IMPHAL (India): In the dimly lit basement restaurant of one of the city’s few hotels, the jukebox pumps out Cat Stevens singing “it’s a wild world”.

Outside, an armoured personnel carrier lumbers through the street, while beyond the city, soldiers in black bandannas patrol the road through the paddy fields, keeping a wary eye on the menacing jungle covering the nearby mist-shrouded hills.

This is India’s answer to the Wild West, home to a thriving heroin trade with neighbouring Myanmar and to 20-plus rebel groups fighting both Indian rule and each other.

Here in the state of Manipur, to carry a gun is commonplace, extortion routine, kidnapping frequent.

“There is a complete breakdown of law and order,” says Pradeep Phanjoubam, editor of the Imphal Free Press.

Up in the remote north-east of India, Manipur boasts a three-decade-old insurgency, on occasion as violent as the better known Kashmir separatist revolt far to the west.

“There is a problem in every state in the north-east, but Manipur is different,” says Chief Minister Okram Ibobi Singh in the state capital Imphal.

Manipur is one of seven north-eastern states which jut out improbably into east Asia, inhabited by people who look more Burmese than Indian, connected to “mainland” India by a 32-km wide strip of land.

After being dragged into joining India at independence in 1947, the people of the north-east began a string of separatist revolts, led in the 1950s by the Nagas, fierce hill tribesmen who live to the north of Imphal.

But while India has begun inconclusive peace talks with the Nagas, the disintegration of the Manipur revolt into many different factions has made it all the harder to contain.

“It’s like mushroom growth,” complains the chief minister.

The army was sent to Manipur in 1980, but with a far smaller presence than in Kashmir, it imposes only a semblance of control, with much of the jungle hinterland beyond the fertile Imphal Valley under rebel control.

And even around the capital, the rebels hold sway, blowing up a bus just 24 km south of Imphal on August 14, killing six people. The rebels subsequently said this was an accident — they had meant to target security forces.

TWO-THOUSAND-YEAR-OLD KINGDOM: The former kingdom of Manipur traces its history back for 2,000 years, at one time covering parts of present-day Myanmar.