First, the notes of the conch shell were heard, and then his Highness Maharaja Bodh Chandra Singh, all 125 kilograms of him, appeared. “A colossal figure in gold-spangled green velvet vestment and an enormous white turban that sprouted long feathers from some exotic bird,” journalist Robert Trumbull wrote about the last ruler of the princely state of Manipur. “His immense brown arms were bare except for tiers of fixed gold bangles. One earlobe dripped loops of gold so weighty that they had to be supported by lacy golden chains over his upper ear.”
Lifted off his “wildly painted and bedizened elephant,” by his crew, the Maharaja now coxswained one of two boats, which were due to race that day, the 11th of the Meitei calendar month of Langban. To ensure the first race was won by a boat coxswained by a man representing the deity Vishnu, the Maharaja steered his own into the riverbank. The second, though, he claimed, as was fitting for a monarch representing Vishnu on earth.
There is no record that tells us what the two Prime Ministers present there, Burma’s U Nu and Jawaharlal Nehru, made of the spectacle they saw on 30 March 1953.
Like them, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was greeted with colour and warmth on his first visit to Manipur since the ethnic pogrom, which began in 2023. The ethnic warfare has claimed the lives of at least 260 people and has forced more than 60,000, mainly Kuki-Zo refugees, from their homes and lands. The Prime Minister pointed to development work being carried out by the new administration, but there was no roadmap for political reconciliation between the Meitei and the Kuki-Zo, nor a promise to hold perpetrators responsible for the slaughter.
Even though killings of civilians have declined sharply since the carnage of 2023 and 2024, data from the South Asia Terrorism Portal demonstrates insurgents now have a presence not seen for almost a decade.
This, Nehru did learn: The peoples of the Northeast aren’t easily seduced by baubles. After the district commissioner declined to accept a petition for the creation of a Nagaland, the 3,000-odd tribespeople who had come to see Nehru, walked out. The chiefs of the Sema, Santang, and Konyak tribes left a petition: “What right you got to be king over us? You can come to free Naga country and give us book knowledge make out living very good if you like, but you can not be king over us.”
For his part, U Nu held out a more blunt message at one road stop. For the Burmese Prime Minister, the Imphal visit offered a chance to end the murderous ethnic warfare that plagued his borders. Ten miles from the border, just days earlier, Burmese troops had hacked their way through the forest to ambush Tsalaw Naga insurgents, killing 32 tribesmen.
The Burmese leader invited Indian Nagas to cross freely into Burma to impart their more advanced civilisation to their Burmese cousins. But, he said, their knives should be left at home. “There will be no more incidents, such as cutting each other’s heads off,” he wryly observed.
Guns and feathers
Leaders from the Indian plains have an intense attachment to time-worn clichés about the Northeast. In Imphal, Modi called Manipur a “jewel adorning the crown of mother India.” Nehru had used almost exactly the same words. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi expressed hope that Manipur would “shine like a gem and impart beauty to the whole of India.” The truth was somewhat less poetic: At her 1969 rally in Imphal, police had to use live fire to drive back protestors.
The radicalisation of politics in Manipur had already begun before India’s independence. The arrival of missionaries created new communal strains between and within communities. Levies of rice for the plains, moreover, created near-famine conditions.
In 1939, women demanding rice were attacked by police. Leadership of the protests was taken over by Irabot Singh, the son-in-law of the Maharaja. The women, author Homen Borgohain records Irabot saying, had “asked for a handful of rice and you gave them a pail of blood.”
For many in Manipur though, the issue wasn’t just rice. Accession to India choked their legitimate political aspirations. Even though the state had authored its own Constitution in 1948—and conducted elections where, as historian Priyadarshini Gangte recorded, each candidate had a ballot box of their own, bearing their photograph—it was only accorded the status of so-called C-category state, with no elected leadership.
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The time of wars
Like so many radicals, Irabot Singh widened his politics in prison. Following meetings with other incarcerated ethnic-nationalists in Sylhet jail, he came to the conclusion that only a cross-ethnic rebellion—uniting Meiteis, Nagas, Kukis, the Zo—could succeed. This would later draw him away from his ethnic-nationalist roots, into the ranks of Communist Party of India.
Efforts to build an armed resistance, though, proved harder than Irabot had perhaps imagined. The Meitei State Committee, set up in 1966 , turned for support to the so-called Federal Government of Nagaland to create a joint revolutionary movement, historian N Joykumar Singh has written. The Nagas had warm words, but showed little inclination to share weapons.
Led by Oinam Sudhirkumar Singh, the United National Liberation Front sought to build an armed movement around chauvinism, promising to use force to drive out migrants like ethnic Marwari traders from Bengal. The movement reached out to both China and Pakistan for support, but was treated with suspicion.
The Revolutionary Government of Manipur, in the next iteration of these efforts, did succeed in receiving training at a Pakistan Army base near Sylhet. The group’s cadre conducted a series of successful operations inside Manipur, including robbing the post office in Imphal and the office of the Imperial College. The war of 1971, though, put an end to its operations.
From 1978 on, the People’s Liberation Army of Manipur (PLA), led by N Bisheshwar Singh, again resumed the campaign, mounting a series of lethal actions against Indian forces. The People’s Revolutionary Party of Kangleipak and the Kangleipak Communist Party joined the campaign. Levels of violence would surge until the mid-1980s.
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Pails of blood
The militarisation of each ethnic group, however, compelled its neighbours to go down the same path. The National Socialist Council of Nagaland’s Isak-Muviah faction (NSCN-IM) exercised de facto control over four of five hill districts in Manipur—Ukhrul, Senapati, Tamenglong, and Chandel. Even though it signed a ceasefire with the Union Government in 1997, it retained on-ground power. To make things worse, the PLA allied with the rival NSCN-Khaplang faction, operating from bases located inside Myanmar. Extortion and drug money fuelled the fire.
From the early 1990s, the region saw multiple inter-ethnic conflicts—Kuki-Naga, Meitei-Muslim, Kuki-Karbi, Hmar-Dimasa, and even Kuki-Tamil clashes, pitting the community against traders in Moreh who settled there during imperial British rule. The extension of the ceasefire with the NSCN-IM into Manipur in 2001 sparked large-scale violence as fears grew among the Meitei that their state would be divided.
Even though the rudiments of a multi-ethnic society began to emerge in cities like Imphal—with Kuki communities capitalising on their education and caste reservations to expand their economic opportunities—ethnic-chauvinists among the Meitei saw this as a threat. Laws prohibited Meitei from buying land in the hills, they proclaimed, and the community would thus eventually be overrun.
To repair this toxic politics of identity and build democratic institutions in which Manipuris of all ethnic backgrounds can meaningfully participate is an enormous challenge. The process will need sustained political effort by parties from across India, not just the execution of a plan by civil servants. The Prime Minister’s three-hour visit, sadly, doesn’t even mark a first step toward making Manipur whole again.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)