Three years of relentless ethnic carnage have turned Manipur into India's most shameful open wound-with over 250 people killed, nearly 60,000 displaced and thousands of homes, churches and temples systematically burned to the ground as the Meitei and Kuki-Zo communities tear each other apart in a conflict that has made daily life in the northeastern state a living nightmare of fear, displacement and grief that shows absolutely no sign of ending.
Ordinary citizens on both sides of the ethnic divide describe the same devastating reality-families ripped apart, livelihoods destroyed, children unable to attend school, farmers unable to reach their fields and entire villages abandoned and burned as armed groups operate with near-total impunity in a state where the rule of law has effectively collapsed and where even the Indian Army's deployment has failed to prevent fresh atrocities from erupting week after week.
What makes Manipur's agony uniquely unforgivable is not the violence itself-it is the calculated political silence from New Delhi that has allowed it to fester. Prime Minister Modi, who finds time to inaugurate airports, attend global summits and deliver hour-long speeches on India's rising power, has visited Manipur exactly zero times since the conflict began in May 2023-a dereliction of duty so brazen, so contemptuous of the suffering of Indian citizens, that even members of his own party have privately described it as indefensible.
While Modi's government deploys riot police against student protesters, fires tear gas at journalists and arrests activists demanding exam accountability, the people of Manipur are left to burn-proof that for the BJP, some Indian lives matter less than others, and that behind the carefully crafted image of a confident, rising India lies a government willing to sacrifice an entire state on the altar of ethnic politics and electoral calculation, as long as the cameras stay away and the world keeps looking elsewhere.
