The barbarization of conflict : How Manipur is destroying its own future

Dr Raj Singh
One can still understand how ethnic groups in conflict justify anger, territorial anxieties, or even armed confrontation under the emotional intoxication of fear and historical grievance. But there comes a point when a conflict ceases to be political and descends into something primitive and self-destructive.
That line is crossed when ordinary men and women become bargaining chips. The armed militants of two communities herding and abducting innocent men and women from the other side, and then engaging in hostage-exchange negotiations in the present Kuki-Naga conflict, is not heroism. It is barbarism. The negotiated release of women does not reflect the benevolence of the captors but the ugly concessions extracted through a heinous crime. The badly managed ethnic conflict in Manipur is crossing every norm of civility and every ethical boundary on the road to self-destruction.
What makes the situation even more tragic is the growing normalization of such acts within sections of society. Communities increasingly celebrate “successful retaliation” without pausing to ask a terrifying question: What happens to a civilization when kidnapping civilians and negotiating their release begin to look like routine political transactions ?
That question should disturb every community in Manipur.
Because once hostage-taking enters the vocabulary of ethnic politics, nobody remains permanently safe. Not travellers. Not women. Not students. Not traders. Not even patients in ambulances crossing ethnic fault lines. And once highways become instruments of siege and starvation, society itself becomes the hostage.
There was a time when a highway blockade in Manipur was described as a “democratic protest.”
Then it evolved into an “economic blockade.” Today, in the age of militarized ethnic polarization, the blockade has become something far more sinister-a method of collective punishment imposed on civilians who have little connection to the actual dispute.
This is where the conflict in Manipur has crossed its most dangerous red line.
Not merely legally. Not merely politically. But morally and civilizationally.
The tragedy is not only that these acts violate the law and ethics. The deeper tragedy is that the communities committing them are geographically destined to coexist on the same land long after this generation’s rage fades. Every blockade, every hostage, every mutilated body dumped as a “message” is not merely an attack on a rival group. It is an attack on the very possibility of future coexistence.
And once coexistence collapses psychologically, even peace agreements become fragile paperwork.
The recent Kuki-Naga tensions and retaliatory incidents have once again exposed how quickly ethnic conflicts in Manipur mutate into cycles of collective punishment. During the Kuki-Meitei conflict, too, the State witnessed horrifying episodes of abduction, killings of civilians, the destruction of villages, and the conversion of highways into instruments of siege warfare.
Innocent travellers became targets simply because they belonged to the “wrong” ethnicity. The highways connecting the valley and the hills, once arteries of commerce, culture, and coexistence, were transformed into psychological borders of fear.
A truck driver carrying merchandise is no longer merely a truck driver. A woman crossing a district is no longer merely a traveller. Identity now precedes humanity.
That is the most dangerous transformation any society can undergo.
Sociologist Emile Durkheim described such moments as “anomie” - a breakdown of social norms in which society loses its moral compass. In conflict-ridden Manipur today, many acts once considered unthinkable are increasingly rationalized through ethnic emotion. Hostage-taking becomes “strategic pressure.” Highway blockades become “community protection.”
Revenge killing becomes “justice.”
This normalization of barbarity is what destroys societies from within.
Historically, even some of the world’s fiercest ethnic and ideological conflicts maintained certain unwritten ethical limits. The Irish Republican Army (IRA), despite its violence, often issued warnings before bombings to reduce civilian casualties. Several insurgent movements in Latin America maintained codes against harming ordinary civilians. Even in tribal warfare traditions across Africa and Asia, women, children, travellers, and food routes were often protected because communities understood one hard reality : today’s enemy may once again become tomorrow’s neighbour.
Manipur seems to be forgetting this wisdom.
In fact, the current trajectory wears the signs of the “deadly ethnic outbidding syndrome,” in which competing ethnic groups continuously radicalize their methods to prove their commitment to the cause. Moderates become irrelevant. Extremists become community heroes. Every retaliatory act demands a more brutal counter-response. Eventually, vio- lence stops pursuing political goals and becomes a self-sustaining culture of humiliation and revenge.
At that point, nobody truly wins.
The highway blockade is perhaps the clearest example of this self-destructive politics.
Unlike geographically expansive regions, Manipur is a small, landlocked State with limited economic arteries. Blocking highways here is not the equivalent of symbolic protest elsewhere. It is collective suffocation. Essential commodities, medi- cines, fuel, education, trade, and healthcare all become casualties. Ironically, the suffering inflicted by blockades often rebounds on the very communities enforcing them, because the State’s economy remains deeply interdependent despite ethnic divisions.
This is precisely what economist Albert Hirschman warned about in his theory of “negative interdependence,” in which communities damage each other through coercive disruption yet ultimately end up jointly impoverished because their survival systems are interconnected.
Manipur’s ethnic groups are now trapped in this destructive paradox. The valley depends on the hills for strategic access, ecology, and trade routes. The hills depend on the valley for markets, institutions, healthcare, and economic circulation. None can realistically isolate itself without inviting mutual collapse. Yet political mobilization increasingly treats coexistence as weakness rather than a necessity.
This is where conflict in Manipur becomes uniquely “suicidal.”
The tragedy is compounded by the State’s historically inconsistent and often timid handling of such crises.
For decades, highway blockades became normalized partly because Govern- ments failed to establish a clear doctrine of non-negotiability when civilians suffered. Every blockade that succeeded politically became an advertisement for future blockades. Every hostage situation without decisive legal consequences became an incentive for future hostage-taking.
The State inadvertently institutionalized coercive bargaining.
It is well established that when States fail to monopolize legitimate coercion, alternative groups begin exercising “competitive sovereignty.” That is exactly what Manipur periodically experiences. Armed groups, ethnic organizations, and protest networks start behaving like parallel authorities capable of regulating mobility, punishing civilians, and controlling territory.
Once citizens begin fearing highways more than battlefields, the State’s legitimacy is already in crisis.
The Government’s selective responses over the years have further deepened ethnic suspicion.
Communities perceive law enforcement not as neutral guardians but as ethnically tilted actors or politically constrained spectators. Delayed interven- tions, inconsistent crackdowns, and symbolic peace appeals without visible enforcement have created a dangerous culture of impunity.
And impunity is the oxygen of recurring violence.
The recent spillovers into Kuki-Naga tensions reveal another dangerous reality often ignored in Manipur : ethnic conflicts rarely remain confined to their original fault lines.
Violence mutates. Alliances shift. Yesterday’s ally becomes tomorrow’s rival. Once the moral barriers against abduction, siege, and revenge killings collapse, no community remains permanently immune.
Ethnic conflict is like fire in a thick bamboo forest. It consumes everything. The current path threatens the long-term viability of Manipur itself. Investors withdraw. Tourism collapses. Young people lose faith. Skilled professionals leave. Educational systems decay. The economy contracts. The most talented minds look elsewhere for a future, while the State becomes increasingly trapped in a militarized ethnic psychology.
Ironically, all communities then become collective losers in the competition to avoid losing.
Game theory explains this as the “Prisoner’s Dilemma” of ethnic conflict. Every group believes that aggressive tactics are necessary for survival because it distrusts the others’ intentions. But when all groups adopt the same logic at the same time, everybody ends up worse off than before.
The blockade hurts all. The revenge killing traumatizes all. The hostage-taking destabilizes all.
And yet each side continues because nobody trusts the other enough to stop first.
This is precisely why leadership matters.
Communities need leaders courageous enough to tell uncomfortable truths to their own people instead of merely amplifying anger. True leadership in conflict zones is measured not by how loudly one threatens enemies, but by how responsibly one preserves the future of coexistence.
South Africa’s transition after apartheid succeeded largely because leaders consciously prevented retalia- tory humiliation from replacing reconciliation. Rwanda, after the genocide, aggressively criminalized ethnic hatred because the State understood that perpetual revenge would permanently destroy National recovery. Northern Ireland’s peace process advanced only after rival communities accepted that coexistence was not an emotional preference but a geographic inevitability.
Manipur faces the same reality.
Its ethnic groups are not temporary refugees sharing accidental space. They are permanent cohabitants of a shared geography. Rivers, markets, highways, educational institutions, ecolo- gical systems, and economic opportunities bind them together, whether they emotionally accept it or not.
This is the less obvious but most important truth.
The future of Manipur will not be decided merely by who controls territory today. It will be decided by whether the communities preserve enough psychological space to live together tomorrow.
If highways become permanent instruments of siege, if travellers become ethnic targets, if hostages become bargaining chips, and if revenge becomes a community virtue, then even a formal ceasefire will not restore normalcy. The land may fall physically quiet while remaining psychologically partitioned forever.
And psychological partition is often more dange- rous than physical division.
The time has come for all sides - communities, civil society, armed actors, and governments to establish non-negotiable ethical boundaries in this conflict. Certain things must become absolutely unacceptable regardless of grievance: targeting civilians, obstructing survival routes, hostage- taking, retaliatory killings, and the ethnic intimidation of travellers.
Because once these limits disappear, conflict ceases to be political and becomes “predatory.”
And predatory conflicts ultimately consume the societies that nurture them. Manipur still has time to step back from this abyss. But that window is narrowing fast. The State’s future cannot be built on mutual strangulation. It can only emerge from a difficult but necessary realization: coexistence is not charity.
It is destiny.

This column, “Beyond the Obvious,” seeks to examine public controversies not through emotional binaries but through deeper historical memory, constitutional logic, and comparative political thought - in the belief that durable peace lies not in louder demands, but in wiser design.