After 28 months of blood and drift, the Prime Minister Narendra Modi came at last, through sheets of rain, to Lamka, a town still ringed by camps. He met families, scanned their lists, and unveiled roads, housing, hospitals and schools. There was applause; so, too, was the question that trailed him off the dais: Where are the dates? The thesis on offer was tidy: build first, and peace will follow. But the texture of life has not shifted; there are levy gates on the highways, children sleeping in classrooms, and FIRs that fossilise before they become chargesheets. Development is staging, not settlement, without a dated plan to protect corridors, return families safely, and prosecute by name and timeline.
To the government’s credit, the choreography began in the hills. That mattered: Lamka has borne a disproportionate share of the costs and had to be seen and heard. Meetings with the displaced acknowledged that emergency needs persist long after headlines move on. If delivered, the programme’s emphasis on health and education in hill districts could chip away at deficits long folded into grievance. Presence, money and promises are not trivial in a place exhausted by absence.
Yet two silences cut through the rain. The first was operational: no dates to dismantle levy points and keep them down; no timetable for phased, safe return to original neighbourhoods; no public mechanism to move priority cases with names and charges from FIR to trial. The second was political: no visible architecture to widen consent beyond a liaison table; no clarity on what constitutional space devolution, policing compacts, fiscal guarantees the State is willing to explore to make co-existence workable. In Manipur, people track promises by the week and judge fairness by whether both communities can see themselves in the plan. That ledger remains largely blank.
Context sharpened these omissions. Days before the visit, Delhi paired an “opening” of NH-02 with a one-year extension of the Suspension of Operations under tighter ground rules. On paper, that looked balanced: a public-goods gain, armed actors bound to regulations, a Joint Monitoring Group to watch compliance. It read as administrative theatre on the ground: headline a deliverable, tuck the conflict into a compliance clause, and keep revocation in reserve. Volunteers and student bodies bridled at the idea that a highway could open by press note; Kuki–Zomi platforms reiterated that their ask is political dialogue; valley formations insisted that impunity persists. This is not an argument against roads or buildings. It is an argument for coupling development to consent and accountability. Without that coupling, projects sharpen asymmetries, and a security-first truce hardens into leverage rather than a platform for politics.
There is a comfort in arithmetic: budgets can always be made to swell. However, numbers, however large, do not manufacture trust. The only meaningful audit is behavioural: can valley residents travel into the hills without escorts, and can hill residents enter Imphal without fear? By that standard, by the ordinary freedom of movement we once took for granted before May 2023, we are nowhere close. The violence shattered not just roads but confidence. Capital can soften edges if it lands where the wound is deepest; it cannot substitute for a political compact that both sides recognise as fair.
What, then, would count as movement rather than motion? The first step is not a ribbon; it is a sentence, an accountability: we failed you. Unless New Delhi and Imphal say this aloud, the rest is ceremony in the hills and the valley. An honest admission of delay, drift, and the state’s inability to protect life and property does not fix anything overnight but instead changes the tone of the conversation. It signals that the wound is treated as a public failure, not a private misfortune. Only on such ground can the following steps be trusted.
From here, the path is testable and straightforward: a short compact with dates that both Kuki–Zomi and Meitei can see. Start with safety; no one hears promises while paying at levy gates. Publish a corridor calendar for NH-02, NH-37 and feeder roads, and report weekly which stretches are clear. Insist on symmetry: if Kuki–Zomi actors keep NH-02 levy-free, the State must guarantee predictable access to Imphal airport, including for hill residents, with fixed time-bands, weekly certification and penalties for lapses. Corridors cannot be one-way; credibility requires mutual safety. The point is not to apportion communal blame but to make the State’s performance visible. Transparency blunts rumour better than any slogan.
Justice must move in public. Manipur can recite the cases that went nowhere. Put a small, named team on a finite set of priority files, killings, arson rings, sexual violence from both communities, and push them from FIR to chargesheet to trial with monthly reporting. Shift hearings where witnesses are unsafe and protect those witnesses. The aim is not indiscriminate incarceration; it is to show that the state still has a spine and that law, not reprisal, will order life.
Any durable peace in Manipur will be political before it is developmental. The centrepiece has to be a constitutional compact that both communities can own, one that accepts, rather than suppresses, the depth of difference. The choice set is not status quo or secession; India’s Constitution already allows asymmetric federalism. That means seriously considering enhanced hill autonomy under Article 371C/Sixth-Schedule-equivalent powers: elected hill bodies with absolute control over land, policing of local order, and development budgets; double-majority rules so that laws touching land, identity and representation pass only when both hill and valley consent; guaranteed power-sharing in Cabinet and administration; and independent commissions on property restitution and boundary disputes.
Call it “living apart within the same house”: when differences run this deep for this long, designed separation inside a shared constitutional frame may be wiser than compelled intimacy that keeps breeding resentment. None of this can be decreed; peace cannot be forced, and healing cannot be rushed. It accrues from procedures people trust, clear timelines, visible compliance, and institutions that distribute voice as well as power. Build that political scaffolding, and roads and schools will begin to mean what they say. Without it, they remain stage props.
Judged by these standards, the prime minister’s visit was necessary, but not sufficient. Showing up in the rain mattered; also, what matters now is what was unsaid: we were late; we owe you a solution; we will count, not perform. Put the compact on paper. Name the officers. Fix penalties for lapses. Then measure what people live: levy-free corridors, families back in their own rooms, cases moving from FIR to chargesheet to trial. Pair this with a constitutional settlement that shares real power across hills and valleys, so consent is produced by institutions, not presumed by speeches.
If those numbers rise, trust follows; if they stall, grandeur remains staging. Peace here will not be declared; it will be kept through small, dated, enforceable acts owned at the top and honoured across the fault line. Own the failure, start the clock and keep the appointments. In a landscape crowded with arches and floodlights, only last-mile delivery and duty will light the way home.
(The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of THE WEEK.)
