Manipur’s Poppy Fields Have Eclipsed Chin State of Myanmar

A new country is being born inside India, and its currency is heroin.Its borders run along the mist-shrouded ridges of Kangpokpi, Churachandpur, Pherzawl, and Tengnoupal. Its army is made up of thousands of “village volunteers” who guard poppy fields. 

Its treasury overflows with tens of thousands of crores earned in mountain hamlets that have no roads yet boast fleets of gleaming SUVs. Its national flower is the opium poppy—blooming in greater density and profit than anywhere else in Asia. This is not metaphor. This is cold, brutal arithmetic.

Kangpokpi district alone now cultivates nearly double the opium poppy of the entire Chin State in Myanmar. Add Churachandpur and Senapati and you have a narcotics super-province that dwarfs the old southern wing of the Golden Triangle. Six to eight thousand hectares of sovereign Indian soil—an area larger than Imphal and Guwahati combined—have been annexed by the most ruthless industry on earth.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime proudly publishes its annual Myanmar Opium Survey — a glossy, 64-page report complete with helicopter photos and satellite maps — and devotes page after page to Chin State’s “alarming” 1,040 hectares of poppy. Manipur, where cultivation is five to eight times greater, receives not a single line, not one satellite pass, not even a footnote. 

Myanmar’s Chin State recorded 1,040 hectares of poppy in 2025, enough for the UNODC to sound the alarm and devote pages of hand-wringing analysis. Kangpokpi district alone has already admitted to 1,748 hectares, with satellite imagery revealing another 1,749 hectares of freshly cleared forest unmistakably turned over to poppy — visible from space to anyone willing to look. Add Churachandpur, Pherzawl, Senapati, and the rest of the hill belt, and Manipur’s total cultivation now stands between 6,000 and 8,000 hectares — and still rising.

In short, a few districts of one Indian state have quietly outgrown an entire province of Myanmar that the world treats as a crisis zone. The numbers do not lie; only the world’s attention does. In November 2025 alone, roughly 270 hectares of poppy were destroyed in Manipur.

This is not an oversight; it is deliberate erasure. Silence from an agency mandated to fight the global drug trade is not diplomacy — it is sponsorship. Every kilogram of Manipur heroin that reaches Mumbai, Melbourne, Delhi or Dublin began as a flower guarded by an Indian-made bullet, yet the UNODC prefers to look away rather than embarrass a permanent Security Council aspirant. By pretending the crisis stops at the Indian border, the United Nations is not protecting sovereignty; it is protecting the traffickers across the border.

For 70 years the world has spoken of the Golden Triangle: that lawless triangle where Myanmar, Laos and Thailand converge, once responsible for half the planet’s illicit heroin. In the last five years a fourth arm has quietly grown out of the old triangle and reached deep into Indian territory. It ends not in Bangkok or Kunming, but in the mist-covered hills of Manipur.Indian officials now openly acknowledge what satellite imagery has been screaming for years: the hill districts of Manipur have become one of the most prolific opium-producing zones in all of Asia. 

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At ten to fourteen kilograms of raw opium per hectare, refined into heroin worth four to six crore rupees per hectare on the global market, the annual turnover of this shadow state is 30-50 thousand crore rupees. That is more money than the legitimate budget of Manipur itself, more than most Indian states spend on health and education combined, generated by villages that still burn firewood for light.

And the world—including most of India—pretends not to see. Every month the country erupts in perfectly rehearsed outrage when Jammu & Kashmir Police seize four or five kilograms of heroin. News anchors scream about “Pakistan-sponsored narco-terrorism.” Hashtags trend. The Home Ministry issues triumphant statements. Retired generals explain how the ISI is poisoning Punjab’s youth to fund terrorism. The ritual is now as predictable as Diwali.

Meanwhile, in Manipur, security forces intercept ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty kilograms of the exact same high-purity heroin almost every day along the Myanmar border. 

In November, a joint team of the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) and Delhi Police seized 328 kg of methamphetamine from the national capital, officials said. Valued at approximately ₹262 crore in the international market, the consignment marks one of the biggest recoveries of the drug in Delhi in recent months.Union Home Minister Amit Shah praised the Delhi Police and NCB for the seizure, stating that the government is “shattering drug cartels at an unprecedented pace”. 

In another crackdown on narco-terrorism, the Narcotics Control Bureau seized 6.149 kg of high-grade heroin worth ₹12.5 crore in Assam, busting a Myanmar-based trafficking network that routes drugs from Chin State through Manipur’s riverine paths into the Barak River when land routes are blocked. NCB, with CRPF and Assam Police, intercepted a motorboat near Silchar, arrested two smugglers, and recovered the heroin hidden in soap cases beneath bamboo layers. This operation doesn't find much coverage in National media, except few regional papers. Even, the leaders do not brother to tweet. 

The same haul in Punjab or Kashmir would dominate headlines, but in the Northeast, such massive drug seizures rarely get the attention they deserve. The drug is identical—Number 4 grade, moving through the same Golden Crescent–Golden Triangle pipeline. The final destination is identical: college hostels in Delhi, clubs in Goa, veins of teenagers from Siliguri to Surat. 

Only the entry point changes. One route is branded “enemy action” and triggers national hysteria. The other is quietly buried in a two-line PTI ticker and forgotten by breakfast.

This is not just hypocrisy. This is a national security catastrophe in slow motion.While television studios hyperventilate over five kilograms in Kashmir, Manipur has become India’s own slice of the Golden Triangle. Satellite imagery, NCB reports, and figures tabled in the Manipur Assembly confirm thousands of hectares of poppy cultivation, overwhelmingly in Kuki-Zo dominated hills. 

Between 2017 and July 2024 the state destroyed 16,788 acres and registered 412 FIRs. Eighty-seven people were arrested, including sixteen village chiefs. Eighty-four per cent of all detected poppy acreage in the five years to 2023—13,122 out of 15,497 acres—lay in Kuki-Chin areas. These are not allegations; these are official numbers laid before elected representatives.

What began as former CM of Manipur N. Biren Singh’s celebrated War on Drugs—once India’s pride—has, by 2025, metastasised into full-blown narco-terrorism. Poppy fields are guarded by armed mobs. Police teams sent to burn crops are chased away with sticks, stones, and gunfire. Village heads caught with kilograms of opium are defended by tribal apex bodies, granted bail within weeks, and carried home on shoulders as heroes. 

The new law of the hills is written in intimidation. The shift from shamefaced cultivators to defiant armed protectors unfolded in plain sight. On 24 February 2023, hundreds of Kuki villagers from thirty-five localities stormed the Deputy Commissioner’s office in Kangpokpi, forcing her to accept a memorandum demanding the release of arrested village chiefs and an immediate end to poppy destruction. 

In November 2024, a thirty-strong police team sent to raze fields near Makhan village reportedly turned and fled when confronted by growers. On 31 January 2025, a joint police-CRPF team was attacked with sticks at Lhungjang, the home village of Kuki Inpi chief Ajang Khongsai; an FIR was lodged against the tribal leader himself. 

And on 22 November 2025, the chief of Gunphaibung village, Lunkhohao Kipgen, was caught with nearly a kilogram of opium, just one day after security forces had torched forty-one acres in the same district. What began as quiet defiance has hardened into open insurrection: the poppy fields are no longer merely cultivated; they are now sovereign territory, defended by mobs and shielded by silence.

These are not protests of poor farmers; they are declarations that the Indian state is no longer welcome in its own territory. When a village headman can traffic openly, when a tribal apex body can attack Indian security forces and suffer no consequence, when entire districts thumb their noses at the Constitution and are rewarded with more central funds the next year, the Indian state has already lost half the war.

When N. Biren Singh launched his “War on Drugs” in 2017, and the formation of Anti Narcotic Task Force (ANTF) in 2022, Manipur briefly became India’s pride: thousands of acres torched, village councils banning the crop, churches denouncing the “white flower of death,” and the state hailed as a rare success story. That triumph, however, carried the seeds of its own destruction. 

The ethnic violence that exploded on 3 May 2023 did not merely pause the campaign; it reversed it completely. Kangpokpi, Churachandpur, and Tengnoupal turned into no-go zones. Many linked to ceasefire-suspended militant groups—seized control of the hills. Poppy returned bolder and deadlier than ever, now guarded by rifles. The new model is ruthlessly simple: sow the seeds in the thinly policed border belt inside Myanmar’s Chin State where Indian boots cannot follow, harvest under the lazy eyes of local militias who collect a small tax, then walk the raw opium or heroin straight back across a border that exists only on paper. 

At the core of this narco-terrorism are the sprawling poppy plantations in Myanmar’s Chin State and Manipur’s hill districts, where opium cultivation exploded amid civil war and economic collapse, generating hundreds of millions in annual profits that directly serve as blood money for Kuki militant outfits and global jihadist networks linked to ISIS, funding weapons, recruitment, and sustained violence across the region.

The same trails that once smuggled AK-47s and meth precursors now carry gum opium in the opposite direction, shielded by ethnic kinship and the endless distraction of communal clashes. What has emerged is narco-terrorism in its purest, most vicious form: drug money buys guns, guns protect the fields, the fields produce more drugs, and the cycle spins faster with every season. A war that once burned poppy has become the perfect smoke-screen behind which an entire narco-empire now thrives.

Drug money from poppy cultivation is fuelling the Manipur conflict.The Meitei-Kuki clashes that began in May 2023 are being deliberately worsened by foreign forces. Pakistan’s ISI runs online disinformation campaigns to widen the divide and portray Manipur as a failed state. Bangladesh-based groups spread one-sided narratives that paint Kukis as victims and Meiteis as aggressors, while quietly inserting ISIS-style radical messages into refugee and relief networks.In essence, a local ethnic conflict is being transformed into a prolonged hybrid attack on India’s security through propaganda, funding, and external meddling, all through poppy plantations. 

A real ethnic clash between two communities is like a forest fire sparked by lightning: it roars, consumes everything in its path for a few weeks or months, then burns itself out from sheer exhaustion, local elders stepping in, or the state stamping it down. It does not rage at white-hot intensity for three straight years, growing more sophisticated and deadly by the season. 

Yet that is exactly what we are watching in Manipur—900-plus days of relentless ambushes, burned villages, sniper duels, drone bombings, and weapons that belong in an army arsenal, not in the hands of farmers.Something is pouring oxygen and petrol on this fire, and that something is money—vast, untraceable, continuous rivers of it.

Fighters have to be paid every month, psyops and propagandists in Washington, London, Islamabad, Dakha and Geneva have to be funded, lobbyists have to fly business class, social-media war rooms have to run 24×7, safe houses in Bangladesh and Myanmar have to be maintained, and black-market arms dealers do not hand out M16s, Carl Gustav rocket launchers, or military drones on credit. 

A kuki village volunteer guarding his paddy field with an old .303 does not wake up one morning with a crate of AKs, night-vision scopes, and bomb-dropping quadcopters unless someone with very deep pockets is writing the cheques.

In the hills of Manipur there is exactly one crop that prints that kind of money: poppy. Hundreds of crores every harvest, cash that never sees a bank, never pays tax, and never runs out. No cabbage patch, no lentil field, no orange orchard can finance a three-year war and an international PR circus. Only opium can.

Remove the poppy cash and this war collapses in weeks. Leave the poppy fields untouched and it will conveniently roll into a fourth year, a fifth, a tenth—exactly as long as someone wants India bleeding on its eastern frontier.That is the brutal, simple truth written in every blooming flower on those guarded hillsides.

Every overdose in Shillong, every suicide in Guwahati, every mother in Punjab burning her son’s body—they are all casualties of a war we refuse to fight because the enemy does not speak Urdu.If the Indian state is serious, it must treat twenty kilograms seized daily in Manipur with the same fury it reserves for five kilograms in Kashmir. 

That means invoking the full, merciless severity of the NDPS Act: immediate attachment of drug-bought properties, default denial of bail, seizure of bank accounts, and community halls built with heroin money. It means flooding the six worst districts with Central forces answerable only to the Home Ministry in a time-bound counter-narco-terror operation.

It also means real-time drone and satellite surveillance married to ruthless ground execution—every acre mapped, every acre burned, every refinery razed before the next season. It means genuine, monitored alternative livelihoods for communities that choose peace, and the uncompromising might of the law for those who choose the gun and the poppy.

Above all, it means abandoning the kid-glove approach dictated by coalition arithmetic and the fear of being called “anti-tribal.”The opium poppy blooming in Manipur’s hills is no longer a cash crop. It is the flag of a narco-state rising within the Republic. 

Ignore it, and the addiction will not stop at Mizoram or Nagaland. One day it will reach the plains, and by then the fields will be too vast and the warlords too rich.

India must finally decide: treat narco-terrorism as narco-terrorism, no matter which border it crosses, or keep performing outrage over five kilograms in Kashmir while the country is quietly injected, twenty kilograms at a time, from the east.The poppy never sleeps. Neither can the dream for a new Republic!