Manipur: Shadows Behind the Festival

As Manipur is set to enter its third unforgiving winter since the violence of May 3, 2023, the state confronts a humanitarian reality that can no longer be obscured by spectacle: more than 60,000 internally displaced people remain hopelessly in different locations. Many remain scattered across relatives’ homes, rented rooms, and overcrowded relief camps—none of which offer safety or permanence. The ambitious rhetoric around rehabilitation has not translated into meaningful action, leaving their futures suspended in uncertainty. After nearly three years of surviving in temporary shelters through monsoons, heatwaves, and repeated waves of trauma, these families are being pushed into accepting an abnormal existence as their new, grim normal.

And now they brace once again for cold nights under tarpaulin sheets. Yet, even as this protracted displacement has hardened into a daily struggle for survival, authorities have chosen to prioritise the appearance of normalcy over the substance of justice.

Nothing captures this dissonance more starkly than the decision to proceed with the Sangai festival. While tents in relief camps sag under the weight of winter fog, stages for the festival rose brightly across Imphal; while displaced children queue for firewood, cultural troupes rehearsed under floodlights; while entire villages remain abandoned, VIPs prepared for inaugurations amidst orchestras and decorations. The festival’s glow did not merely contrast with the darkness of the camps; it exposed a deeper structural indifference, a state apparatus more invested in curating an image of recovery than confronting the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe on its own soil.

The Sangai festival is marketed as a celebration of Manipur’s culture, tourism, and an aspiring global identity. Yet, when the very people who embody that identity are living in uncertainty, when children are growing up without proper schooling, when medical deaths are occurring at a rate of nearly one per week in some districts, the festival takes on a different meaning. It becomes, in effect, a state-sponsored effort to divert attention, a deliberate aestheticisation of stability in a time of unresolved conflict. It becomes a performance, one staged on the backs of those whom the state has failed to rehabilitate.

The response from the displaced themselves made this contradiction impossible to ignore. On November 20, IDPs at the Kwakta Relief Camp in Bishnupur held a protest demanding their return and questioning the state’s priorities. Their argument was straightforward: how can the government justify spending crores on a festival when tens of thousands remain confined to camps for almost three years? A day later, on November 21, displaced residents from Churachandpur, Torbung Bangla, and other abandoned settlements attempted to march back to their homes at Phugakchao Ikhai—a sign of desperation from people who had lost faith in the state’s willingness to guarantee their return. When security forces blocked the march and fired tear gas to disperse them, the message was unmistakable: the state could mobilise resources to control displaced citizens seeking their homes, but not to rehabilitate them. Meanwhile, those displaced and still struggling in camps and makeshift shelters across the hills have been drained of even the energy to protest, a far more dangerous and silent place for any community to be pushed into.

This juxtaposition, celebration amidst displacement, state force amidst humanitarian distress, reveals a deep misalignment in governance priorities. It indicates not merely the absence of political will, but a form of governance that has chosen to normalise long-term displacement rather than confront it.

To understand the gravity of this normalisation, one must examine the actual conditions of displacement. As of January 2025, reporting by Asia Reel confirms that 31,900 displaced Kuki-Zo individuals remain in just two districts: 15,832 in 87 camps in Churachandpur, and 16,023 in 49 camps in Kangpokpi. This does not include Meitei-displaced families in Bishnupur, Imphal East, Imphal West, and Kakching, bringing the total displaced population above 60,000. These camps were never intended to last beyond a few months. Yet almost three years later, many have become semi-permanent makeshift homes reinforced again and again with bamboo, tarpaulin, and tin sheets.

What is most alarming is the mortality rate within these camps. According to the Asia Reel report, Kuki Khanglai Lompi (KKL), a locally-led charitable body engaged in humanitarian work, estimated that at least 90 displaced individuals have died in Churachandpur alone from humanitarian causes since May 2023, making it an average of one death every week. These are not deaths from conflict but from displacement: cancer (26%), kidney failure (18%), respiratory disease (16%), heart-related issues (15%), along with drowning, liver failure, tuberculosis, dysentery, measles, diabetes, and even the common cold. When a four-day-old infant dies from cardiopulmonary arrest in a relief camp, or a seventeen-year-old succumbs to a sudden heart attack, it signals something far more serious than mere administrative delay. It signals systemic abandonment, exposing the absence of any functional healthcare infrastructure in the hills.

The geography of abandonment is also telling. Churachandpur is merely 60 kilometres from Imphal, with roads that were once functional and well-maintained. Yet for nearly three years, the district has been functionally cut off from the state capital. All supplies—from medical essentials to basic commodities—now come through Aizawl in Mizoram, a full 350 kilometres away through hilly terrain. The fact that relief for displaced people of Manipur, that too from a certain community, has to be brought from another state, over a distance six times longer than the most direct route, underlines a collapse of political responsibility rather than logistical difficulty.

Amid the magnitude of displacement, one searches in vain for a comprehensive government announcement detailing a clear rehabilitation strategy. There has been no white paper detailing the condition of camps, no structured compensation plan for destroyed homes, no timeline for phased return if all this is even possible, and no transparent mechanism for reconstruction. Instead, the public narrative has shifted toward the restoration of normal life, roadwork inaugurations, community hall renovations, streetlight installations, football tournament finales, foundation-laying ceremonies for club buildings and crematoriums, and “healthy evening discussions” over tea at scenic riversides. Such updates create a perception of progress, but progress in which large sections of the population are not included cannot be considered genuine. Infrastructure, beautification, and cultural events create the illusion of recovery while allowing the human cost of the conflict to fade from public view.

But displacement is not merely physical. It is psychological. Dr H Gojendro Singh, Head of Psychiatry at RIMS, Imphal, reported a significant rise in depression, insomnia, emotional instability, and suicidal tendencies among IDPs. He had shared these insights in October at a one-day Mental Health and Psycho-Social Support Clinic held for internally displaced children currently residing in relief camps across Thoubal and Kakching districts. During this mental-health support clinic for displaced children in Thoubal and Kakching, twenty-seven children from ten relief camps displayed signs of trauma, anxiety, insomnia, and emotional withdrawal. The modest improvement observed—highlighted by Dr H Gojendro—owes far more to the children’s own resilience and the temporary efforts of mental-health workers than to any sustained, systemic support from the state.

Relying solely on natural resilience is dangerously fragile, as the next phase could easily lead to a complete breakdown. The situation in Churachandpur and Kangpokpi is no different; the psychological condition of camp inmates there is deeply alarming and deteriorating rapidly. The absence of trained counsellors, especially for women and children, is an inexcusable policy failure. This should have been one of the earliest and most urgent interventions implemented alongside food, shelter, and medical assistance, not years later. If this mental-health crisis continues to be ignored, its consequences will outlast the relief camps themselves, imprinting long-term psychological scars on an entire generation.

The analytical problem at the heart of Manipur’s displacement crisis is this: the state’s actions indicate that displacement has been implicitly reclassified from an urgent humanitarian emergency to a peripheral, manageable condition. This reclassification is not formalised anywhere, but it is evident in the everyday priorities of governance. A crisis that should have demanded coordinated action across departments, relief, rehabilitation, home, health, psychology, education, and finance, has instead been compartmentalised into silence. The longer the displacement persists, the more difficult rehabilitation becomes. And the more difficult rehabilitation becomes, the more politically convenient it seems to shift attention elsewhere.

There are political incentives at play. Festivals like Sangai are public-facing spectacles that project stability to the outside world. Infrastructure inaugurations are visible symbols of action that are easy to circulate on social media. Ceremonial events energise constituencies and strengthen political capital. Displacement, by contrast, is administratively burdensome, financially costly, and politically sensitive. It requires negotiation across ethnic divides, managing competing land claims, producing transparent data, and acknowledging state failures. Avoidance becomes easier than engagement.

However, avoidance carries long-term costs that the state cannot escape. Prolonged displacement erodes livelihoods, disrupts education, destroys social ties, and entrenches ethnic segregation. It produces parallel societies: those who have resumed “normal life” and those who remain trapped outside it. In the hills, camps become semi-permanent enclaves, while in the valleys, abandoned villages shift the demographic and political landscape. The longer this persists, the more fractured Manipur becomes.

Economically, the absence of a rehabilitation plan forces entire communities into dependency. Agriculture is disrupted across multiple districts. Small businesses shutter permanently. Local markets shrink or relocate. A state with already limited economic resilience cannot afford a long-term internal displacement crisis. Socially, mistrust deepens. Displacement creates psychological boundaries that often outlast physical ones. Politically, state legitimacy weakens each time a displaced person dies from preventable illness, each time camps go without sufficient supplies, each time security forces block IDPs from returning home while festivals proceed uninterrupted.

The analytical question, therefore, arises: What does the state owe its displaced citizens? At minimum, recognition, clarity, and a plan. Recognition means publicly acknowledging the scale and seriousness of displacement—not vague references in speeches, but concrete data and commitments. Clarity requires transparent communication on return, reconstruction, safety, and compensation. A plan demands coordinated, time-bound rehabilitation actions rooted in humanitarian principles rather than political expediency.

Manipur today stands at a critical juncture. Its government faces a choice between continuing to project symbolic normalcy through festivals and beautification projects or confronting the humanitarian crisis that threatens to define the state’s future. Cultural celebration is not inherently problematic. Development is not inherently misguided. But when celebrations proceed while the displaced suffer, when streetlights are switched on while relief camps go dark, when entertainment is prioritised over rehabilitation, the result is not progress; it is an indictment. It is time for citizens, even those untouched directly by the conflict, to recognise the troubling superficiality with which the state is prioritising some issues while neglecting the ones that matter most.

A state is not judged by the festivals it organises but by the dignity it extends to its most vulnerable. Manipur’s displaced citizens ask for the right to return. And a place to return to is also something still so ambiguous. They ask for shelter that can withstand winter. They ask for access to healthcare that prevents needless deaths. They ask for their children to learn, laugh, and grow without the shadow of fear. They ask for a future not written in temporary tents. The state must give a clear answer. Now. 

Until these demands are met, every festival will ring hollow, every celebration will appear callous, and every claim of progress will remain fundamentally incomplete. The Sangai festival, in this context, is not a symbol of cultural pride; rather, it is a reminder of how far governance has strayed from its most essential obligation: to protect and restore the lives of its people. If Manipur is to heal, it must begin by remembering those it has forgotten.