This past week, school-going children, some still in uniform, are among those who clashed with security forces on the streets of Manipur.

The fresh burst of violence has come after photographs revealed that two students, Hijam Linthoingambi and Phijam Hemanjit, 17 and 20 years old respectively, had been killed, three months after they had gone missing.

In early August, on a reporting trip to Manipur, I met the families of Hemanjit and Linthoingambi. Like elsewhere in Manipur, it was the women of the households who were at the frontline of agitation. Waving placards with pictures of their children emblazoned across them, the women sat on the road outside the police headquarters in Imphal and demanded action. Some clung to me and wept. They were convinced their children — the girl wanted to be a doctor — would be killed if they were not rescued. This week they got the news they’d been dreading. Though the bodies of the teenagers are yet to be found, two pictures showed them in what appeared to be a forest with armed men behind them; the next one showed them slumped over and lifeless.

The teenagers are from the Meitei community and this time, it is they, many of whom have voted in the past for the Biren Singh-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, who are apoplectic with rage. Angry mobs were thwarted by security forces near his ancestral home in Imphal. Luckily, there was no one in residence. The BJP state president’s house was also vandalised in the night of violence, evidently for the sixth time.

Sensing another inflection point in a crisis, the Centre has called back Rakesh Balwal, a top cop posted in Srinagar, to his home cadre in Manipur. But that is not the only shade of the Kashmir conflict that has travelled to Manipur.

Pellet guns, once used in the Kashmir Valley to quell crowd unrest, have now allegedly been deployed in Manipur. With their instantly recognisable pock-mark scars, these guns have long been contentious. In fact, in 2016, then Union home minister Rajnath Singh vowed to find alternatives to pellet guns after their use caused eye injuries to young protestors in the Valley. At the time, it was agreed that pellet guns would be used only in rare and pressing circumstances. The CRPF chief even expressed regret for the injuries.

Though there has been no official word on their use by the paramilitary forces, Dr Palin at Manipur’s Shija Hospital told me that of the eight teenagers hospitalised on his watch, three seemed to have wounds from pellet guns. “One boy is critically injured with 90 splinters, another boy has been blinded in one eye,” Palin said, confirming that all those admitted are under the age of 20. And this is just in one hospital. The accounts from government hospitals are yet to emerge.

The situation is reaching a breakpoint for the security forces as well. For months now, the Assam Rifles have been vilified, targeted and singled out. The police have often been outnumbered by angry crowds. Women at the first line of protest have complicated the options for paramilitary forces. And the Army, whose job it is to protect borders, has been dragged into internal strife that can only be resolved politically. Colonel Gaurav Chaturvedi, a former commandant with the Assam Rifles, told me that a closer forensic examination of some of the most dramatic videos in the last 48 hours reveals “that in some cases, the police is under fire more than it is firing, someone from within the protests is throwing petrol bombs.”

Manipur is not Kashmir. This is not an insurgency or a secessionist agitation. There are, of course, national security implications because of the common border with Myanmar and China’s covetous eye on India’s Northeast. But this is essentially an internal argument between two sets of Indians. And the only thing they will agree on today is being betrayed by the Biren Singh government.

It is unclear why the Modi government has not removed him yet. But with children in the mix, status quo is not an option.

Barkha Dutt is an award-winning journalist and author. The views expressed are personal