‘Modi govt once again treating Manipur like disposable real estate without consent of any of its people’
Islamabad : The Modi government is once again treating Manipur like disposable real estate—and doing it without the consent or consultation of any of its people.
According to Kashmir Media Service, New Delhi is examining a plan to exchange roughly 1.4 square miles of Manipur’s territory in Chandel district’s Molchan sector with Myanmar.
No public debate, no state assembly resolution and no consent from the people whose land is on the chopping block.
Coordinating Committee on Manipur Integrity (COCOMI), the Meitei civil society umbrella, has already drawn a red line: Manipur’s territorial integrity is non-negotiable.
They have warned of mass resistance if even an inch is ceded, pointing to historical losses since the 1949 merger. But the Centre’s arrogance does not stop at ignoring the valley.
It is also steamrolling past the hill communities who actually live along and across this stretch of the 1,643-km India-Myanmar border.
Chandel district where the reported swap between border pillars 65 and 68 is located—is a contested zone claimed by both Naga and Kuki-Zo groups as ancestral or inhabited land.
Nagas (roughly 23–26% of Manipur’s population, around 0.7–0.76 million people) have long asserted historical primacy over large parts of the eastern and northern hills, including areas in Chandel and Tengnoupal.
Their broader political demand for “Nagalim” explicitly includes Naga-inhabited territories on both sides of the international border.
Any unilateral adjustment that shrinks Manipur’s eastern frontier without consulting Naga bodies risks being read as yet another Delhi-imposed alteration of their claimed homeland.
Kuki-Zo communities (approximately 15–16% of the population, around 0.5 million people) have equally deep cross-border ethnic, kinship and historical ties with Chin and Zo groups in Myanmar’s Sagaing and Chin regions.
For them, the border has always been porous and artificial.
Yet there is no evidence of meaningful consultation with Kuki-Zo organisations or armed-group interlocutors about a territorial exchange that could affect their demographic and security landscape in Chandel precisely the district they include in demands for a separate administration or Union Territory.
Meiteis form the largest single group (around 43–54%, concentrated in the valley), while Nagas and Kuki-Zo together dominate the hills that make up the vast majority of the state’s land area.
The proposed swap may be small in absolute size, but it sits inside a state already fractured by three years of ethnic violence that has killed hundreds and displaced tens of thousands.
Adding an opaque, Centre-driven land adjustment with Myanmar’s military regime without transparency, without local consent, and without addressing the overlapping territorial claims of Meiteis, Nagas and Kuki-Zo is not border management.
The same government that endlessly invokes “national integrity” and “Akhand Bharat” is prepared to quietly trade away a piece of Manipur to complete its fencing project, while the communities who live on that land are treated as afterthoughts.
If New Delhi proceeds on this path, it will not merely cede territory, it will deepen every existing ethnic fault line in a state already on the brink.
