Manipur’s government has ordered all schools, colleges and other educational institutes to remain closed for three days, responding to intensifying protests over the sequence of two major administrative exercises: the Census and the National Register of Citizens (NRC).
The shutdown comes as the Campaign for Just and Fair Delimitation (JFD) entered its second day of strikes. On the streets, protesters burned effigies of politicians and held rallies across Manipur’s valley districts. The central demand is straightforward but contentious: the NRC should be updated before the Census happens, not after.
The National Register of Citizens is an official list of Indian citizens. The Census is the decennial national exercise where the government counts and records the population. In theory, the order should not matter. In practice, in Manipur, it shapes everything from district boundaries to political representation.
Communities in Manipur have long competed over how boundaries are drawn and how populations are counted. If the Census happens first, it establishes baseline numbers that could influence how the NRC is subsequently constructed. If the NRC is updated first, it determines who is counted as a legitimate resident before the Census proceeds. The difference is not academic. It directly affects how many seats communities get in elected bodies and how administrative divisions are shaped.
The JFD’s position reflects anxiety among groups who fear being disadvantaged by whichever order the government chooses. That the campaign has mobilized enough support to bring the state’s educational system to a halt suggests this is not a fringe concern but something with broader backing across communities.
The government’s decision to shut schools reveals how it views the situation: serious enough to disrupt normal life preemptively. Officials have not issued a public statement explaining the shutdown as purely precautionary or whether specific threats were reported. The three-day closure directly affects hundreds of thousands of students and families already dealing with irregular school calendars in Manipur.
For parents and students, the immediate cost is lost classroom time. For the state government, the decision trades short-term disruption against the risk of larger clashes if schools remained open and tensions escalated.
No timeline has been announced for schools to reopen after the three days. The coming weeks will show whether this closure marks the peak of the agitation or the beginning of sustained pressure that forces the government to publicly address the NRC-Census sequencing question.
Source: Mint
