India’s northeast has been on the boil for the last five months, largely due to the ruling BJP’s borderline obsession with maintaining the status quo. The latest in a string of heart-wrenching videos to hit social media showed an injured man lying near barbed wire in Manipur while those shooting bullets and spreading chaos in the background turned a blind eye to his ablaze body. Between parading naked women, torching churches, houses and schools and sporadic bouts of violence, a state of civil war persists to this day as the presence of Armed Forces has done little to help the situation. While New Delhi’s mouthpieces continue to concoct cock-and-bull stories that focus on the colonial usurpation of power; the fact that the ethnic battle derives its strength from land feud cannot be ignored. BJP’s communal tactics are busy changing the ground situation in Jammu and Kashmir where politics and money basks in the limelight at the expense of security and welfare of locals. By looking the other way as ethnic and religious minorities are pushed off the cliff, Prime Minister Narendra Modi seems to have his eye on the greater prize: the newly-minted hardline Hindu audience among the Majority Meitis. Corporate interest in the mineral-rich terrain and dense forest cover is also said to have galvanised a strategy for a stronger presence of the centre and its supporters. There is an increasing apprehension about one-sided reports forming the crux of coverage of the ethnic conflict. Local news gathered without any communication links or background checks may have fuelled the menace of fake news as bigoted reports helped forge a common ethnic narrative. The script in Manipur is becoming all too familiar as empowered Hindus lock horns with those who are fewer in number and do not enjoy the tacit support of the government in order to silence them into subjugation. *