The Bharatiya Janata Party’s central leadership (the Super-Sabumnim) has executed a meticulously plotted political manoeuvre in Manipur, dropping a decisive Naeryo Chagi (the Taekwondo axe kick) on the state’s political landscape.
The elevation of Yumnam Khemchand, the Sabumnim (master instructor), to Chief Minister is not merely a change of guard but a scripted move, likely choreographed by the central leadership in consultation with strategic and national security experts.
This calculated selection, sidelining other contenders, arrives as Manipur remains deeply scarred by the ethnic violence that erupted on May 3, 2023.
However, the understanding of this “game” by India’s mainstream narrative manufacturers has been dangerously simplistic, often reduced to a binary framing of pure ethnic conflict and identity-based politics, thereby obscuring the more complex forces of centralised political scripting and geopolitical engineering.
The dominant narrative has fixated on the superficial optics of identity. Khemchand’s appointment is frequently discussed through the prism of his Meitei identity and his supporting coalition—a Thadou leader, a Naga legislator, and a seasoned Meitei MLA. This is framed as a delicate “ethnic balancing act”.
Such an understanding, while factually noting ethnic and communal representation, fails to interrogate the purpose of this engineered balance critically.
It treats the conflict as a primordial feud between ethnic communities, a framing that ignores how political incentives, electoral calculus, and centralised party machinations actively sustain and manipulate these identities.
The violence since May 3, 2023, has been portrayed as an inevitable outburst of age-old animosities, rather than a crisis shaped by contemporary political choices, governance failures, and the strategic partitioning of political geography.
This simplistic ethnic framing dovetails with a troubling tendency in political analysis: the attempt to segregate Manipur’s complex political geography into neat, manageable ethnic clusters.
The mainstream Indian think-tanks, including media commentators, often map the conflict onto a reductive cartography where the Imphal Valley equals Meitei and the hills equal Kuki-Zo or Naga interests.
This cartographic shorthand erases the profound intra-community diversities, shared spaces, and historical interdependencies. More critically, it mirrors the very logic of the political scripting it should critique.
When the BJP central leadership designs a new state team to “represent” clusters, it is engaging in a form of administrative ethnic zoning, a tactic that can solidify boundaries rather than bridge them.
The media’s replication of this cluster-based analysis legitimises it as a natural order, rather than exposing it as a political tool for control. It overlooks how such engineered representation can inflame intra-ethnic fissures—smaller tribes or subgroups within these broad clusters feel marginalised by leaders appointed to “represent” them, potentially triggering new dimensions of sub-ethnic or communal conflict.
The mainstream discourse largely neglects the core mechanism at play: the extreme centralisation of leadership selection.
The meeting of BJP MLAs in New Delhi under central observer Tarun Chugh was not a democratic process but a ratification of a pre-decided script, a pattern consistent with the BJP-RSS model of top-down control. Yet, media reports often present this as standard party procedure, missing the profound implications for a crisis state.
This centralised scripting aims to reduce political uncertainty and align state policy with national priorities, but it effectively sidelines Manipur’s own political agency. The general failure to centre this “scripting” as the primary story allows the narrative to remain stuck in ethnic theatre, ignoring the director in New Delhi.
And who cares about finding out who the playwright is? Consequently, Khemchand is analysed more as a symbolic ethnic figurehead than as an agent executing a central mandate within severe constraints.
This flawed framing has real-world consequences. By reducing the crisis to ethnic passion, it absolves the state and central governments of systemic failure—in law enforcement, justice delivery, and inclusive policy-making. It reduces the profound humanitarian tragedy—displacement, shattered livelihoods, a generation traumatised—to a mere symptom of “age-old tensions”.
Furthermore, it makes the search for solutions similarly simplistic, focusing on ethnic quotas and cluster-based talks while undermining the need for universal citizenship rights, accountable institutions, and a political process that transcends engineered communal boxes.
The path forward for Manipur is illegible within this simplistic frame. Stability requires moving beyond the ethnic cluster model and addressing the concrete political economy of conflict: land relations, resource access, and the demilitarisation of society.
It requires a peace process built not on bargaining between curated ethnic representatives, but on civic consensus involving women’s groups, youth, and grassroots civil society—actors consistently marginalised in both the political scripting and the media narrative. Most critically, it demands scrutinising the centralised political machinery that seeks to manage diversity through division and control.
Manipur’s tragedy is not merely an ethnic one; it is a crisis of political design. The BJP’s scripted installation of a Sabumnim as Chief Minister is a high-stakes gambit to stabilise the state through controlled representation.
However, without authentic local legitimacy and by simplifying a complex human and political landscape into combustible ethnic clusters, this script risks authoring further violence.
The mainstream media, by echoing the simplistic ethnic frame and ignoring the geopolitics of central scripting, becomes complicit in this dangerous simplification. Until the narrative shifts to critically examine the interplay of centralised power, political engineering, and the weaponisation of identity, the true depth of Manipur’s crisis—and its potential solutions—will remain dangerously obscured.
The author is Editor-in-Chief, The Frontier Manipur.
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