Movement within Manipur for nearly three years now runs along the hill-valley divide, where travel between the valley and the hill districts carries risk in either direction and is often avoided. Journeys once taken for granted are now weighed more carefully or not undertaken at all. Guwahati becomes one of the few places where such a meeting can occur.
This was not always how governance functioned. Political engagement assumed a shared space within which differences, however sharp, could still be worked through, even when they carried hostility, because they unfolded within a geography that all sides inhabited. That assumption now carries less ease, as the limits of movement begin to shape the limits of politics.
The meeting in Guwahati follows from these conditions. It allows conversation to take place by shifting it away from the terrain in which it is meant to matter, so that while the state remains formally intact and its institutions continue to operate, the ground on which they act does not carry the same continuity. What appears as engagement also reflects the difficulty of sustaining it within the state itself.
Those who attended the meeting described it as preliminary, closer to an opening than to a settlement, with no resolution emerging from it and with the possibility of further engagement left open. The willingness to meet also followed a change in leadership and was framed in terms that kept expectations measured rather than conclusive.
There is another shift alongside this. On December 18, 2024, the state publicly distanced itself from the Kuki-Zo Council, advising people not to heed it. The distance between the past and present positions on the KZC frames the moment.
In a setting where apex bodies such as the Kuki Inpi Manipur and the Zomi Council have long functioned as platforms through which different segments of the Kuki-Zomi community articulate their positions, the choice of whom to engage acquires a particular weight. It bears on how representation is being recognised in the present moment and how that recognition is organised in practice.
Violence in Manipur did not recede with the decline of large-scale clashes, as its effects continued through displacement, restricted movement, and the reorganisation of everyday life around uncertainty, remaining present in altered routines and in the narrowing of what can be done and where it can be done.
This longer trajectory is also marked by the time that violence carries. Vungzagin Valte, a sitting MLA who was assaulted in Imphal in May 2023, lived for nearly three years with the injuries from that attack before his death earlier this year, and his remains have yet to be laid to rest. He belonged to the party in government in the state and at the Centre.
The incident does not remain in the past, continuing in the present in a form that does not enter the language of restoration but remains part of how the conflict is lived, where even in a case that sits within the ruling establishment, the absence of any significant movement towards resolution raises questions about the terms on which peace and stability are being pursued.
Conversation carries its own value, especially after long stretches of distance, but where it begins as an opening rather than a settlement, the terms under which it takes place remain part of what is being negotiated. A meeting held outside the state, with a formation that had earlier been set aside, does not settle the question of how engagement is to be grounded within Manipur.
The longer trajectory of the conflict does not move in step with such moments, remaining present in the delay that follows violence and in the time it continues to occupy, where closure does not arrive easily around incidents such as the assault on Valte. In such a setting, the language of peace sits alongside conditions that have yet to find resolution. For now, even this requires stepping away from home.
The writer is a researcher and writer based in Manipur
Manipur Chief Minister Yumnam Khemchand (ANI) 
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