In simple language, the problem of Manipur is this: the government rules the valley, but it does not rule the hills. Two great thinkers help us understand this—Weber and Foucault.
Weber said a state is defined by one thing: it has the monopoly of legitimate violence. This means only the state has the legal right to use force—police, arrest, jail. No one else should be allowed to do it. In Manipur, this monopoly is broken.
In the valley, the state has this monopoly. If there is a protest in Imphal, police comes in 10 minutes, imposes legal provisions, arrests people, and controls the situation. The state shows it can use legitimate force.
In the hills, this monopoly does not exist. There, other groups collect tax on highways, decide who can pass, punish people, and run their own courts. The state’s police station may exist, but it is locked inside the compound. It does not patrol. It does not act. So legitimate violence has not climbed the hills. Instead, illegitimate violence has taken its place.
When legitimate violence retreats, illegitimate violence becomes the government.
Foucault said power is not just guns and law. Power is daily work. He called it governmentality—the art of governing people through daily techniques. And he called the full system of these techniques a dispositif—meaning the whole apparatus: offices, files, policing methods, census, surveillance, records, discourse.
Governmentality works not by big speeches, but by boring daily work: the constable doing his beat, the clerk updating land records, the enumerator knocking on doors, the court issuing summons. In the valley, this dispositif works. Foucault would call it panoptic—like a CCTV that is always on. The state watches, it knows, it records, it punishes quickly. People become legible, governable.
In the hills, this dispositif fails. The gaze does not reach. The hills are zones of opacity—dark spots where the state cannot see. The state does not know who lives where, who came when, what is grown in which field. Its power/knowledge—Foucault’s term for how knowing is power—is fractured.
What the state does instead in the hills are simulacra—fake shows of governance. A minister comes by helicopter, gives a speech, inaugurates a building, eats lunch, leaves. This looks like government on TV, but it is not governmentality. Real governmentality is daily, not ceremonial.
When state governmentality is absent, de facto sovereignties grow. Other authorities produce their own power/knowledge and their own discipline. The state is no longer the only boss.
Now the government wants to do NRC and census. In Foucault’s language, these are biopolitical tools—tools to manage population, to classify who belongs and who does not. But biopolitical tools only work if disciplinary techniques already exist on the ground. If your police cannot go to a hill village to verify a document, if your office has no old records, then who will make the NRC list? Local actors will make it. They will include who they want, exclude who they don’t want. Foucault would call this epistemic capture—when the process of producing knowledge is captured by local power-holders.
So a list made by a state that does not climb the hills will never be accepted as truth. It will create more fight, not less.
Climbing the hills does not mean sending more army or more AFSPA. Climbing means extending legitimate force in its disciplinary, lawful form. It means extending disciplinary puissance, rebuilding epistemic infrastructure, and moving from spectacle to praxis.
Puissance means capacity to enforce. Not raid-based policing, but daily beat policing. An FIR can be filed in Churachandpur as easily as in Imphal. Investigation happens by law, not by permission from armed groups. Rebuilding epistemic infrastructure means restoring the daily files, land records, and residency records so that the state can actually know the hills. Without knowing, it cannot govern.
Moving from spectacle to praxis means shifting from one-day visits to everyday presence. A DC and SP who actually live in the hill district, who hold daily hearings, can begin to make governmentality take root.
If the Manipur state cannot do this because it is too weak, too communalised, or too compromised, then it must ask for a reconfiguration of the dispositif. In simple legal terms: ask the Centre to reconfigure jurisdiction under a unified command that is seen as neutral and accountable.
Otherwise, Manipur will remain what it is—a state with a bifurcated authority, one panopticon that works in the valley and is switched off in the hills. Weber would say: first become a state everywhere. Foucault would say: first establish your governmentality everywhere. Only when legitimate violence and the knowledge that makes it legitimate have both climbed the hills, can peace have a chance.
