A debut film from India's most troubled state just won one of cinema's highest honours. Its director prayed for peace on a London stage. Back home, tens of thousands are still living in camps. The Prime Minister took 864 days to visit. The Leader of Opposition visited three times and was stopped by police on his way in.
On Sunday evening, inside the Royal Festival Hall in London, a filmmaker from Imphal walked up to a podium and accepted the Bafta award for Best Children's and Family Film. Lakshmipriya Devi's debut feature Boong, a quiet, tender Manipuri-language story about a boy searching for his missing father, had beaten Disney's Lilo and Stitch, the animated blockbuster Zootopia 2, and a French sci-fi film to take one of British cinema's most prestigious prizes.
It was, by any measure, a remarkable moment. The first Indian film ever to win a Bafta in this category. A debut feature made in a language few outside the north-east have heard spoken, from a state most of India's mainstream media treats as a footnote — until it is burning.
Devi used her acceptance speech to speak not about the craft of filmmaking but about the state of her homeland. She prayed that displaced children, including the young actors in her own film, might one day regain their joy and their innocence. She said she hoped no conflict would ever prove powerful enough to destroy the human capacity for forgiveness. The applause in London was warm. The question worth asking, here in India, is whether anyone in power has been paying attention, and for how long they weren't.
More than 260 people have been killed since May 2023. Over 58,000 remain displaced in 281 makeshift camps. The Prime Minister took 864 days to make his first visit. And when the Leader of Opposition tried to go in June 2023, just weeks after the violence began, police stopped his convoy on the road near the state capital.
Nearly three years. Still in camps.
The ethnic conflict in Manipur began on 3 May 2023. That date, now seared into the state's collective memory, marked the start of violence between the Meitei majority, concentrated in the fertile Imphal Valley, and the Kuki-Zo tribal communities of the surrounding hills. The trigger was a Manipur High Court order that appeared to recommend Scheduled Tribe status for the Meiteis, a classification the tribal communities viewed as an existential threat to their land rights and political standing.
What followed was not a riot. It was, in the assessment of multiple human rights organisations, something closer to an ethnic cleansing in slow motion. Villages were burned. Churches and temples were attacked. More than 4,700 houses were destroyed. A video emerged, filmed on 4 May and circulated publicly only in July, showing two Kuki-Zo women being stripped, paraded, and sexually assaulted by a mob. The video shocked the country. It had been recorded nearly three months before anyone in authority seemed to notice.
By May 2025, the two-year mark of the conflict, more than 58,000 internally displaced persons from both communities were still living in 281 makeshift relief camps across the state, enduring conditions described by Amnesty International as inhumane, with limited access to healthcare, sanitation, and adequate nutrition. Community workers reported regular outbreaks of measles, dysentery, and fever, alongside patients suffering from cancer, tuberculosis, and kidney failure who had no access to specialist medical care.
As recently as December 2025, displaced residents were staging sit-in protests in Imphal, demanding that the government honour its own pledge, made in July, to close all relief camps by December through a three-phase rehabilitation programme. That deadline passed. As of this month, the government has confirmed that around 10,000 people from more than 2,200 households have been resettled, a figure that, measured against the tens of thousands who remain displaced, represents modest progress at best.
Amnesty International India said in May 2025 that it was unacceptable that the Indian government had failed to address the humanitarian needs of displaced communities still living in relief camps two years after the start of the ethnic violence.
864 days. Then a visit.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi did not visit Manipur for 864 days after the conflict began. That number, documented by The Wire and confirmed by multiple Indian news organisations, is not disputed. It is simply a fact of the public record.
The first time Modi spoke about the violence was on 20 July 2023, more than seventy days after it erupted, and only after the video of two Kuki-Zo women being sexually assaulted went viral. Even then, he made a deliberate effort not to single out Manipur, instead referencing other states, then under Congress rule, where violence against women had also occurred. Critics called it a deflection. His government was, after all, in power in Manipur.
Modi addressed the Manipur conflict substantively in parliament only once, in July 2024, more than a year into the crisis, following sustained opposition pressure. Home Minister Amit Shah visited the state several times, but the Prime Minister stayed away. His absence was interpreted by civil society organisations as a signal of detachment, and, some argued, a deliberate effort to avoid association with bad news from a BJP-governed state. By February 2025, the situation had become politically untenable. Chief Minister N. Biren Singh, from Modi's own party, resigned under pressure, having faced fierce criticism for his failure to contain the bloodshed. The state was placed under President's Rule, governed directly from New Delhi.
Modi finally visited on 13 September 2025, where he laid foundation stones for infrastructure projects and announced plans to construct 7,000 new homes for displaced families. The visit lasted a matter of hours. Two days before his arrival, unidentified individuals demolished decorative structures that had been installed along the road in Churachandpur to welcome him, a small but telling indication of the public mood in the Kuki-dominated town. His visit was also part of a broader three-day regional tour that included Assam, West Bengal, and Bihar, all states with significant upcoming electoral stakes. Whether Manipur was the purpose of the trip or a stop along the way is a question the government has not been pressed to answer in any serious public forum.
Rahul Gandhi went. Three times.
While the Prime Minister stayed away, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi visited Manipur three times since the violence began, and on his first attempt the state's own police stopped his convoy on the road near Imphal. He got in anyway.
His first visit came in late June 2023, just weeks after the conflict erupted. He went first to Churachandpur, in the Kuki-dominated hills, and then the following day to Meitei-dominated relief camps in Bishnupur, a deliberate effort to be seen listening to both communities. He said he had come not to play politics but for a peace initiative, and he publicly called out Modi's silence. He found camps short of medicines and basic supplies and said the government needed to act.
His second visit came in January 2024, when he began his Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra from Manipur, choosing the conflict-hit state as the symbolic starting point of his national march. His third visit came on 8 July 2024, after the 2024 general election, in which Congress won both of Manipur's Lok Sabha seats, a striking rebuke to the ruling BJP in a state it governed throughout the crisis. By that point the violence had been running for fourteen months. Gandhi visited relief camps in Churachandpur, Moirang, and Jiribam, where fresh violence had broken out just weeks earlier. He said he had hoped for improvement but found the situation still nowhere near what it should be. He again publicly called on Modi to visit, saying the Prime Minister's presence would bring comfort to the people of Manipur, and that his continued silence would bring no solution.
On each visit, Gandhi was accompanied by newly elected Manipur MPs and met the state's Governor. The BJP accused him of using Manipur as a political pawn. The question of which political leader was treating Manipur as a pawn, the one who went three times or the one who took 864 days to go at all, was left for the public to assess.
What Boong said, and what it reveals
Boong finished filming before the conflict began. Lakshmipriya Devi has been clear about that. The film was not intended as a political document. It was conceived as a child's adventure story, a boy from Imphal chasing his missing father toward the Myanmar border, accompanied by his best friend. It opens, Devi has said, the way a grandmother begins a story: once upon a time, there was a boy named Boong.
But films do not exist in a vacuum, and Boong carries within it a portrait of a Manipur shaped by ethnic complexity long before May 2023. The lead actor Gugun Kipgen, 12, is from the Kuki-Zo community and plays a Meitei character. His best friend in the film belongs to the Marwari community, migrants from Rajasthan often regarded as outsiders in the north-east. The film quietly enacts the kind of cross-community friendship that the state has spent the past three years failing to sustain.
Prime Minister Modi's response to the Bafta win was swift and warm. He called it a moment of immense joy, especially for Manipur, and praised the film for showcasing India's creative talent. The contrast with his silence during the worst of the crisis, and the 864 days before his first visit, was noted widely on social media and in the Indian press. Congratulating a film about peace is considerably less costly than securing it.
The children the world did not see
Among the more quietly devastating details of the Bafta moment was what Devi revealed about the young actors in her film. Some of them, children who appeared on screen portraying a story of belonging and search, are themselves among the internally displaced. The violence that came after filming ended had touched not just the backdrop of the story, but the actual lives of the people who made it.
Devi asked that these children might recover their joy. The relief camps tell a different story. Residents describe living in halls partitioned by worn curtains, surviving on lentils and rice, with dozens of families sharing a handful of washrooms. Several people in the camps have died in medical emergencies, though the government has released no official data on these deaths. In March 2025, a delegation of Supreme Court judges visited camps in violence-hit areas. "Even the judiciary came and left, and we are still here," one displaced woman told the Pulitzer Center's correspondent. "Nothing has changed for us."
That combination, the world's highest court visiting, the world's most prestigious film awards broadcasting a prayer for peace, and yet the displaced still waiting, captures something essential about Manipur's relationship with those who hold power. Attention arrives. Stays briefly. Departs. And the camps remain.
What a Bafta cannot do
Boong's victory is genuinely significant. It brings an underrepresented region into a global spotlight that the state's own government, and the government in New Delhi, have largely failed to provide. It will, in all probability, help more people watch the film, and through the film, encounter a Manipur that is specific, human, and irreducible to a conflict statistic.
But awards cannot rebuild homes. Film cannot unsegregate communities. A prayer from a London stage, however sincere and however widely shared, does not reach the camps. What might reach the camps is political will, sustained, unglamorous, and entirely unconnected to the award season calendar.
Lakshmipriya Devi's film begins like a grandmother's story: once upon a time, there was a boy named Boong who went looking for his father. The story ends with the hope of return, of things found, of families made whole. In the relief camps of Bishnupur and Churachandpur, in the partitioned halls where families wait on lentils and fraying promises, tens of thousands of people are still waiting for their own version of that ending. The grandmother's story, in Manipur, has not yet found its close.