Two Kids Are Dead in Manipur. A Mob Stormed a Military Camp. And Nobody Outside India Seems to Care.

A five-year-old boy and his six-month-old sister died on Monday in Tronglaobi village, Bishnupur district. A rocket attack hit their home. Suspected Kuki armed groups carried out the strike. The children did not participate in any conflict. They lived in a house that sat in the wrong place at the wrong time in a war zone that used to be an Indian state.

Their neighbors did what neighbors do when children get killed. They got angry. A large crowd marched to the nearest CRPF camp in Bishnupur. The Central Reserve Police Force responded by opening fire. Three people in the crowd died. Several more went to hospitals with gunshot wounds.

Three Years of This

The ethnic violence in Manipur started in May 2023. The Meitei community, which is predominantly Hindu and concentrated in the Imphal Valley, clashed with the Kuki-Zomi tribes, who are predominantly Christian and live in the surrounding hills. The original trigger involved economic benefits, job quotas, and a push to grant Scheduled Tribe status to the Meitei. Three years later, roughly 260 people have died. More than 60,000 have been displaced from their homes. Entire villages have been burned.

If you live outside India or outside the northeast, you probably heard about Manipur once or twice in 2023 and then forgot about it. The fighting did not forget about anyone who lives there.

What the Government Did on Monday

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The Manipur government shut off the internet. Mobile data services went dark across five valley districts: Bishnupur, Imphal East, Imphal West, Kakching, and Thoubal. The order cited the Temporary Suspension of Telecommunication Services Rules and concerns about inflammatory content on social media. The shutdown lasts three days.

Here is what that means in plain language. People in a conflict zone cannot call for help. They cannot share evidence of what happened. They cannot contact journalists. They cannot tell their relatives in other states that they are alive. The government's response to a crisis was to make the people in the crisis invisible.

Fresh Firing in Ukhrul

While Bishnupur burned, Ukhrul district reported separate violence. NSCN-IM militants opened fire toward Mongkot Chephu Kuki village. Kuki village volunteers fired back. This is a third armed group in a conflict that already involves two ethnic communities and multiple security forces. The layers of violence keep multiplying.

An ordinary person looking at this asks a simple question: who is in charge? The Indian Army, the CRPF, the Manipur Rifles, the state police, and the Assam Rifles all have deployments in the state. Multiple armed groups operate on both sides of the ethnic divide. The central government in New Delhi has not imposed President's Rule despite three years of what amounts to a low-grade civil war.

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The Question Nobody Answers

A columnist at The Week asked recently why Manipur has not stirred the national conscience the way the anti-Sikh riots of 1984 or the Kashmiri Pandit exodus of 1990 did. The answer is uncomfortable. Manipur is small. It is remote. Its people belong to ethnic groups that most Indians in the heartland cannot name. The conflict does not fit neat political narratives for either major party.

Sixty thousand displaced people live in relief camps or with relatives in other states. They had houses, shops, farms, and schools. They lost everything. Their children are not in regular classrooms. Their livelihoods are gone. Nobody has presented a credible plan for how they go home.

Two dead children in Bishnupur will generate headlines for a day, maybe two. The internet shutdown will suppress local reporting. The CRPF firing will trigger an inquiry that will produce a report that will sit in a file. And next month, or the month after, another rocket will hit another house, and the cycle will continue because the people who can stop it have decided that this particular suffering does not require their full attention.

Common sense says that when children die in a conflict zone inside your own borders, you treat it as a crisis, not a regional inconvenience. Three years of crisis should be enough to demand a national response. The people of Manipur are still waiting for one.