Is Manipur Watching the Slow Erasure of the Liangmais from the Koubru Range?

A village does not disappear only when its last house is burnt. It begins to disappear when the road leading to it becomes unsafe, when its residents are repeatedly attacked, when families are forced to flee and when returning home becomes more dangerous than living in a relief camp.

Something deeply troubling is unfolding in the Koubru Range of Manipur. The Liangmai Nagas living along the Imphal–Tamenglong Road are not speaking merely of another round of violence. Their village authorities and civil society organisations fear that repeated attacks are gradually making their continued presence in the area impossible.

India should listen before another community becomes a refugee on its own ancestral land. 

For much of the country, the Manipur crisis has been explained almost entirely through the Meitei–Kuki conflict. That description may be convenient, but it is no longer sufficient. It leaves little room for the Nagas, Thadous and smaller communities whose villages, roads and lives are being pulled into an expanding theatre of violence.

The events of May 13 should have forced the country to look beyond this familiar binary. Three senior Thadou church leaders were killed in an ambush in Kangpokpi district. The attack triggered retaliatory hostage-taking involving civilians from both Naga and Kuki communities.

Six Liangmai Naga men, including two pastors and a church deacon, remained missing after twelve other Naga civilians were released. Their bodies were recovered on June 10 following a search operation by the Manipur Police, CRPF and Assam Rifles. The remains were reportedly found with their hands tied and their bodies mutilated. The case was subsequently handed over to the National Investigation Agency, and arrests have since been made.

This was not a statistic from a distant conflict. These were men returning from a wedding and travelling to their homes. Some of them were religious leaders. They were civilians.

The killing of the six men should not be separated from the killing of the three Thadou church leaders that preceded it. One atrocity cannot justify another. The demand for justice must cover every civilian victim, irrespective of ethnicity.

Yet what happened after May raises a larger question about the security of the Liangmai settlements along the Imphal–Tamenglong Road.

On August 27, four Liangmai Naga civilians travelling between Makui Ashang and Thanamba were killed when armed assailants ambushed their vehicle. Two others were injured. Days later, on August 31, three Kuki civilians, including two women, were killed and four others injured in an attack at N Teikhang village. 

Then, in the early hours of September 1, armed men attacked Liangmai settlements along the same corridor.

Reports identified Pipuram, Makui Khunjao, Tapon and Thonglang Akutpa among the affected villages. Houses, vehicles, machinery, food grains and other property were reportedly burnt or destroyed. Two villagers, including a pastor of Tapon Naga Baptist Church, suffered bullet injuries. Local accounts said firing continued for several hours.

Village authorities alleged that armed Kuki militants carried out the attacks. The identity and organisational affiliation of the attackers, however, were not immediately confirmed by the police. This distinction is important. Allegations against armed groups must be investigated; they cannot be converted into collective guilt against an entire community.

But the absence of an immediate official finding cannot become an excuse to ignore the pattern.

Several reports said the attacks began around four in the morning, while security forces reached the affected area much later. Local residents alleged that nearby security posts had been informed but failed to intervene in time. At least two villages were reportedly almost uprooted, with homes looted or burnt. 

If armed men can fire for hours, burn villages and leave before an effective security response arrives, the question is no longer whether forces are present in the region. The question is whom their presence is protecting.

The geography of the violence also deserves scrutiny. In October 2022, former Chief Minister N. Biren Singh acknowledged that the Liangmai community had remained outside the reach of several government welfare programmes. He announced that a Sub-Deputy Collector’s office would be opened at Makui and later upgraded into a sub-divisional office. 

The recent attacks have affected villages connected to this proposed administrative centre. That does not by itself prove that preventing the creation of the administrative unit was the motive behind the violence. But it creates a question that the Manipur government cannot dismiss: has repeated violence made the promised administrative recognition of the Liangmai area more difficult to implement?

The government must clarify whether the Makui office was established, whether the promised upgrade is still being pursued and whether the attacks have altered its plans.

There is another anxiety that cannot be resolved through police statements alone. Liangmai organisations have repeatedly alleged that ancestral settlements in the Koubru Range have been renamed after their inhabitants were displaced. They cite names such as Puilong, Kasanlong, Nbumai and Nongmai, which they say came to be known as Chalwa, Gelnal, Waichong and Kotlen.

These are community claims and must be verified through historical records, land documents, Census village directories and official maps. But the State cannot simply avoid examining them.

In the hill areas of Manipur, a village name is not an ornamental label. It records memory, settlement and belonging. When a name disappears from official usage, a community may eventually lose more than a word on a map. It may lose evidence of its historical presence.

This is why the expression “ethnic cleansing” has entered the Liangmai community’s account of what is happening.

It is a term that must never be used casually. The United Nations has described ethnic cleansing as making an area ethnically homogeneous through force or intimidation intended to remove another ethnic or religious group. It is not defined as a separate offence under international criminal law, although acts committed in such a campaign may constitute serious crimes.

A newspaper column cannot deliver a judicial finding that ethnic cleansing has occurred in the Koubru Range. Intent must be established through investigation, evidence and due process.

But waiting for the final village to be emptied before examining the warning would be equally irresponsible.

Killings, attacks on homes, fear-driven displacement, obstacles to return and disputes over village identity do not automatically prove a coordinated campaign. Together, however, they create enough grounds for an independent investigation into whether violence is being used to alter control over land and administration.

That investigation must not begin with an ethnic conclusion. It must identify the actual perpetrators, their weapons, their organisations, their movements and those who assisted or sheltered them.

The Centre and the Manipur government should place the status of the investigations into the May 13 abductions, the August 27 ambush, the August 31 killings and the September 1 village attacks in the public domain. They must explain the delay in the security response, disclose the number of arrests and clarify whether ballistic, telephone and movement records indicate links between the incidents.

The government must also protect the abandoned villages, document every damaged house, enable the safe return of displaced families and prevent new occupation or alteration of land records while residents remain away.

Most importantly, justice cannot be organised along communal lines. Kuki civilians killed at N Teikhang deserve the same justice as the Liangmai civilians killed near Makui and Leilon Vaiphei. Armed groups must not be allowed to hide behind the names of the communities they claim to represent.

A welcome example came from the Thadou Inpi Manipur, which expressed solidarity with the Naga community and called for an impartial investigation into both the six Naga killings and the murder of the three Thadou church leaders. It rightly argued that justice should be based on identifying the perpetrators, not on attaching guilt to a community. 

That principle offers Manipur a way out of the cycle of collective accusation and retaliation. The line must be drawn between civilians and armed perpetrators, not between one ethnic community and another.

National attention usually returns to Manipur only when the violence produces a dramatic death toll or reaches a major town. Smaller communities in remote areas rarely receive the same attention. Their losses occur house by house, road by road and village by village.

By the time the country notices that a community has disappeared from an area, the map may already have changed. The Liangmais of the Koubru Range are asking India to look before that happens.