Imphal has been silent this week, but not the silent of a summer evening on a hill. All schools and colleges in the state are closed today until Friday. Typically bustling markets are closed during the afternoon rain. The forty-eight-hour general strike of student groups has been marred by a larger row that has spanned three governments, two rounds of ethnic violence and one Supreme Court ruling on one question that has haunted Manipur: Should the state count its citizens before it counts its people?

O Ibobi Singh, the former four-time chief minister and Congress veteran, entered the standoff with a claim that is too simplistic to be in a crisis this old. If New Delhi actually wants it solved, then give the Centre 90 days and any problem in Manipur even a full National Register of Citizens rollout would be solved, he said. If the numbers do not match up with the constitution as it is, modify the constitution, he added. It's a line that works well on screen and much less well in the real world, and at a time when the state's civil society has ceased to wait for politicians to make it for them.

The set of demands was raised by a ten-member delegation comprising community groups, including Naga bodies, Meitei associations and the All Manipur Muslim Organisations Coordinating Committee, which flew into the capital of India on Thursday to press the demand directly before the Ministry of Home Affairs and hopefully before Home Minister Amit Shah. They are not as vociferous as the street demonstrations that have gone before them: dialogue rather than confrontation, one delegate said at Imphal airport. That courtesy comes at a time when the Just and Fair Delimitation campaign's student wing has already demanded a two-day shutdown from the state government in Imphal West which hampered the training of census enumerators, and when house-listing for Census 2027 has started the self-enumeration process on August 17 amid boycott threats.

Demand is of a particular form. Organizations are pushing the NRC to be based on 1951, the first census since the country gained independence, noting that the previous one failed to distinguish between people who have been living in the area for a long time and those who are only recent migrants. They wish that the update be published in the official gazette, that the population figures from the 2027 census be delayed until it is done and that no delimitation of seating in the assemblies be considered until the two processes are complete. It is interesting to note that such demands were raised by the Manipur assembly before and a BJP MP from the Lok Sabha, in the Lok Sabha, in March last year. This is not only an opposition talking point, it is a state divided political fact that cuts across the divided political landscape since the ethnic conflict between the Meitei and Kuki-Zo communities broke out in May 2023.

The reason to peer at Ibobi Singh's ninety days, however, rather than turn a blind eye to them, is the example next door. The only NRC that India has ever completed, directly under the Supreme Court, was in Assam and took nearly six years, involved around ₹1,600 crore of public funds and excluded almost 1.9 million people in the end, many of whom, according to most independent sources, were not foreigners but citizens who were trapped in the paperwork. This list has not been notified ever. No one has been deported as a result of it. The Assam story is not a model one but a warning to be heeded by anyone who takes his responsibility as a serious observer of the demand in Manipur. A state of only 3.3 million population surely cannot be expected to take six years to do what Assam aimed to do for more than 31 million scale matters a lot but in Assam, it was not the only reason to drag the exercise. That was done by litigation, backlogs in the verification process and the complexity of adjudicating contested claims and none of the above pressure is going to go away just because Manipur is small.

It pays to remember: The cost of not resolving this quickly is not being mentioned in the political conversation. The Manipur Government Services Federation's June 2019 cease-work was estimated to have costed the state about ₹13.28 crore in nine days of administrative shutdowns, which was even before this week's strike. Chief Minister Y Khemchand Singh himself has cautioned Manipur not to continue with bandhis and blockades as they are “causing damage” to the state's economy, a state whose growth in GSDP, according to limited data available, is steady rather than resilient, and cannot afford any more year of stop-start trade before assembly elections are to be held by early 2027.

None of this will guarantee that the Centre will follow Ibobi Singh's timeline, or that the 90 days is just a rhetorical device to shift the blame for delay to New Delhi. The Centre's insistence on holding an NRC in the existing constitutional framework may not be the only impediment in the way of the political will as the Manipur government has already informed the Centre it is ready for NRC in the current framework. But it is the persistence, not a single event, that has forced a national conversation on citizenship, census methodology, and constitutional amendment onto the Centre's desk.But it is persistence, not a single event, that has brought a national conversation on citizenship, census methodology, and constitutional amendment onto the Centre's desk.