Wired for War: What Manipur’s Unending Conflict Is Doing to an Entire Generation’s Mind

At 1 a.m. on 7 April 2026, two children were asleep in their home in Moirang Tronglaobi, Bishnupur. A five-year-old boy. A six-month-old girl. A bomb hit the house. By morning, both were dead.Their mother survived, hospitalised. 
The state imposed an internet blackout across five valley districts. Protests erupted. Oil tankers burned near a petrol pump. Security forces fired into crowds. Three more people died before noon and many more were injured. But that night was not an exception. In Manipur, most nightsare that night. The firing, the smoke, the waiting, they are not an event. They are the weather.

The news cycle moved on.

But here is the question nobody is asking, the one that should keep us up at night far longer than any headline: what was already happening inside those children’s brains, not just before the bomb fell, but before the firing, before any of this became the only normal they have ever known? What has been happening inside the brains of every child in Manipur, every single day, for the past three years?

The Brain Is Not a Passive Witness

The developing human brain is, above everything else, an environment-reading machine. It is doing one thing constantly: learning what kind of world this is, and wiring itself accordingly.

In a safe environment, with consistent care, structure, and peace, the prefrontal cortex, the part responsible for planning, impulse control, empathy, and learning, grows dense and well-connected. The child becomes capable of curiosity, of patience, of imagining a future different from the present. In a dangerous environment, the brain makes a different calculation. Survival first. Everything else later.

“The largest study on childhood trauma found a 17% reduction in hippocampus volume in children exposed to three or more traumatic events. One-fifth of the memory and learning centre, physically diminished.”

When a child grows up under chronic fear, the amygdala, the brain’s alarm system, stays in near-constant activation. It floods the body with cortisol, the stress hormone. Cortisol at high doses, sustained over weeks and months, is neurotoxic. It physically shrinks the hippocampus, the seat of learning and memory, and knocks the prefrontal cortex offline. A child cannot sit still and work through a problem when their body believes, at a biological level, that it is in danger. Concentration becomes impossible. Learning becomes impossible. The future becomes unimaginable.

Parents understand this intuitively. A child raised with warmth, structure, and even the firm scolding delivered with love turns out differently from a child raised inside chaos and fear. In Manipur right now, the signals entering a child’s developing brain are the sound of gunfire, the smell of a burning house, a parent crying at 3 a.m., a school that closed again, an internet connection that cut again. For three years, these have been the raw materials of an entire generation’s inner world. A clinical study at the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Medical Sciences in Imphal found that 65.8 % of internally displaced persons in relief camps screened positive for PTSD. These are the documented cases alone.

The Brainwashing Nobody Calls Brainwashing

There is something quieter happening alongside the trauma, and in some ways it is more dangerous.
Research by political psychologist Daniel Bar-Tal on children in intractable conflicts found something deeply uncomfortable: children in conflict zones do not grow up confused about the violence around them. They grow up making complete sense of it. They develop coherent, systematic beliefs about who the enemy is, why that enemy must be feared, and why the conflict is justified. This is absorbed through daily life, through the stories adults tell, through what they see and what they are shielded from, through the logic of survival itself.

In Manipur today, a Meitei child in Imphal valley and a Kuki child in Churachandpur hills are being shaped by two completely different, internally coherent realities, realities that have been violent, ethnically charged, and unresolved for three years. By the time this generation reaches adulthood, the other community will not be an abstract political concept. It will be the enemy their developing brain hardwired during the most formative years of their lives. The distrust will not be a reaction. It will be architecture. And architecture is very hard to rebuild.
“This is the generation that will govern Manipur in twenty years. Or continue to fight over it. The choice is being made right now, inside the minds of children, and almost nobody in power is paying attention.”

Those Who Left Are Not Outside This

There is a particular cruelty to what distance does to a Manipuri in this conflict.
Young people who left for metropolitan cities across India, or for academic institutions and research positions in other parts of the country and abroad, did not escape the war. They carried it with them. They sit in examination halls and laboratories, and somewhere in the back of their mind is a question they cannot answer because the internet was cut again: is my family safe? A 2025 study in the International Journal of Indian Psychology found that financial anxiety, fractured academic performance, and chronic emotional distress ran through virtually the entire sample of Manipuri students living outside the state.

For those who have gone further, the distance compounds into something close to guilt. You built something. You are somewhere safe, full of possibility. And your home is burning. This invisible wound appears in no government report and no peace framework. It is borne alone, in rooms far from Manipur, by people who were told that leaving was the right thing to do.

Schools in Ruins, Futures Foreclosed

A school in Churachandpur had 300 students before May 2023. Four months into the violence, it had 50. Nearly 100 schools across the state were converted into displacement shelters. Drug rehabilitation centres began running at full capacity in 2023 and have not stopped. The average age of a new addict dropped from 20 to 21 years down to 14 to 15. Children, with no school, no structure, and no visible future, reaching for whatever numbs the present.
COVID disrupted Indian education for roughly two years and the country still calls it a generational wound. In Manipur, three years have passed with no end date on the calendar. Tourism has collapsed, agricultural land has been abandoned, and young graduates emerge from disrupted universities into a state with nothing to offer them. The people most equipped to rebuild Manipur are the ones leaving fastest. The ones who stay without options stagnate, and sometimes radicalise. A young person with no employment, no structure, and three years of unprocessed trauma is not a stable citizen. They are a recruitment pool.

Children are not just a vulnerable group in a conflict. They are the entire foundation of a place. When a generation grows up fractured, traumatised, and stripped of hope, the damage does not stay with them alone. It is passed forward. A state that forfeits its children does not just lose the present. It loses every future it might have had.
This is the compound interest of neglect.

What Political Leadership Actually Owes This Generation

Let it be said clearly: a government that watches its children grow up inside a war zone for three years and responds with internet shutdowns and budget lines too small to matter has failed its most basic obligation. Not by accident. By choice.

Manipur needs leaders who feel the weight of this land in their chest, not just in their electoral calculations. Leaders who do not simply absorb instructions from above and pass them down unchanged, but who stand in rooms and say: this is what my people need. That quality of leadership, rooted in the soil of the state, thinking independently and acting with genuine courage for the motherland, is what this moment demands.

The children of Manipur are not a constituency to be managed during a campaign season. They are the state’s only real future. Every representative who holds office in Imphal or in New Delhi must ask themselves, honestly and without comfort: what have I actually done for the generation growing up in this conflict? Not what was announced. What was done.

“Manipur does not need to be loved from a distance by those in power. It needs to be governed with honesty, with urgency, and with the full weight of the moral responsibility that office demands. The children have waited long enough.”

History does not forgive by intention. It records what was actually done when it mattered most. This is not the time for managed optics. It is the time for the kind of honest, sustained governance that turns a burning state back into a home.

What Can Be Done, and What This Generation Deserves

The same science that describes the damage describes the remedy. The brain remains plastic beyond childhood. Recovery is possible when the conditions for it are created: consistent safe adults, restored routine, structured environments, access to mental health support, and a believable future.

That means trauma-informed education, not just reopened classrooms. Mental health infrastructure in schools and colleges across the state. There are initiatives that have begun and they matter, but they are far too few and far too small for the scale of what three years of conflict has done. Every child in Manipur, in a valley or in the hills, deserves access to a counsellor, to a safe adult, to someone trained to recognise what trauma looks like in a ten-year-old sitting in a room that was a shelter six months ago.

It means economic investment with young people at the centre. A student who can see a livelihood ahead of them learns differently from one who cannot. It means political leadership that is present. Not visiting for photographs. Governing.

A six-month-old has no politics. A five-year-old has no ethnic grievance. They were asleep.
What a society does to the bodies and minds of its youngest members, it eventually does to itself. The damage accumulating inside the brains of Manipur’s children is documented, measurable, and understood by science. What is missing is not knowledge. It is the willingness to act as though it matters.

They deserve adults, in every corner of Manipur and beyond, who choose better for them. Before the window closes. Before the wiring is complete, and a generation that could have been something remarkable becomes, instead, a monument to what was left undone.

About the Author
Dr Ronaldo Laishram is an Astrophysicist at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, originally from Manipur, and is actively involved in education, science outreach, and youth development initiatives

Opinions expressed are the author’s own.