ISLAMABAD: Protesters in a small northeastern Indian state are demanding that the government identify undocumented migrants before the next national census, threatening to disrupt preparations already underway in a region the United Nations has repeatedly warned is approaching humanitarian collapse.
The state of Manipur borders Myanmar and has a population of roughly 3 million, according to official Indian government figures.
Manipur has been locked in ethnic conflict for nearly three years. Violence erupted in May 2023 after a court directed authorities to consider expanded indigenous land protections for the Meitei, the Times of India reported. Meitei are a valley-dwelling, predominantly Hindu community with outsized political influence in the state.
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Meanwhile, Kuki-Zo groups, a hill-dwelling and predominantly Christian community, feared the move would expose their constitutionally protected ancestral territories to encroachment, according to UN Special Rapporteurs. What followed was a virtual partition of the state, with peace-building researchers describing the physical separation of the two communities as the most complete in the region's modern history.
Tens of thousands remain in displacement camps with no clear path home, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center.
Healthcare has collapsed along ethnic lines, with the Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition and researchers from The Lancet documenting at least eight major attacks on health facilities in 2024 alone, including grenades delivered to hospitals. Because major specialist hospitals are concentrated in the Meitei-dominated valley, Kuki-Zo residents in the hills have been cut off from critical care, the Coalition found.
It is against this backdrop that the Campaign for Just and Fair Delimitation (JFD) is now leading protests demanding India complete a National Register of Citizens before census workers begin counting Manipur's population.
JFD argues that without such verification, undocumented migrants will be counted alongside citizens, permanently altering the state's official population figures.
Further risks of ethnic cleansing
The UN has warned that rhetoric identifying "outsiders," the kind driving the push for a citizen registry, risks fueling further ethnic cleansing.
The stakes extend beyond a headcount. India's 2027 Census will determine how the country redraws the boundaries of its parliamentary and state legislative seats, reallocating political power based on population size, according to a report by NLC Bharat on India's electoral redistricting process.
That process, known as delimitation, has not taken place in most of India since the 1970s. House-listing operations, the first phase of data collection, are set to run from Sep 1 to Sep 30 in Manipur.
JFD is demanding that the citizen registry use 1951, the year of India's first post-independence census, as its reference point, rather than a later date that would count more recent population movements toward Manipur's official population, according to a document from India's Ministry of Home Affairs.
JFD origins
The organization traces its demand to 1980, when a student organization called the All Manipur Students' Union pressed the state government to identify and deport undocumented immigrants.
That pressure led to a formal agreement, later reaffirmed in a separate understanding in 1994, according to researcher Arunava Mondal's 2018 investigation into the political economy of India's northeastern states. Neither commitment was fully carried out, the investigation found.
JFD says successive governments allowed the issue to go unresolved for decades. The group has threatened to escalate its campaign, including picketing government offices and blocking census-related training and fieldwork, if the census proceeds without the citizen registry.
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Students have protested at census training sites in Imphal, the state capital, according to the organization. JFD stated that two students were injured when police used batons to disperse a demonstration.
Women vendors from the Khwairamband Ima Keithel market in Imphal joined the demonstrations, extending the protests beyond students and political groups.
Students have also demanded that people displaced by the ethnic conflict be resettled before the population count. Counting residents before resettlement risks excluding displaced people from official data, according to a study by the International Crisis Group.
Under a government notification, Manipur's self-enumeration phase for the 2027 Census is scheduled to run from Aug 17 to 31, ahead of the house-listing operations in September. JFD has not said whether it will call off its campaign before then.