Nearly a year after the imposition of president’s rule, Manipur is taking gingerly steps towards the resurrection of the edifice of a state government. President’s rule has now been revoked and Yumnam Khemchand Singh, a former cabinet minister and a trenchant critic of his predecessor, N. Biren Singh, has been anointed the new chief minister: he took oath yesterday. Pressure, of course, had been building within Manipur’s political establishment for the restitution of the state government. In April last year, 21 legislators from the National Democratic Alliance had written to the prime minister and the Union home minister, seeking the installation of a ‘popular government’. It can be argued that political imperatives, rather than the vacuum in governance in Manipur or the need to evade a constitutional bottleneck, have forced the Bharatiya Janata Party’s leaders in Delhi to reactivate the political process. Manipur will go to the polls in about a year. Mr Yumnam K. Singh’s government thus needs to work against the clock to resolve its numerous, steep challenges. The chief minister inherits a proverbial crown of thorns. He will be confronted by a society deeply divided along ethnic lines, with the warring Meities and Kukis remaining at loggerheads. The Kuki-Zo Council has, in fact, expressly barred its electoral representatives from being part of the new power structure. Worryingly, the disarmament process is yet to be completed; the rehabilitation of the displaced — an urgent task — has to begin in earnest as well. Mr Yumnam K. Singh also faces an adversity in the form of his predecessor. Would N. Biren Singh and his faction, now elbowed out of power, be willing emissaries of the new regime?

The new government’s acid test would lie in restoring peace and normalcy in Manipur at the earliest. It should shun unilateralism and be representative in its efforts in this direction and engage all bona fide stakeholders in the process. But a larger, moral question hangs over Manipur’s new government and people. This involves demanding and affixing accountability for the three years of unprecedented violence and division that bled Manipur. The path forward cannot be smooth unless the spectres of this past have been exorcised in a non-partisan manner. Posterity and, possibly, the polls would judge Yumnam K. Singh’s stint in power on this metric in particular.