On 1 October 2026, the Ministry of Home Affairs quietly extended the Armed Forces Special Powers Act across most of Manipur for another six months. The order reads like bureaucratic routine: a "disturbed area" declaration, revocable "if conditions change," the same legal language that has governed the state, in one form or another, since violence between the Meitei and Kuki-Zo communities erupted on 3 May 2023. By government count, 258 people have died, 60,000 have been displaced, nearly 4,800 houses burned, and 386 temples and churches vandalised ^[3]. Three and a half years on, the state cannot find its way back to something as basic as normal civil administration. That is not a footnote. It is the story.

AFSPA renewals have become so routine that they barely register as news. But routine is precisely the problem. A law meant to be an emergency exception, first written for Assam in 1958 and extended to other states experiencing insurgency, has calcified into Manipur's permanent operating condition. When emergency powers stop being exceptional, they stop functioning as emergency powers at all. They become an admission that the ordinary machinery of the state, its police, courts, and political leadership, has failed to do the job.

A Law Born of Failure, Renewed by Failure

India's northeast has lived under some version of AFSPA for most of its post-independence history. The Assam insurgency, which began in the 1970s amid grievances over neglect and unchecked immigration, resulted in significant casualties before its slow wind-down ^[2]. Nagaland's own rebellion traces back further still, to the 1932 imprisonment of a thirteen-year-old firebrand named Rani Gaidinliu, who took up Gandhi's call for civil disobedience and paid for it with fifteen years in colonial jails. Nehru wrote of her in 1937 that "a day will come when India also will remember her and cherish her." She was freed only in 1947, by the government of free India, which then spent the next seven decades governing her homeland region under martial law in most years since. The irony is heavy: a fighter against foreign occupation became, in national memory, a symbol invoked by a state that would go on to police her own people with emergency statutes for generations.

This is the deeper pattern Manipur reveals. Northeast India's conflicts, Assam's insurgency, Nagaland's decades-long autonomy struggle, and now the Meitei-Kuki war in Manipur, share a common root: communities that feel structurally excluded from the Indian mainstream, met by a state whose primary tool is security force deployment rather than political accommodation. AFSPA does not resolve that exclusion. It manages the symptoms while the underlying wound festers, sometimes for fifty years at a stretch.

What History Teaches About Force Without Politics

There is a recurring lesson in modern conflict, one that India's own security establishment appears determined to relearn from scratch each time. Military power, however overwhelming, cannot substitute for a political settlement when an insurgency or ethnic conflict draws its strength from genuine grievance and local terrain knowledge.

The United States discovered this in Vietnam. Facing an adversary embedded in the peasant population, able to melt into the countryside and resupply endlessly along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, American conventional force proved almost irrelevant to the actual contest, which was political and social, not merely military. The Vietcong's staying power came from genuine grievances against a corrupt South Vietnamese government, not from superior weaponry. Bombing campaigns that destroyed factories only saw North Vietnam rebuild them elsewhere. The war was lost politically long before it was lost militarily, and no amount of American firepower reversed that fact.

The United Nations relearned the same lesson in Somalia between 1991 and 1995. After Siad Barre's fall, approximately 37,000 mostly American troops arrived under UN auspices to disarm warlords and restore order. But forcibly disarming powerful militias while simultaneously trying to deliver humanitarian relief proved to be an impossible mandate. Warlords like Mohamed Farah Aidid simply refused to cooperate, American forces took casualties, and the mission collapsed in withdrawal by 1995, having imposed no lasting order at all.

Manipur is not Vietnam or Somalia, and the comparison should not be pressed too far. But the underlying mechanism is the same: security operations without political resolution produce occupation, not peace. AFSPA gives the army the legal cover to operate, arrest, and use force, but it does not give New Delhi a plan for reconciling Meitei and Kuki-Zo communities who now live in near-total physical and administrative separation, with roads, checkpoints, and displacement camps hardening what was once a shared valley-and-hills geography into something resembling partition.

India's Own History Argues Against Its Present Course

What makes this especially striking is that India's own founding generation understood something that today's approach seems to have forgotten: violence begets violence, and only political courage, sometimes uncomfortable and unpopular political courage, breaks the cycle.

Consider Gandhi's response to Chauri Chaura in February 1922. When a Congress procession, fired upon by police, retaliated by burning down a police station and killing twenty-two policemen, Gandhi did not double down on confrontation. He suspended the entire non-cooperation movement nationally, convinced that a population which had not yet internalised non-violence could not be trusted to wield mass agitation responsibly. It was a wrenching, controversial decision, one that stunned and angered many nationalists who felt betrayed at the moment of momentum. But Gandhi understood that movements built on uncontrolled violence eventually consume themselves and their stated cause.

Or consider the desperate last act of Gandhi's political life: on 12 April 1947, with partition already effectively decided and communal killing spreading across Punjab, Gandhi and Jinnah, bitter rivals on almost everything else, jointly signed a peace appeal at Mountbatten's urging. They denounced "for all time the use of force to achieve political ends" and called on all communities to renounce violence. It came too late to stop Punjab's horror, which saw thousands killed in the weeks following March 1947, with British officers on the ground admitting that even army pensioners had joined the massacres. But the gesture itself reflected a conviction that only political reconciliation, leaders publicly and jointly renouncing violence, could address a crisis that had outgrown any police or military solution.

Manipur today has no such moment. There is no joint appeal from Meitei and Kuki-Zo leadership, no visible reconciliation process backed by the credibility of national figures, no Gandhi-Jinnah equivalent moment where rival community leaders stand together and renounce force. Instead there is a security order, renewed on schedule, extending the state's coercive reach while the political vacuum beneath it goes unaddressed.

The Real Cost of Managed Conflict

Defenders of AFSPA's continuation will argue, reasonably, that withdrawing security forces amid active ethnic clashes risks worse bloodshed, not less. This is not a frivolous concern. Manipur in 2023-2024 saw genuine armed mobilisation on both sides, not merely street protest, and a security vacuum could plausibly accelerate killing rather than prevent it.

But this argument, taken to its logical end, becomes an excuse for permanent management rather than resolution, exactly the trap that swallowed Assam for decades and Nagaland for longer still. Three and a half years of continuous "disturbed area" status is not a stopgap. It is a policy. And a policy whose main achievement is preventing violence from escalating further, without any accompanying political framework to actually end it, is not a success. It is a slow-motion failure that the government has learned to describe in the passive, technical language of ministry orders rather than the language of crisis.

The comparison to Gallipoli in 1915 is instructive in a different way. Churchill's campaign was pressed forward with confidence that overwhelming force, properly applied, would break Ottoman resistance and change the course of the war. Instead, badly conceived execution against an underestimated adversary produced a catastrophic stalemate, ending in full withdrawal within the year, a serious blow to Allied morale precisely because so much had been staked on the assumption that force alone would suffice. Manipur is not a battlefield in that literal sense, but the assumption underlying its governance is eerily similar: that enough security presence, renewed indefinitely, will eventually produce calm. The evidence of the Indian northeast's own twentieth century, and the evidence of Manipur's own unresolved three years, argues otherwise.

What Would Actually Change the Trajectory

Resolving Manipur requires what AFSPA renewals structurally cannot provide: a credible, high-level political process that addresses the specific triggers of the 2023 violence, including land and tribal-status disputes and competing claims over hill and valley administration, and rebuilds some baseline of trust between communities who now barely interact across a militarised buffer. It requires the kind of political risk-taking that Gandhi showed at Chauri Chaura and, more desperately, in his final joint appeal with Jinnah: leaders willing to make unpopular, costly gestures because the alternative, indefinite managed conflict, is worse for everyone, including the security forces asked to enforce it indefinitely.

Until that happens, expect the next renewal notice in six months, and the one after that. The tragedy of Manipur is not that India lacks the capacity to respond to ethnic conflict. It is that the country has, once again, chosen the tool it knows best, the disturbed-area order and the extended deployment, over the political imagination its own history shows is actually required.

A Law Born of Failure, Renewed by Failure

What History Teaches About Force Without Politics

India's Own History Argues Against Its Present Course

The Real Cost of Managed Conflict

What Would Actually Change the Trajectory

Sources