic reality is that the communities appear to have failed to comprehensively understand each other’s fears and insecurities despite the optics of shared existence glorified through state-sponsored cultural festivities. The Sangai Festival can showcase dances from every tribe on one stage, but it cannot substitute for a shared understanding of why a farmer in Churachandpur fears eviction, or why a youth in Imphal fears demographic change.

Civilisational coexistence mandates deep comprehension of constitutional, historical, and emotional needs. Without that, culture becomes costume. It photographs well, but it does not bind. The state has perfected the choreography of unity while abandoning much of the substance.

This failure is institutional as much as it is social. Legislatures have reduced themselves to supervisors of construction works rather than calling special sessions of the Assembly to discuss threadbare and find constitutional and democratic ways to resolve the unprecedented collapse of public order and governance.

The floor of the House—designed as the primary forum for contestation and compromise—has been silent when it needed to be most vocal. Article 174 mandates the Governor to summon the House. Article 188 binds legislators to constitutional oath, not constituency contracts. Yet tenders are debated more rigorously than the breakdown of Article 21.

The demand for Scheduled Tribe status raised by sections of the Meitei community must also be examined transparently, constitutionally, and with due regard to the protections and concerns of existing tribal communities. Questions of identity and constitutional classification cannot be resolved through slogans, fear, or street mobilisation alone. When the legislature abdicates its deliberative function, the vacuum is filled by the street, the pulpit, and the gun. Governance cannot be subcontracted to relief camps and buffer zones.

The constitutional machinery exists. Part III guarantees equality before law and protection of life and liberty. Part IV directs the state to minimise inequalities and promote fraternity. The Sixth Schedule, though not extended to Manipur, offers a spirit of autonomous accommodation that could inform policy.

The existing district councils, the Hill Areas Committee, and the mandate of the Governor under the Constitution are tools left rusting. Using them requires political will, not new laws. It requires legislators to legislate, not merely inaugurate.

The human cost compounds daily. Beyond the deaths and displacement lies a quieter erosion: trust in institutions. When a patient dies because an ambulance cannot cross a district line, constitutional guarantees begin to lose practical meaning.

When a child misses three academic years because her school is a relief camp, the social contract frays. When traders price goods for risk instead of demand, poverty becomes policy. These are not merely “law and order problems.” They are constitutional failures. And they are reversible only through constitutional means.

There is no easy exit from a conflict this deep, but the direction forward remains constitutional rather than retaliatory. First, restore movement. Free movement is not a concession; it is a right under Article 19(1)(d). Without it, every other right is weakened. Second, convene the Assembly. Put land, reservation, and security on the table, not on the street.

Debate, divide, vote—this is what legislatures are for. Third, rebuild the administrative neutrality of the state. A police force, a bureaucracy, or a relief policy seen as partisan cannot mediate peace. Fourth, acknowledge fears in writing. A multi-community white paper on land, migration, and autonomy—vetted by constitutional experts from all groups—can replace rumour and propaganda as the basis of discourse.

The future does not have to be a continuation of the present. If Manipur’s communities step back from the abyss—through grassroots dialogue, truth commissions, economic cooperation, and a collective refusal to be used by conflict entrepreneurs—they can still build a saner, safer future. But the window is narrowing. Every day spent in the quagmire adds another layer of trauma that will take decades to undo.

Civilisational coexistence is not a slogan. It is a discipline. It demands that communities understand not just their own history, but the insecurities of others; not just their own rights, but the fears others associate with losing them. The Constitution can compel behaviour, but it cannot compel comprehension. That work is political, social, and moral. It must happen in the Assembly, in the church, in the temple, in the market, and in the classroom—not just on the festival stage.

Sooner rather than later, Manipur’s communities must find a way out of the cycle they are trapped in. Because a house divided against itself does not merely weaken; it risks consuming itself. The hills and the valley will still share a map. The question is whether they will share a future—or only a ruin.