Exactly twenty days after Manipur Chief Minister N. Biren Singh resigned and the state was placed under President’s Rule, Union Home Minister Amit Shah has issued clear instructions to ensure normal life in the frontier state. On Saturday, Shah took a review meeting on the Manipur situation for the first time since Singh had resigned. He emphasised two particular issues—recovery of all weapons looted from the police armouries since trouble broke out in May 2023 and surrender of all illegal weapons by all those who have such weapons. That Singh had failed to handle the situation has already been widely proved, with the BJP not even once asking him not to quit. But that illegal arms have groups across the state is the biggest worry, one factor that can at any moment once again lead to the flaring up of the situation. That is exactly why Amit Shah, during his hour-long review of the Manipur situation with top officials in New Delhi, directed that free movement of people must be ensured at all costs, in addition to directing the administration to take stern action against anyone attempting to create obstructions. It is very important to note that Amit Shah has specifically called for ensuring that while Meitei people can pass through Kuki-dominated areas freely and without any fear, the same should also happen when Kuki people pass through Meitei-dominated areas. Illegal checkposts, which had cropped up in various parts of the state by both communities, have to be dismantled at the earliest, and a series of confidence-building measures should be put in place so that Manipur returns to a normal situation. It is important to note that two veterans who have handled various situations in the Northeastern region are currently at the helm of bringing back normalcy in Manipur. While Governor AK Bhalla, a 1984-batch Assam-Meghalaya cadre former IAS officer, Intelligence Bureau chief Tapan Kumar Deka not only belongs to the region but has been engaged in most of the peace initiatives that the Centre has taken up in the Northeast in the past two decades or more. Bhalla, as Governor, has already started the process of a complete overhaul of the security approach in Manipur. As part of this initiative, he has already started an amnesty scheme for the surrender of illegal weapons, cracking down on all those groups that had taken the law into their hands, and facilitating the free movement of goods and people. This has started yielding results, with Arambai Tenggol, a Meitei militia group that had allegedly engaged in gunfights with a similar Kuki group, already surrendering over 250 illegal weapons. The deadline for surrender of arms has been extended till March 6. Sadly, about 250 persons have lost their lives in the ethnic violence that Manipur witnessed in the past twenty months, while about 6,000 weapons from the Manipur Police armouries were looted.