Excerpt on Manipur crisis
An excerpt from Hoihnu Hauzel’s Stories the Fire Could Not Burn ran today as part of a feature tracing the hours before the 2023 Manipur crisis in Imphal — the piece signals continuing literary attention to difficult recent history. (thefederal.com)
A new excerpt on Manipur opens on the morning of May 3, 2023, before the fires, and that choice tells you what Hoihnu Hauzel is trying to preserve: the last ordinary hours in Imphal before ordinary life broke apart. The Federal published the passage on April 9, 2026, from her book *Stories the Fire Could Not Burn*. (thefederal.com) By that evening in 2023, Manipur had tipped into ethnic violence between the Meitei community, concentrated in the Imphal Valley, and Kuki-Zo tribal communities from the surrounding hills. The fighting that began on May 3, 2023 did not end in days or weeks; it stretched across 2023, 2024, and into 2025. (hrw.org) The immediate spark was a “Tribal Solidarity March” organized in the hill districts to oppose a demand that Meiteis be included in India’s Scheduled Tribe category. That demand mattered because Scheduled Tribe status can affect land protections, political representation, and access to affirmative-action benefits. (idsa.in) The geography of Manipur made the split even sharper. Meiteis are the majority in the valley around Imphal, while many Kuki-Zo communities live in the surrounding hills, so when violence spread, neighborhoods, roads, and whole districts hardened into front lines. (hrw.org) The numbers turned the rupture into a long emergency. Government figures cited in widely used public summaries put the death toll at 258 by November 22, 2024, with more than 60,000 people displaced from their homes. (wikipedia.org) India’s Supreme Court looked at the state response in August 2023 and called it an “absolute breakdown of law and order and machinery of the state.” The judges were reacting to thousands of police cases, very few arrests, and months of visible failure to protect civilians. (financialexpress.com) The crisis also outlasted Manipur’s elected government. After Chief Minister Nongthombam Biren Singh resigned, the state was placed under President’s Rule on February 13, 2025, which means New Delhi took direct control under Article 356 of India’s Constitution. (northeastlive.s3.amazonaws.com) That is why a literary excerpt is not just a culture-page item here. Hauzel’s book has been presented across multiple outlets in 2026 as a personal account of the Manipur crisis from 2023 to 2025, with a focus on memory, displacement, and what Kuki-Zo families lost when homes and neighborhoods were destroyed. (scroll.in) (theprint.in) The detail that lingers in this week’s excerpt is not a battlefield map or a government order. It is that Manipur’s catastrophe can be narrated hour by hour, from breakfast tables and church routines and family phone calls, because on May 3, 2023, people in Imphal were still moving through a normal day when the state around them was already close to ignition. (thefederal.com)
