During his visit to Itanagar in Arunachal Pradesh in September 2025, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi described the Northeast as the country’s “Ashtalakshmi,” invoking the group of eight forms of the goddess Lakshmi and symbolizing the region’s cultural wealth, rich biodiversity, abundance of natural resources, and developmental potential. The Ashtalakshmi analogy was accompanied by a series of major investment announcements worth ₹7,300 crore (USD $823 million) in Manipur, including the construction of road bridges and markets and upgrades to existing infrastructure. This label forms part of a wider narrative effort to recast the Northeast from a peripheral frontier into a “frontrunner of growth,” and part of the wider “Act East” policy agenda of infrastructural development for the region.
Just days before the Ashtalakshmi speech, Modi had visited Manipur, in his first visit to the state since large-scale ethnic violence broke out in May 2023, to appeal to all parties to choose the path of peace. However, this message was undercut on September 19, when suspected People’s Liberation Army of Manipur (PLA-MP) militants ambushed and killed two Assam Rifles soldiers in Bishnupur district. The contrast between vision and reality here underscores a critical policy lesson for India’s Northeast: development cannot precede security.
“The contrast between vision and reality here underscores a critical policy lesson for India’s Northeast: development cannot precede security.”
Persistent Insecurity in Manipur
Two and a half years since ethnic clashes first broke out in May 2023, the situation in Manipur remains far from normal. The Northeast state has long been deeply divided along ethnic lines, most notably between the Meitei, Kuki, and Naga communities. Historically, these divisions have been shaped by competition over land, political representation, and access to resources, with tensions dating back decades. The 2023 clashes began after disputes broke out related to scheduled tribe status for the Meitei community, which provoked widespread protests and violent confrontations with Kuki groups.
From May 2023 through May 2025, the Armed Conflict Location and Event Dataset (ACLED) recorded a reported 396 fatalities from political violence. While violence levels are now significantly lower than peaks in 2023 and early 2024, the South Asia Terrorism Portal reports 52 conflict-related fatalities in Manipur in 2025, significantly higher than any figure between 2017 and 2022. Furthermore, the displacement of over 60,000 people during the early months of the conflict has been entrenched by the emergence of buffer zones, enforced by a grid of central paramilitary forces checkpoints separating the Meitei and Kuki-Zo communities, which further enshrine and exacerbate civilians’ fear of “the other.” Conditions for those based in the relief camps for displaced persons remain squalid, yet plans to close these down in December 2025 appear naïve in the absence of viable alternatives.
As the September 19 PLA-MP ambush shows, the conflict has also given a fresh lease of life to Manipur’s longstanding insurgent groups, including those technically under ceasefires with New Delhi. The anti-talks Valley-Based Insurgent Groups (VBIGs)—the term for Meitei insurgent groups operating from the Imphal Valley and Myanmar—have remained the most active of Northeast India’s insurgents, even as violence has declined elsewhere in the region since 2010. VBIGs have carved out influence amidst the deteriorating security situation in Sagaing Province in neighboring Myanmar, securing tactical alignments with pro-junta forces. In January 2025, a large-scale, multi-day clash between these groups and the Myanmar-origin Kuki National Army Burma (KNA-B) killed 20 people. Manipur-based Kuki armed groups, for their part, increased their activities since 2023, including drone attacks in September 2024 and January 2025. The renewal and tightening of Kuki rebel groups’ Suspension of Operations Agreements in September represents a positive step, but such deals are difficult to operationalize and often fall prey to divergent expectations and third party backlash.
Can Development Precede Security?
In this security environment, the central government’s efforts to actualize the Ashtalakshmi vision of ensuring the northeastern states are not left behind in India’s wider national development raises a critical question: can infrastructure, connectivity, and cultural projects alleviate enduring conflict? The empirical record in the Northeast illustrates the shortcomings of this development-first approach. Major infrastructure projects in Northeast India—including the Kaladan Multimodal Transit Project, Imphal–Moreh Rail Line, and the India–Myanmar–Thailand Trilateral Highway—have seen repeated delays due to insecurity and ethnic unrest. For instance, only 70 percent of the Trilateral Highway has been completed, and the Imphal–Moreh Rail Line remains stalled by local tensions and violence. With limited infrastructure development, Manipur’s industrial and manufacturing growth rates have slouched below the Indian average over the past decade, with real GSDP growth around 5.1 percent compared to 6.6 percent at the national level. The region’s rich mineral deposits, worth almost ₹10 lakh crore (USD $13.2 billion), have been cited by government officials as evidence of the region’s status as a “frontier of opportunity,” but these remain largely untapped due to ongoing security challenges and risks of inflaming further political conflict.
Persistent instability has undermined efforts to convert infrastructure and connectivity projects into tangible, sustainable economic growth since the inception of India’s “Act East” policy in 2014. Beyond mere disruption, Meitei, Kuki, and Naga insurgents run varying parallel governance structures with taxation systems to extort civilians, businesses, and contractors, which significantly hamper development in the region. In the Imphal Valley, VBIGs continue to plant or lob grenades at the premises of non-compliant individuals and businesses. In the hills, the National Socialist Council of Nagalim – Isak-Muivah (NSCN–IM) operates its own Government of the People’s Republic of Nagalim (GPRN) from its headquarters in Camp Hebron, near Dimapur. In each of these areas, armed groups continue to exert enormous influence on the contracting and implementation of development projects. As a result, the progress of these and other Act East initiatives has remained slow and vulnerable to delays, setbacks, and subversion. Without an improved security environment, actualization of the Ashtalakshmi narrative is likely to face the same challenges.
Toward a Security-First Strategy
Ultimately, the assumption that peace and normalcy flow from development does not hold in the Northeast. To its credit, since approximately 2010, the Indian government has achieved significant progress by fundamentally changing its approach to peace negotiations in the Northeast. Rather than quickly signing ceasefires and immediately entering into talks—a pattern that repeatedly led to the emergence of new splinter groups—the government shifted toward systematic crackdowns on recalcitrant factions and bringing all stakeholders together under unified peace deals, nine of which have been signed since 2014, that include robust development provisions. The Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which once blanketed much of the region, has now been withdrawn from most of the region’s districts, reflecting the improved overall security situation.
The paradigmatic example of this approach is the 2020 Bodoland agreement. After seven years of counterinsurgency operations, New Delhi brought the National Democratic Front of Bodoland’s Saoraigwra (NDFB-S) faction into a final peace accord in 2020. The resulting agreement strengthened existing Bodo autonomous arrangements in the Kokrajhar, Baksa, Chirang, and Udalguri districts through the creation of the Bodoland Territorial Region (BTR). The accord brought together six different Bodo armed factions, including factions long involved in peace talks as well as recently-surrendered factions such as the NDFB–S. Since the agreement, violent incidents and insurgency-related disruptions have declined sharply.
“Rather than quickly signing ceasefires and immediately entering into talks—a pattern that repeatedly led to the emergence of new splinter groups—the government shifted toward systematic crackdowns on recalcitrant factions and bringing all stakeholders together under unified peace deals, nine of which have been signed since 2014, that include robust development provisions.”
To achieve the Ashtalakshmi vision, New Delhi must consider a similar approach in Manipur. First, to make progress on the security environment, the central government should establish a unified command structure, integrating military, paramilitary, police, and civil administration to coordinate security efforts and improve responsiveness to outbreaks of violence. Unified command structures are not unknown to the Northeast, with one established most famously in Assam to combat the ULFA insurgency during the 1990s. Nor are they without challenges, particularly when competing politics limit the operational dimensions. However, as the case of Assam’s Unified Command in the 1990s and 2000s demonstrated, these structures—even if imperfect and riddled with political disagreement—can facilitate pockets of coordination between central and state forces that can nonetheless tangibly impact the security situation.
Second, the general lull in violence since President’s Rule was imposed should not be equated with peace. While, on the one hand, the central government has been able to rejuvenate its Suspension of Operations Agreement with the Kuki-Zo armed groups, on the other, the political space to deal with Meitei factions—with the exception of the 60-strong UNLF-Pambei in 2023—has been much narrower. Yet dealing with armed factions on both sides of the divide is vital, particularly with the Arambai Tenggol (Meitei for “dart-wielding cavalry”), which has played a major role in the communal violence against Kuki communities. Beyond formal state dialogue with armed groups, it is vital that New Delhi affords space to community-level peace dialogues that flow from a stabilized security situation, driven and mediated by respected civil society actors. An example of a success story from the region is that of the Forum for Naga Reconciliation, which has played a key role in reducing inter-factional violence between Naga armed groups in neighboring Nagaland since 2008.
Third, the reduction of large-scale violence afforded by the creation and de facto persistence of buffer zones must be met with urgent, targeted relief measures to rebuild damaged infrastructure while preparing to rehabilitate those still in the displacement camps. This, of course, requires credible security guarantees that civilians can return to their homes, many of which now sit on the opposing sides of the buffer zones. This calls for a carefully-sequenced process that avoids implementing short-term measures in the interest of declaring a premature return to normalcy.
Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, New Delhi needs to recognize that even if the above measures are implemented, persistent structural challenges—like cross-border insurgent sanctuaries, illicit trafficking, weak governance, and uneven development—will sustain the conditions of conflict. As Indian civil servant Nari Rustomji remarked in 1981, surveys of conflict in the region “will show a rising and declining graph at regularly recurring intervals to correspond with the rise and ebb of disturbances. At the point of each depression will be recorded an explanatory footnote that the situation has been brought fully under control and that permanent peace is at least ‘round the corner.’” Claims that the region is returning to “normalcy” without addressing these security imperatives will ultimately render the Ashtalakshmi vision aspirational at best.
Views expressed are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect the positions of South Asian Voices, the Stimson Center, or our supporters.
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Image 1: PMIndia
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