The Government of India’s constitution of the “High-Level Committee on Demographic Changes” (HLCDC) headed by Retired Justice Prakash Prabhakar Naolekar under the Ministry of Home Affairs marks an important political and administrative acknowledgement that illegal immigration and abnormal demographic shifts have become serious national concerns. The official Gazette notification issued on May 26, 2026 states that certain regions of the country are witnessing demographic changes “not attributable to normal fertility or mortality trends” but emerging due to “illegal immigration, irregular population mobility, and administrative laxity.” The notification further admits that these changes are particularly visible in border districts and are affecting governance, social cohesion, resource distribution, tribal regions, and economically sensitive areas. The High-Level Committee has been tasked to recommend policy, legal, and administrative measures for identification, detention, and deportation of illegal immigrants and for strengthening border management and demographic monitoring systems.
At first glance, this appears to vindicate concerns long raised by indigenous groups in Manipur and elsewhere in the Northeast. The terms of reference of the Committee are sweeping. It will examine cross-border movements, abnormal settlement patterns, structural population changes among social and religious communities, and propose permanent mechanisms for detecting and deporting illegal immigrants. The Committee is also empowered to seek records from any ministry or state government and recommend any additional measures it deems necessary.
Yet the fundamental political question remains unanswered – if demographic change and illegal immigration are indeed considered a major national security issue, why do Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Home Minister Amit Shah and ruling party leaders continue to frame the issue overwhelmingly through the prism of Bangladeshi infiltration while rarely naming Manipur or Myanmar-origin migration directly? Why does the national narrative on demographic imbalance repeatedly foreground Assam, West Bengal, or Tripura while the concerns of Manipur remain largely indirect, implied, or strategically avoided?
This silence is neither accidental nor politically insignificant.
For the people of Manipur, especially many Meitei and Naga organisations, illegal immigration from Myanmar is not merely a humanitarian or administrative issue. It is perceived as an existential issue linked with land, identity, political representation, insurgency, narco-economics, forest encroachment, and the violent conflict that erupted on May 3, 2023. In the local imagination of Manipur, demographic anxiety is inseparable from the ongoing crisis itself.
It may be mentioned that the President of the Zomi Re-Unification Organisation (ZRO), the political wing of the armed group Zomi Re-Unification Army (ZRA), is Thanglianpau Guite. He is a Chin-Kuki leader born in Myanmar, where he was elected as an MP in 1990. The President of the Kuki National Organisation (KNO) and supreme commander of the Kuki National Army (KNA) is P.S. Haokip who migrated from Myanmar. He is leading the organization since its founding on February 24, 1988. He has been a central figure in the Kuki militant movement in Manipur, advocating for a separate administration or “Zale’n-gam” (Kuki homeland). The ZRO/ZRA and KNO/KNA are two of the 25 Kuki-Zomi militant groups under the Suspension of Operation (SoO) agreement with the Government of India (GOI) and the Government of Manipur (GOM).
Ironically, while the Union Government now speaks about “unnatural demographic changes,” it has consistently hesitated to explicitly connect the Manipur crisis with illegal immigration from Myanmar at the national level. This disconnect between Delhi’s political vocabulary and Manipur’s lived anxieties has produced growing distrust.
Reports announcing the formation of the committee quoted Amit Shah describing illegal infiltration and demographic change as “a very big challenge for the present and future of any nation.” The Committee was presented as the institutional outcome of Prime Minister Modi’s Independence Day speech of August 15, 2025, where he warned that infiltration was part of a conspiracy to alter India’s demography. Yet neither the Prime Minister nor the Home Minister specifically identified Manipur as one of the principal theatres of demographic stress despite the state witnessing one of the most violent internal conflicts in recent Indian history.
This omission becomes even more striking because Manipur itself has repeatedly raised the issue officially. Former Chief Minister Nongthombam Biren Singh consistently highlighted the issue of illegal immigrants from Myanmar and occasionally Bangladesh as well. He publicly stated in 2024 that over 10,000 illegal immigrants had been detected in the state over five years. Verification drives, biometric exercises, district-level committees, and repeated demands for stricter border regulation were initiated under his government. According to his statements, districts like Kamjong, Tengnoupal, Chandel, and Churachandpur had recorded large numbers of undocumented entrants. My earlier published articles repeatedly highlighted these developments and linked them with concerns over demographic imbalance, reserved forest encroachment, mushrooming villages, narco-trafficking, and ethnic territorial contestation.
However, while N Biren Singh repeatedly foregrounded the Myanmar issue, the national leadership rarely amplified the same narrative with comparable clarity. Even during Prime Minister Modi’s visit to Manipur in September 2025, my earlier article observed that the Prime Minister avoided directly addressing illegal immigration from Myanmar despite speaking strongly about infiltration in Assam shortly thereafter. The contrast was politically revealing.
This divergence reflects the existence of two parallel political frameworks.
The first is the national electoral framework. Within this framework, illegal immigration is primarily discussed in relation to Bangladesh because the issue carries substantial electoral and ideological weight in Assam, West Bengal, and Tripura. The narrative of Bangladeshi infiltration has long been embedded within the politics of nationalism, border security, and demographic protection. It resonates strongly with the historical memory of the Assam Agitation and aligns with the ideological discourse of the BJP and RSS regarding “ghuspaithiyas” or infiltrators.
The second framework is the frontier-security reality of Manipur. Here, the dominant concern is not Bangladesh but Myanmar. The porous Indo-Myanmar border, the post-2021 civil war in Myanmar, the collapse of border regulation, armed ethnic networks, narco-trafficking routes, and trans-border kinship ties have created a vastly different demographic and security environment. The people entering Manipur from Myanmar are not viewed locally merely as refugees. They are perceived by many indigenous organisations as actors within a larger process of demographic transformation and territorial restructuring.
This is why organisations such as the Coordinating Committee on Manipur Integrity (COCOMI) and the United Naga Council (UNC) and other sections of Naga civil society repeatedly insist that the issue cannot be reduced to a generic humanitarian refugee question. For them, the concern is fundamentally political and civilisational. They argue that demographic shifts in a small and conflict-ridden border state like Manipur have consequences far beyond statistics. In a state with barely three million people, even relatively small migratory inflows can alter electoral balances, land ownership patterns, forest occupation, constituency structures, and ethnic equations.
Yet New Delhi’s reluctance to explicitly centre Myanmar-origin migration within the national discourse arises from multiple strategic compulsions.
First, India’s geopolitical relationship with Myanmar remains delicate. Despite international condemnation of the Myanmar military junta after the 2021 coup, India has maintained cautious engagement with the regime because of border security concerns, connectivity projects, Manipur insurgents, and strategic competition with China. Openly portraying large-scale Myanmar-origin migration as a national demographic threat risks complicating this relationship.
Second, the Indo-Myanmar frontier is unlike the Indo-Bangladesh border. Communities such as Nagas, Kukis, Chins, Mizos, and Zomis have long-standing ethnic and familial ties across the border. The Free Movement Regime (FMR), despite its suspension and modifications, emerged from this historical reality. Any aggressive rhetoric directly targeting Myanmar-origin communities risks intensifying ethnic tensions within Manipur, Mizoram, and Nagaland.
Third, sections of the anti-junta resistance in Myanmar, including the People’s Defence Forces (PDF) and Chin armed groups, maintain varying degrees of ethnic linkage with groups in India’s Northeast particularly Manipur. India’s security establishment therefore operates within a complex strategic environment where humanitarian concerns, counter-insurgency calculations, border management, and regional geopolitics overlap.
Consequently, strategic ambiguity has become the Centre’s preferred approach. The leadership speaks about “demographic change,” “cross-border infiltration,” and “encroachers from beyond the border” without consistently naming Myanmar-origin migration explicitly. Bangladesh becomes the politically safer and electorally more rewarding symbol of infiltration, while Manipur’s anxieties remain only partially acknowledged.
This ambiguity, however, has deep consequences in Manipur.
The perception that Delhi refuses to openly recognise the Myanmar dimension strengthens alienation among indigenous communities. Many feel that their concerns are subordinated to electoral calculations elsewhere. This perception has intensified after May 3, 2023, when the violent conflict transformed demographic anxieties into armed territorial realities.
The issue is no longer merely about immigration. It is about whether the Indian state recognises the fears of indigenous peoples regarding demographic survival, land rights, and political continuity.
The constitution of the HLCDC therefore becomes both significant and insufficient at the same time.
It is significant because, for the first time, the Government of India has formally institutionalised demographic change as a national security and governance issue. The Gazette notification explicitly acknowledges that abnormal demographic changes are occurring in border districts and tribal regions and that existing institutional mechanisms are inadequate.
It is insufficient because the committee’s framework remains highly generalised. Manipur is nowhere specifically identified despite being one of the most visibly conflict-affected border states linked with illegal immigration debates. There is no dedicated reference to the Indo-Myanmar border, no explicit acknowledgment of the post-coup Myanmar crisis, and no indication that Manipur’s unique ethnic complexities will receive special treatment.
This creates legitimate doubts about whether the Committee will seriously engage with the specific realities of Manipur or subsume them under a broader national framework dominated by the Bangladesh discourse.
The composition of the Committee also raises questions. While it includes retired bureaucrats, a former police commissioner, the Census Commissioner, and economist Shamika Ravi, there is no obvious representation from Manipur or from indigenous Northeastern institutions deeply familiar with the region’s social and ethnic complexities. The Committee may consult stakeholders later, but the absence of institutional representation from the affected frontier societies themselves may reinforce perceptions that Manipur will again be examined from Delhi’s distance rather than from lived realities on the ground.
Moreover, if the Committee genuinely intends to address demographic imbalance in Manipur, it cannot restrict itself to abstract population analysis. It must confront several politically sensitive questions directly.
It must examine the relationship between illegal immigration and the proliferation of new settlements in reserved forests and protected areas. It must investigate allegations regarding cross-border militant movement, narco-trafficking corridors, forged identity networks, and demographic engineering. It must assess whether existing systems like Aadhaar, voter enrolment, and local residency certification have been vulnerable to manipulation in sensitive border districts. It must also evaluate the security implications of demographic change in relation to insurgency and transnational armed networks.
Equally important, the Committee must avoid reducing the issue solely to communal arithmetic. Demographic change in Manipur cannot be understood merely through religious categories. The crisis is deeply tied to ethnicity, indigeneity, territory, customary land systems, existentiality, and political representation. Any simplistic national framework that merely imports the Assam or West Bengal template into Manipur will fail.
The Committee also faces another challenge: credibility.
For many in Manipur, committees and commissions have historically produced reports without meaningful implementation. Unless the HLCDC leads to visible policy changes –stronger border regulation, effective detection systems, transparent deportation procedures, proper biometric monitoring, fencing in vulnerable sectors, coordination with state agencies, and consistent political acknowledgment of Manipur’s concerns – it risks being perceived as another symbolic exercise.
Besides the hasty appreciation of the Committee by the Manipur Chief Minister Yumnam Khemchand, the former Chief Minister Biren Singh also hastily welcome the Committee despite Manipur not being specifically mentioned reflects this political dilemma. On one hand, supporting the Committee aligns with his long-standing narrative regarding demographic imbalance and illegal immigration. On the other hand, the absence of explicit recognition of Manipur within the Committee’s announcement exposes the limitations of the state’s influence over the national framing of the issue.
Ultimately, the seriousness of the HLCDC regarding Manipur will not be measured by rhetoric but by whether it is willing to confront the uncomfortable contradictions embedded within India’s current demographic discourse.
If the Committee merely reinforces the existing Bangladesh-centric narrative while treating Myanmar-origin migration ambiguously, it will deepen distrust in Manipur. If it genuinely examines the Indo-Myanmar dimension with honesty and seriousness, it could become a turning point in recognising the frontier realities of the Northeast.
Manipur today stands at the intersection of demographic anxiety, ethnic conflict, border geopolitics, insurgency, and questions of indigenous survival. Ignoring these realities or subsuming them under generic national narratives will only intensify alienation.
The real test before the High-Level Committee on Demographic Changes is therefore not whether it can produce another bureaucratic report on illegal immigration. The real test is whether the Indian state is prepared to acknowledge that demographic change in Manipur is not merely a peripheral issue of a distant borderland but a central question touching national security, federal trust, indigenous rights, and the future stability of India’s eastern frontier.
If the Committee fails to seriously engage with Manipur’s realities, then the fears expressed by many in the state will only deepen – that while India speaks loudly about infiltration elsewhere, Manipur continues to be treated as a frontier whose anxieties are recognised only partially, selectively, and too late.
Senior Editor: Imphal Review of Arts and Politics
