Pradip Phanjoubam

Even if it has scored convincingly in the short run, there is no guarantee that the new government’s problems are over. It will have to keep its own members of legislative assembly happy when a majority of the cabinet ministers are from the smaller parties that are supporting it.

A rejoinder to Neville Maxwell's "Olaf Caroe's Fabrication of the 'McMahon Line'" (EPW, 6 August 2016) claims that there are many factual inconsistencies. The author also asserts that Maxwell deliberately silences alternate explanations to his claims.

Delhi's chest-thumping journalists are becoming mere stenographers of power, forgetting to ask questions and interrogate official narratives. A journalist from Manipur recounts the events leading up to and around the 9 June 2015 "surgical strikes" by the Indian Army against insurgents and explains the event in its contexts.

The results of the Manipur elections point to an interesting theme paradox - the Congress was voted back to power despite its all-round failure in governance. The voters perhaps felt the need to vote the party back to power in the state contiguous to its reign in the centre, conditioned by incidents in history pertaining to centre-state relations. The rise of the Trinamool Congress as a force in the state and the marginal victories for the Naga People's Front also carried important local messages.

As the events of the past two months have shown, Manipur is now a divided house. The seeds for this division were visible even before the merger of the state with the Indian Union in 1949. Today, in this insurgency-torn state, the liberation that a section of the population seeks is not the liberation another wants. The politics behind the 68-day economic blockade over the issue of revival of the Autonomous District Councils in the hill districts, which further hardened after the state government refused to allow the Naga nationalist leader, Thuingaleng Muivah, to visit his "home" village located in Manipur revealed the complex and antagonistic nature of ethnic aspirations that seem to make the state destined for conflict.