The CRPF chief's security review meeting with Manipur's home minister is not routine — it signals Delhi's deepening direct control over the state's law and order. With Manipur's state police fractured along Meitei-Kuki ethnic lines and Assam Rifles facing local hostility, the CRPF is emerging as the Centre's preferred instrument, effectively bypassing CM Biren Singh's operational authority.

Here is the thing about a 'routine security review' in a state where the police themselves have drawn battle lines along ethnic fault lines: nothing about it is routine. When the CRPF Director General sits across the table from Manipur's home minister in Imphal, as reported by ThePrint, the meeting is not about PowerPoint slides and deployment charts. It is about who actually holds the gun — and whose orders that gun obeys.

Manipur has been burning, in slow motion and sometimes not so slow, since May 2023. Over three years of ethnic violence between the Meitei community in the Imphal Valley and the Kuki-Zo tribal groups in the surrounding hills have left hundreds dead and tens of thousands displaced, according to data compiled by the Indian Express and the Ministry of Home Affairs. But the deepest casualty has been something less visible and far more dangerous: the collapse of a unified state police command.

Consider the arithmetic. According to reports in NDTV and The Hindu, Manipur's police force — including its elite commando units like the Manipur Police Commandos (MPC) and India Reserve Battalions (IRBs) — has effectively split along the ethnic divide. Meitei-dominated units operate in the valley. Kuki-Zo personnel, many of whom deserted or were reassigned during the violence, function — when they function at all — in the hill districts. The DGP's writ, in practice, runs only as far as his personnel's ethnic loyalty permits. This is not a police force. It is two armed camps wearing the same uniform.

Into this vacuum, Delhi has poured central forces. At the peak, over 40,000 central paramilitary personnel were deployed in Manipur, according to MHA statements reported by PTI. The CRPF has borne the largest share of this burden, operating checkpoints, patrolling buffer zones between communities, and increasingly handling law-and-order duties that would normally fall to the state police.

Political Pulse

The corridors of South Block tell a story the official press releases will not. The talk among security establishment insiders, as India Herald's read of the situation suggests, is that CM N. Biren Singh's authority over Manipur's security apparatus has been reduced to something approaching a formality. He chairs meetings. He issues statements. But the operational decisions — which areas get reinforced, which buffer zones hold, which hill routes reopen — are increasingly being made by central force commanders reporting to New Delhi, not to Imphal's Secretariat.

This is not accidental. It is architectural. The CRPF chief's direct meeting with the state's home minister — not the chief minister, not a joint meeting with the state DGP at the head of the table — is itself a signal that veteran political observers have not missed. One security analyst, speaking to The Hindu on the broader Manipur situation, described the central forces' role as having evolved from 'aid to civil authority' to 'substitute for civil authority.' The distinction matters enormously in a federal democracy.

Why not the Assam Rifles, the force historically associated with the Northeast? Because the Assam Rifles have become politically toxic in Meitei-dominated areas. The perception — fuelled by specific incidents during the 2023 violence and amplified across Meitei civil society groups — is that Assam Rifles personnel were either complicit in or indifferent to attacks on Meitei communities, according to reporting by India Today and Hindustan Times. Whether the perception is fair is almost beside the point; the Assam Rifles cannot operate in the valley without generating protests. The CRPF, by contrast, carries no such baggage. It is the clean instrument.

And here is the dimension the routine reporting misses entirely. What is being constructed in Manipur — piece by piece, meeting by meeting, deployment by deployment — bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the security architecture Delhi built in Jammu and Kashmir in the years before 2019. There, too, the state police became unreliable in Delhi's eyes. There, too, central forces expanded from a supporting role to a commanding one. There, too, the elected chief minister's operational authority was hollowed out long before the formal political changes arrived. The parallel is not exact — Manipur is not under Governor's rule, and Article 371(C) protections give it a different constitutional texture. But the pattern of centralisation through the security apparatus, as multiple analysts have noted in The Hindu and Indian Express, rhymes uncomfortably.

The political calculation beneath this is brutally simple. Biren Singh remains useful to the BJP as the Meitei face of governance — he won the 2022 election, he carries the community's trust, and replacing him would be an admission of failure. But trusting him with actual security control is another matter. His government has been accused — by opposition parties and by Kuki-Zo civil society organisations, as reported by NDTV — of being partisan, of using state police resources to arm one side, of failing to protect tribal communities. These are allegations his government has denied, calling them politically motivated. But the denials have not stopped Delhi from building a parallel chain of command that runs around him, not through him.

The numbers make the erosion of state control stark. According to MHA data cited by PTI, the CRPF alone has conducted over 6,000 area domination operations in Manipur since 2023. State police-led operations in the same period, by contrast, have been a fraction of that — hampered by the ethnic split, by mutual distrust between valley and hill units, and by the political sensitivity of every deployment decision. When one force is running 90% of the operations, the question of who 'controls' security answers itself.

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What makes the CRPF chief's visit particularly telling is its timing. June 2026 is not a crisis point; there has been no fresh outbreak of large-scale violence. The buffer zones, while tense, are holding. The visit, then, is not firefighting — it is institution-building. It is about making the CRPF's command role in Manipur permanent rather than emergency, structural rather than reactive. That is a fundamentally different proposition, and it is one that should concern anyone who cares about federal governance in India.

The forward read, in India Herald's assessment, points in one direction. Watch for three things in the coming weeks and months. First, whether the CRPF's Manipur deployment gets a dedicated 'sector' command structure — a formalisation that would effectively create a parallel security headquarters in Imphal. Second, whether the state government's requests to recall central forces and restore state police primacy are quietly shelved, as they have been repeatedly since 2023. Third, and most critically, whether Biren Singh pushes back or acquiesces — because the answer to that question will reveal whether the BJP's chief minister in Manipur sees himself as the head of a government or as the caretaker of someone else's security zone.

A state where the elected government does not control its own police, where a central paramilitary force runs law and order, and where the chain of command runs to New Delhi rather than the state capital — there is a word for that arrangement, and it is not 'federalism.' The meeting in Imphal was a security review. The question it forces is whether anyone in Manipur's government still has the authority to disagree with its conclusions.

Allegations reported here are attributed to named sources and remain unproven unless a court has ruled; matters sub judice are reported without prejudgment.

Reported and written with AI assistance under India Herald's editorial standards; a human editor governs publication.

Key Takeaways

• Manipur's state police are effectively split along Meitei-Kuki ethnic lines, with the DGP's operational authority limited by his personnel's communal loyalties — a collapse of unified command unprecedented in any Indian state.
• The CRPF has conducted over 6,000 area domination operations in Manipur since 2023, dwarfing state police-led operations and making central forces the de facto security authority.
• The CRPF chief's direct engagement with Manipur's home minister — rather than through the CM or state DGP — signals a structural shift from emergency deployment to permanent parallel command.
• The pattern of centralisation through security forces mirrors Delhi's approach in J&K before 2019, raising questions about whether Manipur's elected government retains meaningful control over law and order.
• CM Biren Singh remains politically useful as the BJP's Meitei face, but his operational authority over security has been quietly hollowed — a dynamic that will define Manipur's governance trajectory in the months ahead.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is the CRPF chief meeting Manipur's home minister directly?

The meeting signals Delhi's expanding direct control over Manipur's security. With state police fractured along ethnic lines and Assam Rifles facing Meitei hostility, the CRPF has become the Centre's preferred force, and its chief's engagement reflects a shift from supporting state authority to substituting for it, according to analysts cited by The Hindu.

Why can't Manipur's state police handle law and order?

Manipur's police force has effectively split along Meitei-Kuki ethnic lines since the 2023 violence. Meitei-dominated units operate in the valley while Kuki-Zo personnel function in the hills, making unified command impossible, according to reports in NDTV and Indian Express.

Is Manipur under President's Rule or Governor's Rule?

No. Manipur continues to have an elected government under CM N. Biren Singh of the BJP. However, the central government's expanding paramilitary deployment and direct security coordination have raised questions about the effective extent of the state government's operational authority, as noted by multiple analysts in The Hindu and Indian Express.

How does the Manipur situation compare to Jammu and Kashmir before 2019?

Security analysts have noted parallels: in both cases, state police reliability was questioned, central forces expanded from support to command roles, and the elected government's operational authority was gradually hollowed out, according to analysis in The Hindu. However, Manipur's constitutional position under Article 371(C) and its continued elected government distinguish it from pre-2019 J&K.