A blockade is, by its very nature, an act that causes suffering. It disrupts the movement of people and goods, delays access to much needed healthcare, interrupts livelihoods, and turns the ordinary routines of life into uncertainty. Roads that should carry ambulances, school buses, farmers, workers and families instead become barriers. Whatever its stated objective, a blockade succeeds only because it makes everyday life more difficult for ordinary people. That simple truth should make us pause and think.
Over the past few years, Manipur has witnessed one blockade after another. What began in the aftermath of one conflict has, over time, found expression in another. The communities involved have changed. The demands have changed. The reasons have changed. Yet the consequences have remained remarkably the same. Fuel becomes scarce. Essential supplies are delayed and prices hiked unreasonably. Businesses struggle. Patients wait. Students lose valuable days of learning. Daily wage earners return home without an income. The faces behind the barricades may be different, but the faces of those who suffer are painfully familiar. What troubles me is not only the suffering itself, but what it says about us.
Every blockade rests on an uncomfortable assumption, that someone else’s hardship is an acceptable price for our own cause. It asks us to believe that our grievance is important enough to delay another family’s medicine, another student’s education, another worker’s livelihood or another patient’s treatment.
Who and what gave us that moral authority?
No democratic society grants one citizen or one community the authority to decide how much another citizen should suffer for a cause they neither created nor have the power to resolve. Yet that is precisely what a blockade demands. It asks ordinary people to carry a burden they never chose, in the first place, in the hope that their suffering will compel someone else to act.
This is not a question about whether a cause is just. Every community has grievances that deserve to be heard. Every society must protect the right to protest, to dissent and to seek justice. The question is different. It is whether any cause, however just, gives us the right to make innocent people carry a burden they did not create and have no power to resolve.
Somewhere along the way, we seem to have stopped asking that question. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of repeated blockades is not that they close roads. It is that they slowly close our hearts to the suffering of our fellow citizens. We have become so accustomed to disruption that our first instinct is no longer to question its morality but simply to prepare for it. We fill our fuel tanks, stock our kitchens, postpone our journeys and hope that this blockade will end sooner than the last. We have learned to live with the consequences without asking what they are doing to our conscience.
There was a time when our differences did not prevent us from recognising one another as fellow citizens. We belonged to different communities, spoke different languages, practised different faiths and celebrated different traditions. Yet we shared markets, schools, workplaces and public spaces. We depended on one another in countless ordinary ways. We did not have to agree on everything to understand that another person’s suffering mattered. That sense of shared responsibility seems increasingly fragile today.
We have become more willing to measure the success of our movements by the amount of pressure they create than by the amount of suffering they avoid. We have begun to accept that innocent people can become instruments through which political demands are amplified. Once we cross that line, we are no longer merely protesting. We are making a moral decision that our cause matters more than another person’s dignity.
History has shown us that methods have a way of outliving the conflicts that first justified them. Today one community believes a blockade is necessary. Tomorrow another community reaches for the same tactic. The actors or groups change, but the method remains. And with every repetition, the idea becomes a little more normal that the suffering of ordinary people is simply how public demands are made. That should concern all of us.
Because a society does not lose its moral compass in one dramatic moment. It happens quietly. We justify the suffering of others because our cause is urgent. We tolerate it because it appears effective. Eventually, we stop seeing the suffering altogether. What was once unthinkable slowly becomes ordinary.
Roads were never meant to divide us. They were built to connect us—to carry children to school, patients to hospitals, farmers to markets and families to one another. When we choose to close them, we do more than interrupt traffic. We interrupt trust. We weaken the idea that despite our many differences, we still belong to one another.
Justice is essential. Every community deserves to be heard. But justice without conscience is a dangerous thing. A cause that requires us to overlook the suffering of innocent people eventually loses something of its own moral strength. If we truly seek a better society, then the means by which we pursue justice must reflect the kind of society we hope to build.
Perhaps that is the question before us today. Not which community is right, nor whose grievance is greater, but whether we have allowed our causes to become greater than our conscience. Because the moment we begin to believe that another person’s suffering is an acceptable price for our own demands, we have already lost something far more valuable than any road we choose to block.
The day our cause becomes greater than our conscience is the day we begin to lose not only our humanity, but also the justice we claim to seek.
Sam Khumanthem writes about home, identity, and the quiet complexities of life in Manipur. His work reflects a deep connection to place, shaped by both love and uncertainty.
