The Manipur Commission of Inquiry has now been extended six times without submitting a single page of report. Along the way, its original chairman quit and was replaced by a new judge, who inherited the same deadline, the same blank document, and presumably the same sense of anticipation.
On May 14, 2026, the Ministry of Home Affairs granted the Commission of Inquiry investigating Manipur's ethnic violence its sixth extension, pushing the deadline to November 20, 2026 — a date that now sits three and a half years after the violence erupted on May 3, 2023. The extension timeline reads: September 2024, December 2024, May 2025, December 2025, February 2026, May 2026. In the interim, original chair Justice Ajai Lamba resigned effective February 28, handing the blank slate to former Supreme Court Judge Balbir Singh Chauhan. The new chairman inherits a commission that has refined its ability to generate extensions to a remarkable degree of precision. Whether its next deliverable will be a report or a seventh extension notification remains, appropriately, an open inquiry.