Why is India’s Manipur burning for three years?

Last Saturday, alleged fighters ambushed vehicles on a national highway in the state’s Ukhrul region, killing two men, including a retired soldier – and pushing a state trapped in a cycle of ethnic violence for more than three years now to the edge once again.

Smoke rises from burned vehicles heading towards Churachandpur district following an attack in Bishnupur district, Manipur, India, April 7, 2026 [Reuters]

Why is Manipur burning?

Once a princely kingdom, the region that constitutes Manipur was taken over by the British until it became a part of independent India in 1947. Historically, the Meiteis have dominated the plains and the valley – where the capital, Imphal, is based, too – while the Kuki and Naga communities have mostly lived in the hills.

In post-independent India, land laws were introduced to keep this delicate balance intact: Meiteis were barred from buying land in the hills, where the Kuki-Zo community was given a scheduled tribe status that carved out jobs, education, and political representation for them.

In the coming years, a web of ethno-nationalist rebellions emerged in Manipur – with fighter groups from Meitei, Kuki, and Naga communities – each demanding territorial sovereignty and autonomous rule.

In 2023, the fuse was lit.

Nongthombam Biren Singh, a former football player and regional leader of Prime Minister Modi’s Hindu-nationalist BJP, became the state’s chief minister in 2017. He is from the Meitei community.

In public comments, Biren Singh started increasingly portraying the hill-based tribal communities as “illegal immigrants” and “narco-terrorists”, while appearing to support the Meitei nationalist outfits.

Then, on April 14, 2023, the Manipur High Court passed an order widely viewed as a step towards recognising the majority Meitei community as a scheduled tribe – a move that the Kuki-Zo community feared would make jobs and educational opportunities previously reserved for them accessible to Meiteis, too.

The court order prompted state-wide ethnic clashes.

Biren Singh, the chief minister, was widely accused of being partial as the fighting raged, favouring Meitei groups. Meanwhile, Modi – who, by that point, had already visited more than 60 countries, many of them multiple times, as prime minister – chose not to visit Manipur, drawing intense criticism.

More than 260 people have been killed, and at least 60,000 have been displaced into segregated relief camps since the conflict began – numbers that civil society activists say are conservative.

Over time, the segregation further deepened, with government forces managing buffer zones, while the young and old, gun-wielding men, guard their areas. More than 250 companies of the Central Armed Police Forces are stationed in Manipur, alongside other forces, making the state among the most militarised zones in South Asia.

In February 2025, Biren Singh finally stepped down as chief minister – by then, the BJP was clearly on the back foot politically, having lost support from within the Meitei community, too, over its failure to end the violence. The BJP had lost both parliamentary seats in Manipur in the 2024 national elections, with the opposition Congress winning those seats. Finally, Modi visited Manipur in September 2025.

After the recent clashes, Manipur’s new chief minister, Yumnam Khemchand Singh, also from Modi’s BJP, said the perpetrators were yet to be identified and that the ⁠bomb attack was the “handiwork of individuals or groups with an interest in disturbing the prevailing peace”.

In more than three years, the conflict has left no one untouched in the state, spilling over into daily life. In the village of Tronglaobi, where two children were killed in the bomb blast, a majority of the people are dependent on farming, but large parts of the agricultural fields reportedly lie in so-called “buffer zones” – heavily militarised areas that are out of bounds for both valley-based Meiteis and hill-based Kuki-Zo communities.

Photographs of deceased Meiteis who were killed after ethnic violence broke out in Borobekra are placed next to graves dug for their funeral, in Jiribam in the northeastern state of Manipur, India, November 22, 2024 [Francis Mascarenhas/Reuters]

Why is peace eluding Manipur?

Samrat Choudhury, author of the 2023 book Northeast India: A Political History, said the core issue that has remained unresolved, and will likely remain so, is a perpetual problem related to the ideas of the nation-state and nationalism.

“You have a situation in Manipur’s geography, where different groups have ended up claiming overlapping territories,” Choudhury told Al Jazeera. This historical problem goes back to a shift from centuries-old ways of life and understanding borders to the current understanding, with borders and lines on maps, the author added.

Rebel groups across the spectrum of communities have “maximalist claims to territory”, Choudhury said. “It is a clash of right-wing nationalist movements with maximalist claims on territory because all their maps overlap.”

Choudhury added that the window to resolve this crisis was “right at the beginning of tensions, before things got out of hand”.

“It was a lack of sufficient response from the government that has now led to a de facto division of the state,” he told Al Jazeera. “Who’s giving Manipur the attention it requires?”

Pradip Phanjoubam, a senior journalist and editor of the Imphal Free Press in Manipur, said “there are people who benefit from keeping this state of anarchy.”

The chaos also feeds a multimillion-dollar narcotic trade, Phanjoubam added.

Manipur sits on the edge of the “Golden Triangle”, an area in Southeast Asia covering civil war-torn Myanmar, and one of the biggest drug trafficking corridors in the world, featuring heroin, opium, and synthetic drugs like methamphetamine.

Pradip said the state is rife with conspiracy theories about what was behind the latest bomb attack, and who could benefit from shattering the peace.

“One can sense that there are people with vested interests who want this conflict to carry on. Maybe not to full scale, but just keep it enough so that there is this lawlessness, there’s that chaos,” he told Al Jazeera. “To keep the anarchy, within which they can function.”

During reporting and research across the state, Phanjoubam said he has met with people from both sides, who yearn for peace and a return to normalcy, including those who do not see the rival community essentially as enemies.

“In a frozen conflict, in Manipur, the hostility remains in the background, even if it doesn’t show up immediately,” he said. “That’s why the security situation in Manipur remains very much fragile.”

Meanwhile, in New Delhi, there is a sense that the crisis can still be “managed”, said Choudhury, the author. “There is great confidence that everything can be managed, eternally forever, unendingly managed: The headlines, people, everything will be managed.”

That, in turn, leaves Manipur burning, unattended, on the edge of spiralling further into chaos.