Still Waiting: Manipur After Modi’s Visit

On September 13, 2025, nearly two and a half years after ethnic violence engulfed Manipur, Prime Minister Narendra Modi finally visited the state. His brief stop in Churachandpur — one of the worst-hit districts — and Imphal came after much anticipation. Many in Manipur had watched closely when, in March 2024, he travelled to neighbouring Assam to unveil a statue and launch Rs 18,000 crore worth of projects in Kaziranga, just miles away, yet worlds apart in priority.

The long delay, punctuated by overseas visits, raised inevitable questions about priorities. For many, it felt like showing up to a funeral too late: the gesture may be solemn, but the moment has passed. Still, such timing may reflect the complexity behind the scenes of a visit calculated, with the hope that what follows will speak louder. The visit, particularly to Churachandpur, was historic indeed in one sense, because no Prime Minister had set foot in this district since the late Rajiv Gandhi in 1988.

That it took four decades for the Indian state’s highest office to acknowledge Churachandpur is not just a delay; it’s an indictment, as obvious as it is. The hills of Manipur have always been administratively peripheral, economically underserved, and politically expendable. Their absence from the national consciousness is structural, not accidental.

When violence broke out in May 2023, it exposed what many in the hills already knew: they live in a state that governs them but does not represent them.

The PM’s brief “touch-and-go” stop in Churachandpur, followed by a visit to Imphal, was framed as an effort to strike a balance to show even-handedness. But the lived realities on the ground are impossible to mask.

“Can hill people now safely enter Imphal? Can Meiteis travel to the hills? Is the barbed wire that divides Manipur purely symbolic, or is it now constitutional? Why does it take mass violence for Delhi to look East? And why, even then, does it fail to listen? These are the questions that echoed most often in conversations. 

A language not meant to be heard

One of the most revealing moments of the Prime Minister’s visit came during his speech at Peace Ground in Churachandpur, delivered entirely in Hindi without translation into local dialects or even English, which he had used beautifully just hours earlier in Mizoram. In a region where Hindi is not widely understood, the speech felt distant, even alienating.

This isn’t about opposition to Hindi, India’s linguistic diversity is its strength, not a threat. But language is not just a tool of communication; it is a bridge of recognition. When leaders speak in a language people cannot understand, especially in moments of pain, the message received is not connection, but exclusion. And in a place that has long felt unheard, that silence speaks louder than words.

Development without dignity is not development

The Prime Minister’s announcement of Rs 7,300 crore in development projects was framed as a signal of renewed national commitment, a gesture meant to rekindle connectivity, promote inclusivity, and restore faith in the state’s capacity to rebuild. But in a region still marked by displacement, distrust, and political fracture, development cannot be understood merely as capital expenditure. It must be read as a political act and its allocations as declarations of who matters.

When scrutinised, the distribution of these funds exposes more than uneven development; it reveals an asymmetry of attention. For “statewide” projects, Rs 4,163 crore is earmarked, many of which, in practice, will remain disproportionately centred on the valley. But for Kuki-Zo inhabited regions, which absorbed the deepest wounds of the 2023 ethnic violence, the total allocation amounts to a mere Rs 70 crore. Of this, only Rs 23 crore is directed to Churachandpur, the district that bore the greatest humanitarian losses. Just two projects. There is no clear, comprehensive rehabilitation plan. Nor dedicated investment in rebuilding lives, which people have been waiting to hear.

This imbalance is not merely a planning failure; it is a failure of recognition. It compels a hard question: what does “inclusivity” mean when the most afflicted communities are rendered marginal in the very plans meant to heal them?

Even the notion of “connectivity” becomes conceptually hollow when those who need access the most, the Kuki-Zo population, still cannot travel to Imphal, where airports, hospitals, and administrative institutions are concentrated. Meanwhile, the Meitei population, too, cannot access the national highways cutting through restive hill districts. Infrastructure cannot succeed in isolation. Roads cannot bridge trust. Corridors cannot substitute for constitutional guarantees.

But beyond questions of distribution lies an even more fundamental issue: accountability. The assured Rs 7,300 crore is not an abstraction. It is public money. In a state where institutional trust has already been deeply eroded, every rupee must be accounted for transparently, rigorously, and publicly. Who are the implementing agencies? Which districts are prioritised in execution, not just in announcement? What monitoring mechanisms are in place to ensure that these funds do not become another layer of misgovernance or political patronage?

Development, if it is to be a form of justice, must be auditable. Its outcomes must be measurable not only in roads built or buildings erected, but in the restoration of dignity, access, and equality. Otherwise, the language of progress becomes a mask for exclusion.

Ultimately, the government’s claim to national integration will not be judged by project launches, but by whether development reaches the wounded and the waiting. Importantly, whether the state has the political honesty to track and publish where the money goes, who it touches, and what it leaves behind.
 
An uncomfortable truth: India’s constitutional blind spot

What has most deeply disillusioned the Kuki Zo community is not only the delay in the Prime Minister’s visit, but the silence on the most fundamental issue that has shaped their political consciousness since the 2023 violence: the question of self-determination. Over the past year, this aspiration has been voiced not through appeals and marches alone, but in a series of informal consultations and backchannel dialogues initiated by government interlocutors. 

That it found no place in the Prime Minister’s address, and no acknowledgement, no roadmap, not even a gesture, was not simply disappointing; it was, for many, a quiet extinguishing of hope.

The absence of any formal audience with the 10 Kuki-Zo legislators during his visit only reinforced the perception that this was not a moment of listening, but a performance of presence. This, of course, immediately led to the respective legislators filing a petition to the PM for “early political settlement.” It raised difficult but necessary questions: Was this visit a substantive political intervention, or merely symbolic? Was it intended to resolve, or simply to be seen?

This silence is not without consequence. India’s Constitution, one of the most visionary documents of postcolonial governance, is increasingly strained in regions where the aspirations of Indigenous and peripheral communities are evolving faster than the state’s institutional reflexes. The Kuki Zo appeal for a separate administrative arrangement should not be misread as secessionist or anti-national. It is not a rejection of India, but a reflection of the deep structural failures that have denied this community protection, political agency, and equal dignity under the current state apparatus.

Instead of reacting with suspicion, the Centre must ask: What institutional failure has made such demands necessary?

India has never been and was never meant to be a singular identity. It is a federation of distinct cultures, geographies, and historical experiences, held together not by homogeneity, but by a constitutional commitment to pluralism. The task, therefore, is not just to defend the letter of the Constitution, but to adapt its mechanisms to sustain the diversity it promises to protect.

The main concern for Meiteis, on the other hand, is Manipur’s integrity, which the PM seems to have indirectly assured by lavishly praising Manipur’s history and contributions to India. However, as no new commitments were made, the Meitei response remains lukewarm. The aspirations of both communities must never come at the cost of the other. Moving forward, the government must pave a clear and just path for peace in Manipur, rather than avoiding the difficult realities. It is essential to now recognise the deep geographical divides and urgently find ways to address this.

The PM must, therefore, strike a fine balance and produce a workable mechanism to address the very appeal for a self-determination of a community that can no longer be ruled or administered via Imphal, with justice. 

Without this, every outbreak of violence will be followed by the same cycle: visit, announce, appease, ignore.

A visit, or a signal?

For many, the Prime Minister’s visit was perceived as ceremonial, one that is carefully choreographed, strategically timed, and arriving not in the heat of crisis, but well after the fires had cooled. To some, it appeared less like a reckoning and more like a formality undertaken when the political cost of continued silence had become untenable.

Yet to reduce it entirely to optics may miss a more layered reading.

Many say, Modi is not one to walk into a political firestorm without calculation. His decision to come only now, after months of public pressure and mounting criticism, may in fact signal that something beneath the surface has shifted. Those quiet backchannel negotiations, long unseen but active, are beginning to yield space for movement. His arrival, then, may not just mark a symbolic closing of distance, but a cautious acknowledgement that momentum, however faint, exists.

More than the length of his stay, which lasted only a few hours, it is the intent behind the visit that should carry significance. After all, a leader could remain for days and still leave without commitment or clarity; presence is not measured in hours, but in the weight of its purpose.  

The PM’s decision to visit signals a level of commitment. While specifics are awaited, one can choose to interpret this as a positive step, holding onto the hope that meaningful outcomes will follow.

Political, yes. Calculated, certainly. But not devoid of meaning.

He came not at the height of pain, but perhaps when those in power judged the moment ripe to shape a narrative to step in when the possibility of resolution, or at least credit, seemed within reach. That may feel unsatisfying to many, but it does not render the gesture empty.

In a state that has endured over two years of silence from the country’s highest office, even a brief visit can matter not because it solves anything, but because it signals, however faintly, that the centre has remembered the periphery.

He came. He saw. He extended a hand cautiously, perhaps conditionally, but consciously. And in the complicated geometry of Indian politics, where sincerity and strategy are rarely separate, better late than never is not a consolation — it may well be the beginning of something long overdue.

What must come next

There is no straightforward path ahead, for resolving the crisis in Manipur demands more than administrative intervention or rhetorical gestures. It requires an unflinching engagement with the deeper moral and political fault lines that have long divided the hills and the valley. At the heart of the crisis lies a historically entrenched asymmetry of power and representation, underpinned by mutual suspicion, systemic neglect, and competing imaginaries of belonging. Confronting this reality calls not merely for political courage, but for emotional honesty, a willingness to acknowledge that unity cannot be coerced through silence or managed through development schemes alone.

The time for symbolic overtures and vague reassurances has passed; what is needed now is a principled institutional response that reflects both the gravity and the complexity of the situation. That process of “healing” whatever it constitutes, must begin with a credible and inclusive political dialogue, not a choreographed performance. It must involve substantive engagement of all communities and stakeholders, particularly those whose voices have historically been excluded.

The government must discerningly refrain from engaging with radicals from both communities, but hear and listen to what the people who are at the core of the crisis and conflict, and mindfully tread the road ahead. It must not, at all costs, return to the superficial calm but to the construction of a durable framework for peace rooted in justice, trust, and mutual recognition. Governance, in this context, must evolve beyond procedural uniformity to accommodate the plural, layered realities of the Indian polity; linguistic and cultural inclusion must become structural imperatives, not symbolic afterthoughts.

Equally, the idea of federalism must be reimagined in substantive, not merely administrative, terms:  recognise that indigenous communities evolve over time and should not be expected to simply comply with existing structures, they must be allowed and encouraged to actively shape and co-author their own path forward.

Finally, connectivity should be seen not just as building roads and networks, but as ensuring everyone can move freely with dignity and safety.