Fare thee well, Biren Singh?

The Shoguns in New Delhi's North Block have indeed a weird sense of humour.

- 

The nation had been crying hoarse, demanding the removal/replacement of N Biren Singh, chief minister of Manipur, who had been reigning over the remains of what was once the jewel of India, the state of Manipur.

Over 260 lives have been lost, some 70,000 rendered homeless, and hundreds of villages and settlements erased from the face of the earth.

Over 6,000 firearms were handed over to civilian hands and various non-state actors given the authority to implement normal state laws. The shogunate instead went and changed the governor and not the chief minister.

On Friday, the 3rd of January, Manipur High Court's Chief Justice Krishna Kumar administered the oath of office and secrecy and ushered in Ajay Kumar Bhalla as the 17th governor of Manipur. Bhalla had earlier presided over the shogunate in Raisina Hills's North Block in the Rajdhani as the Union Home Secretary when the cauldron began boiling on the 3rd of May 2023 and, as such, had a ringside view of the events unfolding in the state. The gifting away of arms from police armouries, the summoning of ministers and MLAs, and the manhandling of some by a radical Meitei group in full public view. Biren Singh's refusal to drop two Kuki ministers from his cabinet who have been operating in office the net and in spite of the fact that the husband of one of the ministers is the chairman of a conglomerate of armed Kuki militant groups who are behind the attacks on the Meitei population with impunity.