Opinion Two years of conflict in Manipur, and the erosion of our moral conscience

In the language of states, there is a tendency to euphemise loss: Displacement becomes “temporary relocation”; systemic collapse becomes “intermittent disturbance.” But the reality in Manipur defies such linguistic anaesthesia. Over 60,000 people remain displaced. More than 200 have been killed. Vast swathes of land lie abandoned, people continue to live in camps, and an entire generation now risks growing up in the wreckage of promises long broken.

There is no discernible roadmap for reconciliation. No public articulation of what a political solution might entail, no institutional architecture for truth-telling, reparations, or justice. Commissions of inquiry function as a delaying tactic rather than a mechanism of redress. Though invoked with hope, the judiciary has moved slowly. And the political executive has chosen the comfort of silence over the discomfort of moral responsibility.

What does this prolonged state of inertia reveal? India does not lack the capacity to respond to crises. It seems to lack the ethical will to extend that capacity to places it does not deem central to its imagination. In this sense, Manipur is not just a site of suffering. It is a mirror that reflects, with cruel clarity, the deepening asymmetries: Between centre and periphery, spectacle and substance, citizenship as legal fiction and citizenship as lived experience.

There has been no national mourning. No ceremonial acknowledgement of collective failure. The constitutional morality that Ambedkar once insisted must animate our institutions has been replaced by bureaucratic minimalism, a state that does the least it must and rarely what it ought.

To live in Manipur today is to live in a space where time is suspended. Where days are counted not by progress but by survival. Relief camps, conceived as temporary, now function as permanent addresses. Children study in makeshift classrooms, if at all. Women bear the twin burdens of violence and care, and many live with the lingering trauma of having been both survivors and first responders. Civil society does what it can, but cannot substitute for a state.

Yet, to focus only on administrative failure would be to miss a deeper malaise: The erosion of the moral. The Republic is not merely a structure of governance. It is a promise, a commitment to mutual recognition, equality of dignity, and the idea that no citizen shall be invisible to the state.

It is telling that Manipur does not generate outrage in the national imagination. There are no mass protests in metropolitan cities across India. No sustained media attention that treats the crisis with the gravity it deserves. This is not simply fatigue. Manipur bleeds silently because we have constructed a moral geography of the nation where some lives are proximate and others disposable, where grief is a privilege and empathy a rationed commodity.

Perhaps this is the most dangerous development of all: The normalisation of abandonment. When suffering is localised and containment becomes a strategy, the state begins to forget that legitimacy is not enforced; it is earned. Violence, when institutionalised, does not remain static; it travels.

Earlier, words like dignity, justice, equality, and fraternity were not merely inscribed, they were invoked. But today, that vocabulary has been replaced by a technocratic register, where order is prized above justice and optics above truth.

Two years on, there has not been a national process of reflection. No commission was empowered to reckon with the past, no timeline for a political settlement, and no guarantee of return or restitution — only the quiet rustle of bureaucracy and the louder hum of amnesia. The burden of remembering, then, falls to those who cannot afford to forget.

The question now is not simply what the state will do but what kind of people we wish to be. The Republic can survive dissent. It can even survive failure. But erasure from the imagination is agonising. We must ask: How long can Manipur endure this violence?

Hansing is a researcher and writer based out of Manipur