Three years. Two communities. One state that had the men, the arms, and the time to stop this — and didn't.
Scroll for the recordNo single riot did this. Three years of nobody stopping it did.
No single day. A chain of moments where someone should have stepped in — and didn't.
A High Court order on tribal status triggered a solidarity march. The march met counter-mobilisation. By nightfall, Manipur was burning — and three years later, it still hasn't fully stopped.
Source: Wikipedia — 2023–2026 Manipur conflict, citing contemporaneous reporting
A mob broke into the Manipur Police Training Centre at Pangei. Twenty guards, outnumbered, fired blank rounds and were overrun. Roughly 6,000 firearms were looted from armouries statewide in the days that followed. More than half are still missing.
Source: ThePrint — reporting on armoury looting, 2023–2025
According to the CBI's own charge sheet, two Kuki-Zo women who would later be paraded naked and assaulted had first reached a police vehicle and asked to be driven to safety. They were told it wasn't possible, and left. What happened next was filmed.
Source: The Wire, reporting on CBI charge sheet — April 2024
The footage of the assault took over two months to surface nationally — partly due to an internet shutdown in Manipur that rights groups widely criticised. Arrests followed only after the video went viral, not after the original police complaint. Parliament was disrupted for three days demanding a response.
Coverage largely began and ended with outrage at the video itself — a single, shocking clip standing in for the story.
What was left outThe men in the footage were identifiable from day one. It was the internet shutdown and institutional inertia — not lack of evidence — that delayed any response for months.
Source: BBC; CNN — July 2023
Footage from January 2024 implicated Manipur Police commandos and members of a Meitei vigilante group in the arson of homes, a school, and a church hall in Moreh. Witnesses said a central paramilitary force stood by while it happened. Rights groups documented a broader pattern: armed vigilante outfits operating for months with little to no consequence.
Source: Newsreel Asia, citing CCTV footage and local reporting
Facing a no-confidence motion after 20 months of intermittent violence, Chief Minister N. Biren Singh resigned. President's Rule was imposed days later — the Union government took direct charge of a state its own police force could no longer be trusted to run.
Source: Wikipedia — 2023–2026 Manipur conflict
A 694-page independent tribunal report, led by former Supreme Court judge Justice Kurian Joseph, concluded the violence was planned and ethnically targeted — enabled by state failure. FIRs were filed selectively. Investigations were delayed. Security forces were accused of active complicity. Both state and central governments were indicted for "enabling impunity."
Source: The Wire, reporting on the PUCL Independent People's Tribunal — August 2025
Almost exactly a year after direct central rule began, it ended — a new Chief Minister took office and Manipur's elected government was restored. The conflict was not resolved when this happened; it was still active.
Source: Wikipedia — 2023–2026 Manipur conflict
By mid-2026, militant groups had escalated to coordinated drone strikes near the Myanmar border. A bomb attack in April killed two children in their home. Most of the ~6,000 weapons looted in 2023 are still unaccounted for. The government's own Commission of Inquiry has had its deadline pushed back repeatedly — most recently to November 2026.
Each new incident is reported as an isolated flare-up — a bombing here, a clash there.
What's missingThe throughline: the same unrecovered weapons, the same stalled inquiry, the same institutional gap — three years running.
Source: Eurasia Review, South Asia Terrorism Portal data — May 2026
Every entry above has a rule attached to it. The state wrote the rule. The state broke it.
Five obligations the state was bound to. Then, point by point, where the record shows they weren't met.
The state's most basic obligation — security forces exist to stop violence, not to pick a side in it.
Police weapons cannot become the conflict's weapons. That line failed on day two.
An FIR is the starting point for justice. Selectively filing them is a choice, not an oversight.
Vigilante militias functioning for months with impunity is a state choosing not to act.
A response delayed for months, made only after public outrage forces it, is itself a form of failure.
Roughly 6,000 firearms were taken from state armouries within days of the outbreak. More than half remain unrecovered three years later. Those looted weapons are cited by security officials as the reason the conflict escalated from riots to sustained armed violence.
Source: ThePrint, The Wire — 2023–2025
The CBI's own charge sheet states two women were left by police who declined to drive them to safety — hours before they were assaulted on camera. This was not absence. It was a decision made in the moment.
Source: The Wire, reporting on CBI charge sheet — 2024
CCTV from January 2024 showed individuals believed to be police commandos and Meitei vigilante group members burning homes and a church hall — while a central paramilitary force reportedly stood by. Both the vigilante activity and the standing-by are failures of the same rule.
Source: Newsreel Asia — 2024
A 694-page report led by a former Supreme Court judge found FIRs were filed selectively, investigations were delayed, and security forces faced credible accusations of active complicity — not just negligence.
Source: PUCL Independent People's Tribunal, via The Wire — 2025
Drop your sourced account here — link or citation. Balance across communities where the record supports it.
Source: — add citation —
Three years. 258 dead. 60,000 displaced. Most of six thousand stolen weapons still out there — and an inquiry that keeps getting pushed back.
"Cry my beloved country, cry" — that's not our line. That's what someone had to write on cardboard because no one else would say it for them. That's the whole point.
The mark in your tab
Yellow, dark blue, red, and green — this exact four-stripe banner has circulated for years as an unofficial symbol tied to Meitei and hill-tribe coalition sentiment. It has never been an official state flag, and vexillological records themselves describe it as more of a claim than a settled emblem — a flag for what some hoped Manipur could still be, not a government banner.
It's used here at the size of a browser tab, on purpose. Not a banner to rally behind — a small, easy-to-miss reminder that the idea of one shared Manipur still has people willing to claim it.