The indefinite delay in conducting elections to the Autonomous District Councils (ADCs) in Manipur is more than a procedural deferral; it is a profound betrayal of the constitutional promise and political agency of the hill peoples. The ADCs, established under the Sixth Schedule-like framework of the Manipur (Hill Areas) District Council Act, 1971, were conceived as instruments of participatory self-governance and as a constitutional safeguard against the historical marginalisation of the hill tribes. Their stasis today, an outcome of deliberate bureaucratic inertia and political expediency, exposes the enduring asymmetry between the hill and valley in Manipur’s political imagination. The slogan “No Polls, No Voice” captures not merely a democratic deficit, but a deeper malaise in Manipur’s federal ethos, the failure to translate autonomy into agency, representation into responsiveness, and constitutionalism into lived justice.
The 1971 Act, enacted under Article 371C, sought to extend the logic of the Sixth Schedule without fully incorporating its spirit. While the District Councils were designed to provide legislative and executive powers over land, forests, culture, and local governance in the hill areas, effectiveness depended on regular elections and fiscal devolution. In theory, the ADCs were to serve as a counterbalance to the dominance of the Manipur Legislative Assembly, where valley constituencies determine the political tide. In practice, the ADCs have been rendered peripheral, underfunded, bureaucratically constrained, and politically manipulated.
The state government’s repeated postponement of ADC elections, citing pretexts ranging from administrative preparedness to law-and-order concerns, reflects a structural denial of representation. The last elected councils, constituted in 2015, completed their tenure in 2020; since then, the councils have remained defunct or under interim arrangements. This democratic suspension cannot be viewed in isolation, it is symptomatic of a larger project to centralise authority and silence dissenting peripheries. The refusal to hold elections amounts to disenfranchisement by stealth, where the rhetoric of ‘development’ and ‘security’ substitutes for political participation.
At its core, the ADC delay reveals the asymmetrical nature of Manipur’s democracy. The hills, predominantly inhabited by tribal communities, account for around 90% of the state’s territory but only a lesser population and political representation. This demographic and geographical paradox has historically enabled the valley-centric state apparatus to subordinate the hills’ demands for autonomy to its own vision of integration. The suspension of the ADCs thus perpetuates a colonial logic of governance, treating the hills as administrative units to be managed, not political communities to be represented.
The absence of elected councils has created a democratic vacuum where bureaucrats and politically appointed administrators act without accountability to the local populace. Development funds meant for tribal areas are channelled through state departments with minimal transparency, undermining the principles of decentralised governance. The delay also weakens the institutional framework for customary land management, forest conservation, and local justice, all of which are intrinsic to tribal identity and autonomy. What remains is an administrative shell, an ‘autonomy’ emptied of content.
The ADC impasse illuminates the paradoxes of Indian federalism in its frontier regions. The Union government, while projecting an image of inclusivity through rhetorical invocations of tribal empowerment and ‘Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas,’ has been conspicuously silent on the ADC issue. This silence is strategic, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which governs both the Centre and the state, seeks to avoid alienating the Meitei political constituency that forms its core base in the valley, even as it pays lip service to tribal concerns.
The constitutional instrument of Article 371C, which mandates a Hill Areas Committee (HAC) in the Manipur Legislative Assembly to safeguard tribal interests, has been rendered toothless. The HAC’s recommendations, including those demanding the immediate conduct of ADC elections and enhanced autonomy through the proposed Hill Areas Committee (Amendment) Bill, 2021, have been systematically ignored. The political subtext is unmistakable; federalism in Manipur functions not as a mechanism of power-sharing but as a hierarchy of control, with the Centre and the state colluding to preserve majoritarian hegemony.
In this sense, the ADC delay is not merely an administrative lapse, it is a form of constitutional evasion that exposes the limits of India’s pluralist promise. The irony lies in the fact that while New Delhi celebrates its democratic credentials internationally, it tolerates the silencing of an entire set of indigenous communities within its own borders.
The consequences of the ADC impasse transcend institutional paralysis. The denial of local elections has deepened mistrust between the hill and valley, reinforcing perceptions of political exclusion. The hills view the state’s actions as a continuation of historical injustices, of being governed for the people, but never by the people. In the wake of the 2023-24 ethnic violence between Meitei and Kuki communities, this institutional disenfranchisement has acquired sharper significance. The absence of elected tribal bodies exacerbates alienation at a time when trust in the state is at its lowest ebb.
Furthermore, the vacuum created by non-functional ADCs has opened space for informal authorities, armed groups, and civil society organisations to fill governance gaps. While such actors often mobilise for legitimate grievances, their proliferation in the absence of formal institutions risks entrenching parallel governance structures. The long-term effect is the erosion of constitutional legitimacy in the hills, where the state’s authority appears neither representative nor just, but extractive and indifferent.
Beyond identity and representation, the ADC delay also serves material interests. Keeping the councils in limbo allows the state government to retain control over developmental funds earmarked for tribal regions. The flow of central grants through state departments, rather than directly to elected councils, creates opportunities for patronage and corruption. The bureaucratic control over tribal affairs thus becomes a mechanism of resource capture, where the rhetoric of ‘capacity building’ masks a system of dispossession.
This political economy of delay is sustained by an elite consensus that spans party lines. For valley-based politicians, an empowered ADC structure threatens to dilute their control over resource allocation and administrative appointments. For the Centre, too much autonomy for the hills risks setting precedents that could embolden other peripheral regions. Thus, the ADC issue becomes a casualty of the politics of containment, a calculated suppression of democratic decentralisation to preserve an unequal status quo.
The phrase ‘No Polls, No Voice’ encapsulates more than an immediate grievance, as it signifies the structural condition of being perpetually deferred. The hills’ democratic claim is not merely for periodic elections, but for recognition of their political subjecthood. The betrayal lies in the systematic transformation of constitutional safeguards into instruments of control. Every delay, every procedural justification, reaffirms a paternalistic logic that views tribal governance as a privilege to be granted, not a right to be exercised.
In a deeper sense, the ADC crisis mirrors the broader contradictions of India’s postcolonial democracy: the coexistence of electoral proceduralism with substantive exclusion. The state’s reluctance to hold elections is not an aberration, but a logical outcome of a developmentalist discourse that prioritises order over justice, integration over autonomy. The result is a democracy that speaks the language of inclusion while practising the politics of silence.
Restoring the ADCs is not simply a matter of administrative regularity, but it is a moral and political imperative. Elections would reconstitute local legitimacy, enable community participation in governance, and re-anchor trust in constitutional institutions. But beyond procedural restoration, the crisis demands a reimagining of autonomy itself, one that moves from token representation to substantive self-governance.
This requires not only holding overdue polls but re-empowering the councils with fiscal and legislative authority, as envisioned in the 2021 Amendment Bill. It demands an end to bureaucratic tutelage and the recognition of the hills as co-equal partners in Manipur’s political order. Most crucially, it calls for the Indian state to confront its own internal contradictions, to reconcile its democratic self-image with the lived reality of disenfranchised citizens in its peripheries.
The delayed ADC elections are not a minor procedural lapse, it is the crystallisation of decades of structural neglect, political manipulation, and constitutional bad faith. In the silence of the ballot box lies the silencing of an entire people. ‘No Polls, No Voice’ is thus not a slogan of protest alone; it is an indictment of the hollowing out of democracy in India’s frontier. The betrayal of the hills is not only that the tribal been denied elections, it is that the very right to be heard, to govern, and to exist as political subjects within the Indian union has been systematically deferred. Restoring that voice is not charity; it is justice long overdue.
-NW Joyngam Vashum (Social Activist)
(The author can be reached at joyvashumjesus@gmail.com )
