On 27 November 2018, police in Manipur arrested the journalist Kishorechandra Wangkhem for a video he had posted on social media criticising the state’s chief minister N Biren Singh, his Bharatiya Janata Party and India’s prime minister Narendra Modi. In the video, Wangkhem objected to the ruling dispensation’s push for a local celebration of the Rani of Jhansi, a 19th-century Maratha queen lionised by Hindu nationalists but with little or no connection to Manipur’s history. The courts, finding no cause for judicial action against Wangkhem, released him. But he was arrested again a few days later for the same social media post, this time under the stringent National Security Act.
Wangkhem has been in and out of prison since, repeatedly charged and arrested for his online criticisms of the BJP and its ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. His detentions, which the state has repeatedly justified as being for the maintenance of order, have been a public performance of state power over anyone who might challenge the Manipur government’s preferred narratives. Wangkhem is from the Meitei community, and his persecution reveals how the state has not hesitated to extend its repression to dissident members of Manipur’s ethnic majority, which Biren Singh claims as his own people.
While this logic of power extends across ethnic and community lines, its effects are unevenly distributed. The Biren Singh government’s apparatus of control has been more stark and repressive in the case of minority communities, and the state apparatus has exercised violence most freely against the minority Kuki-Zomi-Hmars.
Hanglalmuan Vaiphei, a 21-year-old Kuki-Zomi student, was arrested on 30 April 2023. This was days before ethnic violence broke out between Meiteis and the tribal Kuki-Zomi-Hmar minority – violence that has continued with little respite for the last 20 months and counting. Vaiphei’s offense had been merely sharing a Facebook post critical of the Manipur government. His detention was shrouded in procedural violations, including his mother being coerced into signing documents she did not understand. That May, a police vehicle transporting Vaiphei from a court proceeding was intercepted by a mob and he was beaten to death.
Under Biren Singh’s BJP-led Manipur state government, arrests, intimidation and narrative manipulation have turned governance into a tool to dominate the public. The violence that erupted in Manipur in May 2023 was a manifestation of decades-old ethnic tensions in the state, exacerbated by Biren Singh’s divisive ethnic politics. But a less-noticed aspect of Manipur’s trajectory is how underlying and fuelling those tensions were years of systemic repression at the hands of a state machinery designed to silence dissent and marginalise minority communities, all in an attempt to consolidate power.
For Manipur’s tribal minority communities, after decades of marginalisation, the immediate tipping point was the issue of tribal land rights and the Biren Singh government’s threat to them – something they saw as being representative of their broader struggle against institutional discrimination and neglect. Meanwhile, even among the majority Meitei community on the other side of Manipur’s ethnic divide, there had been growing dissatisfaction with governance under Biren Singh’s rule. The state’s response, which helped to escalate and precipitate the violence, was a narrative that directed this frustration into anger against the tribal communities instead of against the government.
The pattern of the state silencing dissenting democratic voices from within the Meitei community while stoking majority fear and anxieties against the Kuki-Zomi-Hmars has historically been part of Manipur’s politics. The state’s orchestration of ethnic tensions through policies and public discourse rendered differences virtually irreconcilable, leaving no alternative but confrontation.
This dual strategy serves a broader purpose: to fragment democratic resistance. By criminalising dissent across ethnic lines while escalating conflict along ethnic lines, the state has widened gaps of distrust and isolated potential opponents.
WITH THE RISE of the BJP government in Manipur in 2017, the state apparatus expanded its reach beyond governance and towards establishing a systematic framework of domination. This domination operates through an intricate interplay of surveillance, punitive measures and the regulation of public discourse, targeting not just tribal communities but anyone perceived as a threat to the ruling regime’s authority. These mechanisms reflect a deeply embedded logic of power that seeks to normalise compliance and silence dissent through calculated displays of state control.
State suppression is not confined to physical acts of detention; rather, it is deeply embedded also in its ability to control narratives. In January 2021, two editors of Frontier Manipur were arrested on charges of sedition and under sections of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act – another stringent law that has been applied arbitrarily against critics of the government. The state’s flimsy justification was that they had published an article seemingly sympathetic to the long-running armed movement for Manipur’s secession from India. Both editors had earlier been critical of the BJP and its policies. Like with Wangkhem’s arrests, this episode exemplifies the state’s efforts to regulate information. By effectively criminalising the publication of dissenting opinions, the government sought to delegitimise alternative perspectives, thereby consolidating its ideological hegemony. The arrest of 23-year-old Usham Manglem in July 2020 for putting up social media posts mocking the chief minister, Biren Singh, shows how even the most banal forms of expression have been subject to scrutiny and punishment.
The Manipur government has also reached beyond state borders in its attempts to control narratives and suppress criticism. When the Editors Guild of India (EGI) published a report on the causes of ongoing violence in Manipur, the state filed charges under Section 153A of the Indian Penal Code, accusing the authors of inciting communal hatred. The Supreme Court, however, dismissed these complaints as the state government’s “counter-narrative”, emphasising that errors in a report did not constitute criminal activity. The Manipur government’s targeting of EGI members is consistent with a larger pattern in which journalists and fact-finding organisations are silenced in order to maintain a dominant narrative. By criminalising institutional critiques, the state conceals the underlying causes of violence and systemic failures.
The surveillance, disciplinary measures, arrests, detentions and deaths have embedded fear and compliance into the fabric of the state. This has resulted in much of the populace internalising obedience and self-regulating their behaviour in anticipation of the state’s punitive gaze.
While the state suppresses resistance wherever it might occur, the unequal application of power widens the mistrust between communities, further entrenching the divisions that the state capitalises on to maintain control. As can be seen in the current conflict, the state has deliberately positioned itself to align with an ultranationalist cultural sense of indigeneity with Meiteis at the centre. This is most evident in Biren Singh’s rhetoric.
The chief minister has frequently referred to the need to protect the “indigenous” people of Manipur against infiltration by illegal immigrants – a dig at Kuki-Zomi-Hmars – who ostensibly pose a threat to Manipur’s identity and integrity. He has said, “We will not compromise with outsiders who want to destroy our culture and our land.”
VIOLATIONS OF INDIGENOUS RIGHTS, cultural marginalisation and land encroachment have all become instruments of dominance under Biren Singh’s administration. Biren Singh became chief minister in 2017 following a breakdown of the local Congress party – earlier the state’s dominant political force – after a series of political protests in Imphal and Churachandpur, Manipur’s two major urban centres.
The Meiteis form the majority in the Imphal Valley, which is also home to the state capital. The state’s northern hills are populated mostly by the Naga community, who also live in smaller contiguous areas in the outer western, eastern and south-eastern hills. The Kuki-Zomi-Hmars, meanwhile, are generally settled in the southern hills, as well as foothill regions to the immediate north, east and west of the valley, situated between the Naga-dominated and Meitei-dominated areas.
In Imphal, in the lead-up to the violence, there was growing anxiety among Meiteis over “migrant” ownership of shops and establishments. This led to calls to implement an Inner Line Permit system, which would require that travellers to Manipur get special permission and documentation limiting their stay within the state. This was meant to check any influx of migrants and to keep businesses and land from being transferred to non-residents. This obsession culminated in the rapid passage of three bills – the Protection of Manipur People Bill, the Manipur Land Revenue and Land Reforms (Seventh Amendment) Bill, and the Manipur Shops and Establishments (Second Amendment) Bill.
These bills extended the Imphal government’s authority to the hill districts, overriding the Hill Areas Committee of the legislative assembly, which
comprises elected legislators from the tribal-dominated areas of the state and exercises administrative powers over them. The proposed reforms threatened to turn large segments of the tribal populace into “non-locals” while transferring land presently under tribal control over to state ownership. This caused widespread tribal protests that lasted for more than two years before the outbreak of violence.
These protests, and Meitei counter-protests, laid the ground for further polarisation. Biren Singh rode a rising tide of resurgent Meitei ultranationalism, fuelled by anger against the protesting tribal communities, and it carried him into power. The influx of refugees into Northeast India after the coup across the border in Myanmar in 2021 only stoked fears of being overwhelmed by foreigners and non-locals, and Biren Singh exploited the Meitei fear of outsiders by conflating the issues of refugees, separatists and minority communities more broadly. The resulting erosion of social trust became both a tool and an outcome of the state’s strategy to consolidate its control.
In early 2023, Biren Singh withdrew the state government from tripartite talks on the establishment of territorial councils. The talks were held under the aegis of a 15-year Suspension of Operations agreement between the central government, the state government and tribal communities represented by the United Progressive Front (UPF) and Kuki National Organisation (KNO), two insurgent parties. The territorial councils were supposed to secure special constitutional provisions for these tribal communities in line with those already granted to tribal populations in other states of Northeast India, and the parties had seemingly come very close to an agreement before Manipur’s withdrawal.
However, any permanent peace agreement would have limited the state government’s direct reach, locking it out of dictating administrative and financial affairs in the hill districts. Biren Singh’s position and power had relied on a Meitei ultranationalist narrative, with tirades against “illegal immigrants” and accusations of “separatism” against the Zomi Revolutionary Army and the Kuki National Army, head organisations within the UPF and KNO respectively. To accept a territorial council in agreement with these parties could be seen as weakening the hardline stance that had kept him in power.
Since Biren Singh’s power over democratic dissent has not been absolute, his government has resorted to constitutionally questionable practices, silencing dissenting voices even within its support base – the Meitei majority. The human-rights activist Babloo Loitongbam and the police official Thounaojam Brinda both fell victim to vigilante groups like the Meitei Leepun and the Arambai Tenggol as a result of their criticism of Biren Singh over his alleged involvement in the drug trade, which he has rhetorically railed against.
The Meitei Leepun and Arambai Tenggol are not fringe vigilante groups. Rather, both have significant ties to the political establishment. Arambai Tenggol in particular has been linked to BJP leaders – including Robin Mangang Khwairakpam, whose social media profiles highlight his association with the BJP’s national executive committee. Additionally, it has also received patronage from symbolic figures like Sanajaoba Leishemba, a parliamentarian and the head of Manipur’s former royal family. The state’s reluctance to take decisive action against their unlawful activities – including attacks on critics of the government – has led to widespread allegations of tacit state support.
THE ONGOING VIOLENCE began in May 2023 as localised mob violence, but it was a result of years of deep-seated mistrust and systemic suppression on a much wider scale. The immediate spark was the Tribal Solidarity March on 3 May, a protest against the state’s aggressive encroachment on tribal forests. Kuki-Zomi-Hmars returning from the march clashed with organisers of a Meitei blockade on the borders of Churachandpur district. Things escalated from there with the burning of the Anglo-Kuki War Centenary Gate, allegedly by Meiteis, and with rumours spread online of Kuki-Zomi-Hmar men raping Meitei women en-masse.
The congruence of the events and rumours that led to the escalation of the violence has led many to believe this violence was pre-planned. Fundamentally, it was built on the suspicion and mistrust between communities, which resulted from structural failures in Manipur’s governance. This was starkly explicit when mobs were left to rampage uncontrolled, leading to the displacement of about 60,000 Kuki-Zomi-Hmars from Imphal and the surrounding foothills, and of between 10,000 and 15,000 Meiteis from the hill districts.
By the time the march took place, societal fractures had widened to the point where confrontation seemed almost inevitable. In early November 2024, after a year-and-a-half of simmering tensions and episodic violence, another surge of violent unrest was sparked by the brutal murder of a Hmar woman, set ablaze at her home in Jiribam district. Six women and children, mostly from the Meitei community, were subsequently discovered dead. According to reports, at least 16 incidents of violence involving deaths, injuries, arson and heavy gunfire occurred between 1 October and 18 November. At least 20 people died in Jiribam between 7 November and 18 November. Manipur’s security adviser, Kuldiep Singh, reported that the central government in New Delhi was sending an additional 90 companies of security personnel to Manipur to try and bring the situation under control, which would bring the total headcount of central forces deployed in the state to well over ten thousand. The state was put under a blanket internet shutdown for another two weeks or so from 16 November, replicating similar measures from when the violence first broke out.
The aftermath of 3 May 2023 highlights an important truth: power mechanisms that suppress dissent and stimulate division subsequently destabilise society. Manipur’s crisis is more than just a local conflict; it is a testing ground for the machinery of state-sponsored oppression. This is not just Manipur’s problem. What has happened in the state is a blueprint for authoritarian governance beyond its borders too, with dissent being suppressed and anger channeled towards a convenient “other” instead of broken state institutions.
Peace in Manipur requires more than just addressing the current crisis; it necessitates a systemic overhaul of how power is wielded. The state must transition from a model of governance based on domination to one that prioritises justice, equity and autonomy for its citizens. This includes recognising minority communities’ rights to self-determination, allowing the expression of majority concerns without fear – including when these might challenge the ruling powers – and establishing structures that encourage dialogue rather than division.
True reconciliation is only possible with accountability. The state must confront and address the historical and ongoing injustices it has inflicted on its people. Without such a reckoning, the cycle of unrest will continue, and the repressive machinery on display in Manipur will continue to thrive and spread. If it is left unchecked, it is just a question of when, not if, this same machinery will be deployed elsewhere in India as well. Whether it is dismantled will be a test of whether India’s governance remains democratic or descends deeper into authoritarianism.