Three years and Two communities. One state that had the men, the arms, and the time to stop this but It chose not to.
Read the recordNo single riot caused this. Three years of inaction did.
No single day. A sequence of deliberate choices to stand down.
A High Court order on tribal status triggered a solidarity march. The march met counter-mobilisation. By nightfall, Manipur was burning. 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. Within days, roughly 6,000 firearms had vanished from state armouries. More than half are still unaccounted for.
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. The officers refused and drove off. 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, slowed by 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
January 2024 CCTV footage captured Manipur Police commandos and Meitei vigilante group members setting fire to homes, a school, and a church hall in Moreh. A central paramilitary force stood by and did not intervene. 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: a direct admission that the state's own police force could no longer be trusted to enforce the law.
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, ethnically targeted, and 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 documents a legal breach. The state drafted these laws and The state itself violated them.
Five explicit obligations bound the state. Here is where the official record proves abandonment.
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, arriving only after public outrage forces it, is itself a form of failure.
Roughly 6,000 firearms were looted from state armouries within days of the outbreak. More than half remain unrecovered three years later. Security officials cite these looted weapons 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 Manipur Police commandos and Meitei vigilante group members burning homes and a church hall, while a central paramilitary force 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 former Supreme Court Justice Kurian Joseph 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
Three years. 258 dead. 60,000 displaced. Most of six thousand stolen weapons still unrecovered. An inquiry that keeps getting pushed back.
"Cry my beloved country, cry." That's not our line. It's what someone had to write on cardboard because no institution would say it for them. This site exists because that piece of cardboard shouldn't have had to.
The Flag in Your Tab
Yellow for the valley. Blue for the waters. Red for the blood. Green for the hills.
This four-stripe banner emerged from self-determination movements: a visual claim to an undivided Kangleipak. It was never a government flag, nor a piece of state bureaucracy. It was an assertion of what the land was supposed to be: valley and hills tied under one horizon.
Shrunk to 32 pixels in your tab, A small, quiet reminder of a unity the state failed to protect.