Manipur’s ethnic violence, which began in May 2023, drew strict geographical boundaries between the Meitei valley districts and the Kuki-Zo hill districts. These boundaries came to be known as buffer zones, monitored by security forces to prevent killings or the further spread of violence. A fresh conflict between Tangkhul Nagas and Kuki-Zo tribes, which started in one part of Manipur in February this year, has since created fissures across all the hill districts. Over the months, this has isolated entire villages from accessing essentials, pushing these districts to the brink of constant violence while reviving old narratives of hatred.
New civilian blockades imposed by the Nagas can now be found in every hill district of Manipur. Their intended effect is to choke Kuki areas from accessing supplies, be it milk powder, medicine or a bag of rice.
“It feels like an epidemic. I feel like it is only going to get worse,” said Grace Tingneo, a resident of Moreh. It has not even been a week since she lost her husband, Kaikam, who was 52.
When Grace escorted her husband to the primary health centre (PHC) at Moreh, the town’s only medical institution was overflowing. Patients were sleeping on the veranda, many even outside the gates. Everybody had the same symptoms: severe high fever with chills, headaches and body aches.
Scrub typhus, typhoid, and dengue had become widespread from the last week of June, and almost every household came to be affected. Grace’s husband was one among them, and his symptoms quickly escalated. She had tried to nurse him at home, but once he developed chest congestion, she took him to the PHC. But they were unable to get an X-ray done, because of a power outage. “There was just one doctor and one nurse, and the whole place was flooded with patients,” Grace said. The delay in diagnosis did not help matters. Oxygen support and the emergency medicines needed to treat him were both unavailable. He died the next day, a death that was entirely preventable.
The district of Tengnoupal has more than a lakh people and just two medical facilities: a PHC at Moreh and another at the Tengnoupal district headquarters. Both now have just one doctor and two nurses each.
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When David Hangmi took his sick two-year-old, showing similar symptoms, to the PHC at Tengnoupal District HQ, the PHC was shut. A notice on the gate announced that, owing to unavailability of medical personnel, emergency services had been temporarily suspended, and that emergency medicines and drugs for non-communicable diseases were out of stock.
David had no choice but to rely on a pharmacist’s diagnosis to treat his son. “I can travel down to Pallel [in a Meitei area], but with this new conflict with the Nagas, there are blockades on the way. It is a risk,” he said. Nagas working at these PHCs in various capacities have abandoned their positions after a boycott call was issued by Naga organisations against the Kuki-Zo tribes.
A fresh flashpoint
After nearly three years of instability, punctuated by a year of President’s Rule, the BJP leadership under the controversial former Chief Minister N. Biren Singh gave way to Yumnam Khemchand Singh in February 2026. Khemchand is seen as more amicable to the Kuki-Zo tribes than Biren, who has faced allegations of stoking communal violence and weaponising Meitei society against the Kuki-Zo.
The end of President’s Rule was almost instantly followed by violence in Ukhrul, a Tangkhul-dominated district, between Kukis and Tangkhuls. This has often been described as a drunken brawl, but Tangkhul leaders allege that simmering tension between the two communities due to land disputes gave rise to the standoff. Kukis, on the other hand, allege that Naga leaders are anxious about talks between Kuki insurgent groups and the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), fearing this could see Nagas lose territory they claim as their own.
It is against this backdrop that the violence, which first broke out in Tangkhul districts, spread to the rest of Manipur—set off by an ambush that killed three Kuki-Zo church leaders in May, followed on the same day by abductions of Nagas, and Kukis in turn. Among the Naga hostages, six died horrific deaths in the custody of Kuki insurgents allegedly affiliated with the Kuki National Front-Presidential faction (KNF(P)). These killings have become a rallying point for Nagas across Manipur, whose demand for justice has been accompanied by a crushing economic blockade on Kukis across the state. In the past six months, at least 15 Kuki-Zo people, 11 Nagas, three security personnel and one truck driver have been killed. Fourteen Kuki villages and more than 30 Naga houses have been burnt down, and many of those affected now live in relief camps. The Kuki-Zo allege that the National Socialist Council of Nagalim-Isak-Muivah (NSCN(IM)) is orchestrating violence against them to drive them out of Naga districts.
People in a protest march from Tangkhul Baptist Church in Dewlaland to Manipur Baptist Church in Chingmeirong, organised by the All Naga Student’s Association Manipur (ANSAM), demanding justice for six Naga civilians who were allegedly abducted and later found dead, in Imphal, Manipur, Saturday, June 20, 2026.
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PTI
Initially, the economic blockades were restricted to a small stretch in Ukhrul, where the violence had started in February, and ran both ways: Kukis curtailed free movement to stop Tangkhuls travelling through the villages they live in along the highway, while Tangkhuls stopped transport of supplyies to the Kukis. After the abduction of the Naga hostages, a similar blockade was set up outside Kangpokpi. Once news of the killings was confirmed, these blockades spread to every hill district where Nagas were in a position to control supplies to neighbouring Kuki settlements. Manned by civilians, they check every vehicle that passes through and confiscate anything they believe is meant for Kukis.
Kukis are not in a position to impose retaliatory blockades, because most Naga districts—barring a few villages here and there—have alternative routes that bypass Kuki areas or lead to Nagaland, Assam or Imphal. Manipur’s State government has not acted, either to remove the blockades or to ease the shortages of essentials, especially medicines, that Kuki districts such as Tengnoupal are beginning to face. The families of the six Naga men killed have maintained that they will not ease the blockades unless everyone responsible for the killings is held accountable.
An old claim over indigeneity
Alongside the blockades, a narrative that has re-emerged questions the very existence of the Kuki-Zo tribes in Manipur. Though this echoes what happened before and after 2023, Meiteis have come to this narrative more recently than the Nagas. It has long been a Naga claim that the hills are exclusively Naga territory, and that the Kukis migrated there much later—a claim that predates the formation of the Manipur state.
Over the decades, these claims turned into bloody feuds, with Naga and Kuki insurgents fighting over territory, culminating in the Naga-Kuki conflict of the 1990s. From then until now, there has been no state-led resolution between the two groups. Successive governments, Congress and BJP alike, have pursued separate talks with both sides, often playing one against the other, without publicly addressing either group’s claims.
The dispute has resurfaced now with the Meiteis switching sides: in the 1990s, they were firmly opposed to the NSCN(IM)’s negotiations with the Indian government, which included ceding territory within Manipur to the Nagas for self-governance. This opposition is the origin of the Meitei movement to keep Manipur’s territorial integrity intact, under which Meitei leaders regard the hill districts, not just the valley, as part of Manipur. Congress leaders such as former Chief Minister Okram Ibobi Singh were part of the pushback against the NSCN(IM)’s claims.
Ibobi’s approach left little room for Nagas and Meiteis to see eye to eye. The leaders who followed him, such as Biren, found newer ways to do political business—chief among them, speaking the language of indigeneity. The Federation of Haomee can be seen as a pioneer in this regard. Founded by Meiteis, with Tangkhul Naga support, the group claims to be the authority on which tribes are indigenous to Manipur, and holds that only Nagas and Meiteis qualify. It frequently uses xenophobic language to describe the Kuki-Zo, calling them “refugees” or “illegal immigrants”.
“One of our main demands is the National Register of Citizens (NRC), and to drive out foreigners from our ancestral land,” said Visicy Shimray, secretary of the group. As the state reeled from the 2023 violence, the Federation of Haomee inaugurated an “Indigenous Pillar” in 2025, listing every tribe except the Kuki-Zo. Tangkhul members of the Federation also facilitated the Arambai Tenggol’s occupation of Kuki properties in Imphal, including in Lambulane.
The politics of a new alliance
This narrative has gained fresh currency in the Naga-Kuki fallout. Among the protests this reporter attended was one at the Tribal Market in New Checkon. Among the speakers was Ashang Kasar, a Tangkhul Naga politician and convener of the Native People’s Committee, Manipur (NPCM), a newly formed group similar to the Federation of Haomee. Kasar has contested Lok Sabha elections unsuccessfully in the past and has convened several organisations over the years.
After the 2023 violence broke out, he floated an organisation called the Forum for Restoration of Peace, through which he regularly called on “Meitei and Kuki brothers” to engage in dialogue and choose peace. He also founded the “Indigenous People’s Forum”, which he quit in 2025 after the United Naga Council (UNC) barred Nagas from participating in “International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples”, a program organised by Kasar jointly with Meiteis in Imphal. The UNC issued the following warning to Kasar in a notice, “If any Naga attempts to banalise the Naga political issue and situation or challenges the Nagas, then such a person is deemed fit to be dealt with befitting actions.”
Charred remains of structures and other properties lie scattered at Zingshophai Choro, a Tangkhul Naga village, one of the three border villages along the Indo-Myanmar border, allegedly attacked by Myanmar-based Kuki militants on May 7th, in Kamjong district, Manipur, on May 18, 2026.
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PTI
Kasar is said to have received Biren’s patronage after this episode, having earlier demanded Biren’s resignation as president of the Forum for Restoration of Peace. Following the events of May, he floated the NPCM along with Meiteis, saying the organisation would defend the joint interests of Nagas and Meiteis against “Kuki-Zo aggression”.
At the Tribal Market protest, Kasar alleged that Kuki immigration from Myanmar began with a small number of families very recently but has quickly swelled to form the present Kuki-Zo population of Manipur, whom he repeatedly referred to as refugees and illegal immigrants through his speech. Tribal Market, as it happens, is located next to New Lambulane. Some of the earliest Kukis to settle in Imphal came from Old and New Lambulane, among them retired Manipur Civil Service (MCS) officer Chongpu Kipgen, who was displaced from the area during the 2023 violence.
Raised in Imphal, Chongpu’s father was Kuki and his mother Tangkhul, from Ukhrul. Kipgen’s father was born in Tamenglong in 1920 and moved to Imphal in 1927, going on to join the first generation of educated tribal people in Manipur’s administration. Together with a few others, he helped build Lambulane. All these houses are now occupied by the Arambai Tenggol and its supporters, who justify their actions using the same theory Kasar espouses—at the other end of which stand people like Chongpu.
Kasar’s framing of Kukis as immigrants or outsiders needs to be located in this context; his claim that Kukis arrived in Manipur as refugees as late as the 1960s does not hold up. The 1960s were a tumultuous period in Myanmar, when a military-led coup led to the mass expulsion of Indian-origin Burmese, including Tamils, whose repatriation the Indian government at the time helped organise. During the same period, conflict was raging in the Naga hills along the Myanmar border as the Naga freedom movement was in its formative stages. Many Naga and non-Naga families fled from the Indian side into Myanmar’s Kabaw Valley, fearing backlash from the new insurgents; the Myanmar government pushed many of these Naga and Kuki families back into India from 1968 onward. Kasar appears to have drawn on this history selectively to support his claim.
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“War strips away polite disguises. Across the world, it is conflict that brings out xenophobic tendencies among communities to prevail over the other, even among those who have lived historically together,” said Rama Hansraj, a humanitarian aid worker with more than two decades of experience in conflict-affected regions. Ethnographic research points to the migratory nature of all tribal communities in the hills surrounding Manipur, but it was only with the arrival of the British that classification of these tribes hardened, laying the ground for the modern political negotiations that have produced today’s insider-outsider accusations.
Cracks beneath the alliance
The alliance between Nagas and Meiteis through such organisations appears, on closer inspection, to run no deeper than the surface. Leaders affiliated with Naga tribal councils are not in complete agreement with what organisations such as the Federation of Haomee or the NPCM claim. Many Naga leaders this reporter spoke to see Kasar as a political opportunist. “We are not telling Kukis to leave. All we are saying is that you have to accept that the land is ours,” said Thingreiphi Lungharwoshi, president of the Tangkhul Shanao Long (TSL). She attributes the problem to the Indian government’s lack of political will to resolve Naga demands, and believes Nagas, if given autonomy over their land, could manage such problems better than the present government.
Very few Naga leaders toe the NSCN(IM) line, and those who have, such as Congress MP Alfred Arthur, are largely absent from public conversation. In practice, political alliances end up being decided by insurgent groups. In the last Lok Sabha election, in 2024, the KNF(P)—the group Nagas blame for the killing of the six hostages—supported the NSCN(IM) candidate from the Naga People’s Front (NPF). The coming election will likely see similar alliances, whatever is being said today.
An RTI query filed by activist Hareshwar Goswami with the Manipur Home Department has found that at least 731 displaced people have died in relief camps and temporary shelters across the state since the Meitei-Kuki-Zo violence began. Most of these deaths were preventable, caused by an inability to access basics such as nutrition and healthcare. Rather than move the state away from this deepening cycle of death and violence, the narratives now being pushed seek to other an entire community. This, instead of addressing the political causes of the conflict, will only further polarise an already divided population—at the receiving end of which are ordinary citizens, in a state where a bag of rice costs Rs.3,000 and medicines for the most common ailments are nowhere to be found.
Greeshma Kuthar is an independent journalist and lawyer from Tamil Nadu.
