On 9 August 2006 the Education Minister of Manipur, L Nandakumar, warned activists in the state's hill districts, the government of neighbouring Nagaland and the region's civil society to refrain from interfering in Manipur's affairs. He declared that he had "abstracted assurances" from Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh and other Union ministers that they would not interfere with an ongoing school-affiliation agitation in Manipur.
One month prior to Nandakumar's warning, students in the four Naga-majority hill districts of Manipur – Chandel, Senapati, Ukhrul and Tamenglong – made a bonfire out of the textbooks prescribed by the Board of Secondary Education, Manipur (BSEM). They carried banners that read, 'We want common education', 'Welcome Nagaland Board' and 'Goodbye Manipur Board', and launched a campaign to affiliate the private schools in their districts with the Nagaland Board of School Education (NBSE). The protest was seen by many in the Imphal Valley as a move towards pressing for the unification of a Naga homeland. As such, the discussion has been diverted from the textbooks' content and the students' grievances.
In a letter to the BSEM, the All Naga Students Association of Manipur (ANSAM) pointed out that students in the hill districts of Manipur were being denied their rights on several fronts. It alleged that the Meitei Mayek language has been imposed on them by being made a compulsory school subject, and that Meitei culture and history – that of the Imphal Valley's majority population – are glorified while the histories of several other indigenous Manipuri communities receive no mention in syllabi.
As for the textbooks themselves, the BSEM Social Science reader for Class VIII dwells heavily on the way of life in the Imphal Valley. It acknowledges the hills and their peoples only in descriptions of shifting cultivation as a primitive method of farming, narrations of the spread of Christianity, or topographic charts that compare population, literacy levels and landholding between the Imphal Valley and the hill districts. At the end of chapters students are asked questions that could be considered loaded, such as: "Which district in Manipur has the highest literacy rate?" and "Why do hill districts in Manipur have low density of population?"