A people’s tribunal of conscience documents grave state failures but risks reinforcing a binary narrative unless it fully embraces the Idea of Manipur as a shared home for all its citizens.
TFM’s Take on PUCL Report
On August 20, the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) released its Independent People’s Tribunal on the Ongoing Ethnic Conflict in Manipur at the Press Club of India, New Delhi. The 694-page report was released under the chairmanship of former Supreme Court judge Justice Kurian Joseph.
PUCL’s Independent People’s Tribunal concludes that the Manipur violence was neither spontaneous nor random, but planned and ethnically targeted, with specific communities and civilian enclaves systematically attacked. It outlines research, interviews, and evidence attributing the orchestration of violence to organized militias and state functionaries, rather than isolated local clashes.
The Report implicates state officials and security forces in complicity or passive inaction, arguing that administrative failures and political patronage created an enabling environment for the escalation and spread of targeted atrocities. It also documents the displacement of civilians at scale, mass property destruction, and the breakdown of law and order that followed the initial triggers of the conflict.
In its recommendations, the Tribunal calls for judicial investigation, accountability for both state and non-state actors, restoration of citizen rights, and structures for truth-telling, reparations, and institutional reform aimed at preventing recurrence of ethnic violence. The report is a comprehensive indictment and a blueprint for justice in Manipur.
The Report is indeed an evidence-based critique of the Manipur crisis through the not-so-unique lens of indifference. The idea of the Tribunal seems to advance an inclusive Idea of Manipur, but falls short of its extra potential to be impartial. The report grounds remedies in equal citizenship and constitutional duty—calling central inaction a dereliction and insisting the State protect all citizens, not just communities in contention. That framing seems to push the issue toward inclusion rather than ethnic exceptionalism.
Explicit peace-building architecture has been provided that can include everyone. Its Chapter 11 proposes a stakeholder-mapped, multi-tier dialogue (intra-group, inter-group, state-level); restorative justice; truth-telling; peace education; and youth engagement. Properly executed, the same scaffolding can enable Meitei, Kuki-Zo, Nagas, Pangals (Meitei Muslims), and smaller groups to co-exist together as co-owners of the future.
The report seems to acknowledge that the rupture affects more than two blocs, the Meitei and the Kuki-Zo. The Executive Summary names Nagas as “largely uninvolved but deeply affected,” as if there were no past violence between the two communities. This creates space to treat the Nagas as stakeholders rather than bystanders—a necessary correction to zero-sum binaries. The recommendations to counter hate speech and improve media literacy are directed to society writ-large, not one ethnicity. This would serve as a useful tool for an inclusive citizenship project.
There is also a need for corrections to monolithic narratives about drugs/forests. The recommendations explicitly say poppy/drug networks are not owned by a single community. This is true as the report goes on, urging for a transparent forest governance—good for defusing ethnic blame and returning the debate to law, rights, and livelihoods.
Where the Tribunal Risks Sharpening Divides (and how to fix it)
Asymmetry in Detailing Perpetrators
The Report devotes substantial space to Meitei militias (Arambai Tenggol, Meitei Leepun) and alleged state complicity—with rich testimonial texture and operational detail. That is important—and much of it is well documented. But the granularity is far thinner on Kuki-Zo militant. Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs) and grey-zone tactics between mid-2023 and late-2024 (e.g., targeting highways, energy, and disappearances). The result feels imbalanced and can be read as community-specific culpability rather than a full-spectrum threat picture. Align the evidentiary detail on both sides to avoid reinforcing stereotypes.
Under-developed Treatment of “Third Communities”
Beyond a line in the Executive Summary, the lived realities and security needs of Nagas (as adjacent, affected citizens), Pangals, and other minorities appear mostly through passing references (e.g., a quote that “Now, we allow Pangals to pass”). An Idea of Manipur demands that these groups are visible in analysis, testimony, and remedies, not INCIDENTAL. Build an explicit “third-community” lens across relief, return, and policing sections.
Media Chapter’s Valley-centric Bias Callouts Need Symmetry
The report is strong on identifying valley-based media partisanship and the Army’s concerns about biased reportage, but inclusion would be better served by equally structured scrutiny of hillside/diaspora info-ops and coordinated narrative. Kuki-Zo Intellectual Council on June 30, 2023, sought the help of right-winged Zionists in creating a separate Kuki State out of Manipur. This calls for an addition to mirror casework from hill-aligned channels to make the chapter diagnostically even.
One needs to move away from the idea of “majority/minority” and resort to “citizenship” language. Repeated majority/minority labelling (and frequent pairing of “Meitei vs Kuki-Zo”) can subtly normalize and perpetuate only a two-ethnic framing inside one state. Replace that frame with “citizens,” “residents,” “districts,” and “public institutions,” except where legal status is the point (e.g., ST). That rhetorical shift matters for shared belonging. And this is of utmost importance now.
Security Analysis Needs an Inclusive Deterrence Logic
The Tribunal powerfully critiques state failure and militia impunity. However, it missed the operational insight and aspect of the conflict. When security forces were unambiguously tasked, high-end violence dropped (drones/projectiles, confirmed by other agencies like the NIA, while the army outrightly dismissed it). Somewhere truth becomes the casualty. It should also be noted that grey-zone tactics persisted. Without integrating that, the report risks sounding like a political indictment more than an all-citizens security plan. Fold in a dual imperative—neutral law enforcement and proactive counter capacity to protect everyone.
How Critical Notes Can Strengthen the Tribunal’s Frame
There is a need for principled denial of ethnic-segregation, lest we follow the Indian partition route in the past. If some so called valley-based organisations have argued for the denial of “separate administration/UT”, they have articulated it as a principled affirmation of Manipur’s historic, indivisible identity—not mere administrative inconvenience. This reframing is crucial to an Idea of Manipur that reassures Meitei community and invites Kuki-Zo/Naga/Pangal buy-in to a shared state. The Tribunal should explicitly adopt this language in its political recommendations.
Timeline of Conflict Transformation
There is a need for periodisation (mob violence → organised armed conflict → high-grade weapons → grey-zone sabotage). A timeline based on this would help design phase-appropriate, citizen-protective responses— such as return corridors, infrastructure hardening, and cross-buffer humanitarian guarantees—without weaponising ethnicity or ethnicising enforcement. The Report compilers can effectively incorporate this sequencing into Chapter 11’s dialogue and security architecture.
Documenting Grey-zone Harms to Civilians
Nothing much has been done to trace the disappearances of Meitei civilians crossing into Kuki-controlled areas and attacks on highways/power. Pairing this with the Tribunal’s thorough documentation of valley-side militia abuses evens the ledger and clarifies: all citizens faced targeted harms that the State failed to prevent. Here, the report calls for concrete, text-level edits and additions to make the report more “citizenship-centric”. Aren’t the disappeared citizens, too.
Third-Community Impacts
The Report could have also named specific Naga and Pangal vulnerabilities, displacement patterns, and service interruptions, with a commitment to proportional representation in all remedial bodies.
The Report seriously needs to add a mirrored subsection on Kuki-Zo armed groups’ grey-zone TTPs (IEDs on NH-2/NH-37, grid strikes, disappearances) with case summaries, chain-of-command questions, and victim/witness protection pathways—modelled on the report’s treatment of valley militias. This calls for being far away from self-inflicted research inability. Pair this with the existing analysis of Meitei militias and state complicity, so the enforcement agenda reads as neutral, capability-driven protection of citizens.
The Report can include a companion section on hill-aligned/diaspora amplification networks, bot-driven virality, and cross-border messaging, with identical analytical rigour and examples. This symmetry prevents the chapter from reading as blame-assignment and repositions it as civic hygiene for a multi-ethnic state like Manipur.
Dialogue & Security Design
Stakeholder mapping should include organisations from Naga, Pangal communities, marginalised sane/rational voices/occupational groups, religious minorities, and migrant workers as distinct seats at the table—not FOOTNOTES to a binary conflict. While dealing with Safe Return Corridors, there is a need to codify neutral “return & reopen” corridors (health, schools, markets, highways, power lines) protected by mixed companies under central command, with community hotlines. This calls for an acknowledgement of a phase-aware security logic while staying constitutionally neutral. Here, and as mentioned earlier, a language shift is necessary. Replace “majority/minority” in prescriptive sections with “citizens” and “residents,” except where statutory categories (ST/SC/OBC) are materially at issue.
Recommendations
The Report badly needs to add a Third-Communities Chapter that consolidates the socio-economic requirements of the Naga and Pangal communities in relief, return, livelihoods, and even policing, preventing just “binary capture” of resources and attention. Those who have taken pains to compile this report should also create a Manipur Peace Index tracked across all communities (trust in institutions, intermixing, school attendance, clinic access, safe mobility), tying funds to improvements for every group rather than territory control. The bottom line is that the Tribunal Report already contains a major part of the DNA of an inclusive Idea of Manipur—constitutionalism, citizen-centric peacebuilding, and system-level reform. And to fully realize that ideal (and avoid re-inscribing a two-pronged ethnic narrative), it should: (a) balance perpetrator detailing across all armed actors; (b) mainstream “third communities” throughout; (c) adopt the voice of principled, indivisible-state language or else perpetuate painful partition theory that India witnessed in 1947; and (d) retool security/media sections with mirrored, capability-based, citizen-protection logic.