On the 10th of January 2026, a young Kuki-Zo woman died in a hospital in Guwahati, two and a half years after armed men abducted and raped her in Imphal when she was eighteen. She filed a police complaint within weeks; nobody named in it has ever been arrested. Amnesty International’s response was blunt: survivors of conflict sexual violence in Manipur have been left to fend for themselves, with no investigation ever following through.
Hers is not an isolated failure. It is the clearest illustration of a state that has spent nearly three years choosing not to act on the law it has.
That violence erupted on the 3rd of May 2023, after a Manipur High Court order on Scheduled Tribe status for the Meitei community provoked a "Tribal Solidarity March" by Kuki-Zo groups fearing the loss of protections over hill land. Within days, mobs were burning homes, churches, and temples, and the harm fell overwhelmingly on the Kuki-Zo minority.
Government figures put the dead at well over 260; the state's own home department records 731 deaths in relief camps since, and more than 43,000 people still cannot go home. The scale alone is humanitarian; what makes it constitutional is that India's law already speaks to this and has been left unenforced anyway.
Begin with the oldest of the three. Manipur has lived under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act since 1958, shielding soldiers from prosecution in disturbed areas, and its record is best captured by one name: Thangjam Manorama. Killed by Assam Rifles personnel inside her own home in 2004, it was an act that drove Manipuri women to march naked through Imphal behind a banner reading "Indian Army Rape Us."
Two decades later, the pattern has barely moved; since 2023, only one case has come close to prosecution, and almost everything else has gone unpunished. The persistence of that gap is the first proof: not a missing law, but an unenforced one.
The second proof sits in the courts. Articles 14, 19, and 21 guarantee equality, liberty, and the right to life, and the Supreme Court has ruled that the state cannot hide behind technical defences when those rights are violated. In the landmark judgment (Nilabati Behera v. State of Orissa), it held the state strictly liable for a death in police custody, regardless of fault.
The Court went further: in the (EEVFAM) case, it ordered the mechanism for accountability nearly a decade ago, after a court-appointed commission found six AFSPA-era encounter killings in Manipur unlawful, and the cases continued under its supervision. Yet prosecutions against central security forces have since stalled for want of sanction. A remedy the highest court has already ordered is not absent; it is one the executive has chosen not to deliver.
The third proof is political. Then-Chief Minister N Biren Singh, accused of deepening the divide and branding the Kuki community as outsiders, resigned in February 2025 as the Supreme Court scrutinised leaked recordings of him discussing the violence. President's Rule followed within days. The Union government also cited its Article 355 duty to protect a state from internal disturbance, but issued no published order, leaving even that step unaccountable.
The army's impunity, the courts' stalled remedies, and the executive's unpublished interventions are not three failures but one, repeated at every level of the state: a refusal to let laws that already exist do the work they were written for.
Manipur does not need new legislation; it needs the law on the books enforced, starting with the independent commission Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have requested and that no government has agreed to convene. The young woman who died this January spent her final years carrying injuries the state never investigated and a complaint it never pursued. Global attention to her case, and to Manipur's, faded years before she did, leaving documentation to local journalists at real risk; that fading scrutiny is what lets enforcement gaps calcify into impunity.
An independent commission would not undo what has already happened, but it would be the first acknowledgement, in three years, that the law was always supposed to apply here.