If you are the Indian government, the last few days have not been such great news. Gautam Adani, the corporate honcho considered to be the closest to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has been charged with fraud by the US department of justice. For a few days around the time, the country’s national capital has been breathing poison as air pollution levels have crossed all toxic limits. None of this has attracted the attention of the government and of the prime minister who have continued on their merry ways. Modi had been on a six-day foreign tour of three countries but returned in time for the results of the assembly elections in Maharashtra and Jharkhand. The polls have always been his priority; not governance.
If New Delhi’s poisonous air and Adani’s indictment are not serious enough to warrant Modi’s intervention, the same cannot be said about the ongoing violence in Manipur. Over the past few days, more than 20 persons have been killed in violence that erupted in May 2023. The Union home minister, Amit Shah, has taken the pro-forma step of holding some more meetings with bureaucrats and the Central Armed Police Forces. More importantly, he has publicised them so that they are regurgitated by the regime-media to give an impression to the larger public that some concrete action has been taken. Some 90 companies of CAPF have been despatched to Manipur; they will work under the state government. Despatching additional security forces makes little sense after nearly 19 months of continuing violence, especially if the Bharatiya Janata Party-led governments at the Centre and the state have taken no steps to retrieve more than 5,000 lethal weapons from state armouries that continue to be with the majoritarian militia group.
If Shah was capable of dealing with the crisis, he would have resolved it last May itself when he had travelled to Manipur. He has evidently failed and the buck now stops with the prime minister. As the former US defence secretary, Robert Gates, used to say, only the most wicked problems come to the top because if it was easy, someone lower in the chain would have solved it. That applies to the problem in Manipur which warrants a political solution. The crisis has been aggravated by the steps taken in New Delhi and in Imphal since May 2023, but the real killer has been Modi’s apathy towards Manipur. A state that has been crying for a ‘healing touch’ has been made to feel unwanted and undesirable by the prime minister. In making a choice that can only be recorded as an abdication of political responsibility, Modi has not visited the state even once. Rajdharma, anyone?
Anusuiya Uikey, who was the governor of Manipur from February 2023 to July 2024, said the peopleof the state were begging Modi to visit. “People of the state wanted the PM to visit and they kept making requests, which I kept sending to the PMO (Prime Minister’s Office) but I don’t know why he has not visited”, Uikey said in an interview. Even she says that the “only solution to the violence is restoration of mutual trust among both communities [Meities and Kuki-Zos] and the central government should take steps to build that.” This is not rocket science but the Modi government is prioritising partisan politics and the creation of a majoritarian vote bank over India’s national interest.
The fragile situation in Myanmar and a regime in Dhaka that is not a puppet of India should have concerned the Modi government enough to move rapidly in Manipur. Instead, it has allowed the political instability to spread to the neighbouring states of Nagaland, Mizoram and Assam. For a region characterised by ethnic diversity and historical insurgencies, this runs the risk of creating a bigger security crisis that can reignite dormant regional conflicts. It would serve as an even bigger drain on New Delhi’s energies and resources, diverting its attention from other critical strategic challenges like China or Kashmir. The Modi government boasts of an ‘Act East’ policy but the conflict hinders the efforts to build infrastructure projects and trade routes by creating an insecure environment. A broader instability in the Northeast will only make the dream of the region to become a gateway to Southeast Asia even more distant, but it doesn’t seem to affect Modi at all.
Equally damaging for India is the loss of authority of the Indian State, which has never failed so miserably for want of trying. At no point in independent India’s history has the government done nothing to reassert its authority while a militia holds a public meeting with the ministers and MLAs in the state capital. The government has not made any effort to get back weapons which were taken away — other versions suggest that they were handed over — from the state armouries and given to the militia group. No policeman or official has been punished for the loss of weapons, an inexplicable act for any organised force. The state itself stands divided into two, with a buffer zone manned by the Central forces as if it is the demilitarised zone between the two Koreas. Even the army and the Assam Rifles have not been spared. The state police have filed first information reports against the soldiers and the Union government has moved two Assam Rifles units out of Manipur in what was seen by many as a step to placate the majoritarian groups. Imagine if the same demand was made in Kashmir or Punjab — what would the response of the Modi government be?
Even administratively, the whole exercise has been a failure. The Modi government posted a security advisor but he has been totally ineffective in restoring normalcy to the state. A new DGP, handpicked by the Union home ministry from a different state cadre, has made no difference. They can’t, unless the state is brought under president’s rule by imposing Article 356. That is unlikely because the state is ruled by the BJP and the Modi government is not even able to officially state whether Article 355 was declared in Manipur last year for the breakdown of law and order. The ineptitude of the BJP has reached such a point that it can’t even remove N. Biren Singh from the post of chief minister. What more should a chief minister do to deserve to be sacked? And if Modi can’t change a chief minister, what good does the universally accepted claim of his total control over the ruling party serve?
If the political executives in Imphal and New Delhi have been failures, other institutions of the Indian State have done no better. The Supreme Court had been hearing the cases but has now hidden behind the fig leaf of a committee headed by a former judge that has not shown any progress whatsoever. The National Human Rights Commission has not questioned the government and the Parliamentary Standing Committee on home affairs has not examined the issue to date. Its primary job of speaking truth to power and seeking political accountability long forgotten, the regime-media just restates the information and the narrative of the BJP governments at the Centre and in the state. Unless someone is deeply rooted in the region, the media coverage is of little help as it ignores the nuances of the situation and doesn’t provide any context to the problem.
The last 19 months have proven that the crisis in Manipur is a political one; only its manifestations are visible in the security domain. It needs a political solution which can now come from the prime minister. It is time for Modi to make amends or remember his own words in Imphal in 2017: “Those who cannot ensure peace in the state have no right to govern Manipur.”