DC Edit | Manipur continues to burn as Centre, state govt dither

Protests are taking place in the capital with legislators of even the ruling party faring the ire of people who feel insecure at home; mobs are setting fire to the homes of the wielders of power and their kin. Security agencies under the Union government are forced to fire upon armed militants operating from their hideouts. The home minister is being forced to cancel his busy schedule in the all-important state elections and sit with security agencies and analyse what is happening. The NPP, an ally of the BJP and a member of the NDA, has withdrawn support to the Biren Singh government in the state.

Neither the members of the majority nor those of the minority community feels safe in the state; none, starting from the Chief Minister to the months-old babies are safe there; no force, whether it is the state police or the Central paramilitary force, can control the passions running high as the state witnesses a violent harvest of hatred that was sown there in the last one-and-a-half years.

It defies logic that those who are responsible for nursing the state back to normalcy have not bothered to do so ever since violence broke out in the border state on May 3, 2023. While the state government has been accused of running a partisan administration inimical to the minority Kuki tribes, the Union government pays only lip service to the need for peace to return. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has not yet visited the state though there were elections to the Lok Sabha that covered Manipur, too. Only once did he make a mention of the unfortunate incidents in the state; nothing more has come out of him or his office since. Even the Supreme Court’s harsh observations about the total breakdown of state machinery have failed to move either the Union or state government. The formation of a unified command under a pointman appointed by the Union government has not helped the situation either.

It is not just the determined use of force that is absent in the state; there is no political process either. It goes against all ethos of democratic governance that neither the Union government nor the state government has launched an initiative to bring the warring ethnic factions to a discussion platform and find a solution to the issues that have several dimensions, and historical baggage to boot. There has been no attempt to identify the faultlines and address their impact on the larger polity. On the other hand, the governments and the BJP which runs them do everything that justify Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge who last week said the mess in Manipur serves the divisive agenda of the saffron party.

The price the nation has paid for the acts of commission and omission on the part of the government when actors of violence reared their heads in the past was too high. The tortured bodies that surface at the nook and cranny of an Indian state should serve as a stark reminder for the powers-that-be of that price.