Why Dinganglung Gangmei’s Courage Matters for Manipur’s Survival

Manipur needs leaders like MLA Dinganglung Gangmei right now—leaders who are willing to risk votes, alliances, and even personal safety to say what they believe is true instead of what is convenient.

In a state where almost every politician carefully calibrates every word to protect the next election, the BJP MLA from Nungba AC has done the opposite. Dinganglung Gangmei has spoken plainly about the encroachment on Zeliangrong ancestral lands, the sudden appearance of new settlements along highways, and the spread of poppy fields that are destroying both forests and futures—even though a sizeable part of his own constituency consist of Kuki voters. 

His constituency is not an easy terrain for such candour. Nungba has a significant Kuki voters in villages like Sempat Gangte, Joujangtek, and T. Khongmol. Yet, when poppy fields began swallowing Zeliangrong ancestral domains, when abandoned Liangmai settlements in the Koubru Range were quietly renamed and resettled by new arrivals—Puilong became Chalwa, Kasanlong became Gelnal, Nbumai became Waichong—Gangmei refused to look away. 

He saw highways turning into ribbons of unauthorised colonies, national highway corridors becoming private real estate for settlers whose paperwork is as new as their signboards, and he decided that the long-term survival of his people mattered more than the next election.

This is not a new phenomenon, but it has reached a tipping point. In November 2025 alone, security forces destroyed seven acres of poppy cultivation in Thengjang and Lasan areas under Tamei Police Station in Tamenglong district. Earlier operations in Kadi-IV, Kwilong, and T. Khongmol uncovered the same pattern: illegal cultivation, absentee village chairmen safely ensconced in Churachandpur while their fields poison both land and politics in the hills. 

Suspension of Operations (SoO) camps run by Kuki militant groups in the Koubru Range have turned stretches of the Imphal–Tamei road into informal toll plazas. Small traders and ordinary commuters now treat that route with dread—everyone knows they’ll be stopped, questioned, and forced to pay “taxes” just to pass through. Where poppy fields are cleared for quick profit, illegal timber logging quickly moves in next. The forests vanish, the soil erodes, and the harm spreads far beyond any one community.

And behind it all is an aggressive land-grabbing policy that does not even pretend to respect older titles or older inhabitants.Yet the most astonishing aspect of this crisis is the silence that greets it from quarters that should be the loudest.

Where are the Meitei legislators and civil society leaders who spent years warning about “illegal influx” when the theatre of conflict was the Imphal Valley? 

Where are the Tangkhul intellectuals and organisations who, as late as 5 July 2019, issued fiery statements through the Tangkhul Naga Long (TNL) declaring: “Let it be known to the whole world that there is no ancestral land belonging to Kukis in all Naga districts of Manipur in general and in Tangkhul Naga Territory in particular… The only indigenous people in Manipur are Meiteis and Nagas”?

Where is the follow-up to that historic 2019 declaration today, when the encroachment has crossed from theory into concrete signboards and poppy fields?

The answer is uncomfortable but obvious: realpolitik. The same Tangkhul and Meitei voices that once thundered against “concocted historical narratives replete with lies and false mythology” have discovered that an alliance—or at least a tactical silence—with certain Kuki armed groups and their political patrons is electorally rewarding in the post-2023 arrangement. 

Yesterday’s “refugees and aliens” (as described in the 1933 and 1941 orders of the President of Manipur State Durbar) have become today’s indispensable allies in the larger chess game against the former CM N Biren Singh government or in the negotiation for Naga political aspirations. 

Ancestral land, it seems, is negotiable when the price is right. MLA D Gangmei has refused that transaction. He has pointed out what everyone sees but few dare articulate. 

Several new unauthorised Kuki settlements—Khollen, Saikot, West Haipi—have sprouted inside the legally demarcated jurisdiction of Chawangkining Naga Village in Kangpokpi district. Village signboards claim establishment in 1980, yet official records show zero households when Chawangkining was recognised in 2002. 

Boundary stones are planted, histories are invented, and the slow-motion erasure of one people’s map proceeds under the gaze of a state too paralysed or compromised to act.This is not a parochial Zeliangrong issue. 

It is the thin end of a wedge that threatens every indigenous community in Manipur. If highways—NH-37 and NH-2—can be colonised village by village, if reserve forests can be cleared for cash crops under the watch of suspended-operation militants, if demographic engineering can be carried out in broad daylight while the state government pleads helplessness, then no one’s land is safe. 

Not the Tangkhuls in Ukhrul, not the Meiteis in the valley, not even the very Kuki villagers being used as pawns in a larger game run by their own armed overlords and off-stage political brokers. D Gangmei’s warning is therefore not tribal; it is existential. “As a peace-loving community, the Zeliangrong people feel targeted and vulnerable,” he wrote recently. “The real issue we are facing is illegal immigrants… Many new villages have come up. I do not know where they come from. They are occupying our land and claiming it as their ancestral land.”

Today it is Koubru and Tamei; tomorrow it will be Phungyar or Tadubi or any hill territory whose guardians have traded principle for temporary power.History offers cold comfort to those who keep quiet in the hope that the storm will pass them by. 

The 1933 Standing Order of the President of Manipur State Durbar called Kukis in Naga areas “aliens and refugees”. The 1941 order required them to take permission from Naga village chiefs and pay house tax. Successive payments of refugee relief by the Government of India (1957, 1959, 1966, 1968) are matters of public record. 

None of this is ancient history; it is administrative memory less than a century old. To watch that memory being overwritten in real time by fabricated village foundation dates and narcotic plantations is to watch the state itself commit suicide by amnesia.

Former Chief Minister N. Biren Singh fought this battle almost alone from the valley, earning both brickbats and admiration for refusing to look away from reserve-forest encroachment and demographic change. 

In the hills, the baton has now passed to a lone Zeliangrong MLA who knows that his words may cost him votes, friends, perhaps even personal safety. Yet he speaks—because someone must.

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The question Manipur must now answer is brutal in its simplicity: will the Meiteis and the larger Naga family—especially the Tangkhuls who once drew a red line in 2019—stand with D Gangmei while there is still land left to defend? Or will they wait until the poppy fields reach their own doorsteps and the renamed villages carry their grandparents’ names in a language they no longer recognise?

Courage is contagious, but only if there is someone left to catch it. Right now, in the hills of Manipur, that someone is Dinganglung Gangmei—standing almost alone, holding a line that was once collectively sworn but has since been conveniently forgotten.

When D Gangmei decided to speak up, he did something most politicians in Manipur have stopped doing: he told the truth as he sees it, even though he knew it would hurt him at the ballot box. And in doing so, he has forced all of us—valley and hills, Meitei, Naga, Kuki—to look again at the one problem that keeps bleeding this state dry: nobody actually agrees anymore on where one person’s land ends and another’s begins, and everyone is terrified that admitting the mess will mean losing everything.

Manipur future rests on a single, urgent question: can we take the raw fear on every side—fear of losing ancestral land, fear of losing identity, fear of being singled out and crushed—and channel it into a shared determination to govern transparently and recognise one another’s legitimate place in this state?

Right now, one MLA from Nungba has picked up the baton that N. Biren Singh once carried alone from the valley. Dinganglung Gangmei has done something deceptively simple yet extraordinarily hard: he has refused to treat silence as safety. By speaking out, he has reminded everyone that staying quiet is never neutral—it is a choice, and in Manipur today, it is a choice whose consequences may soon become irreversible.

We can go on shouting past one another—dismissing Gangmei’s warnings as “communal” and the Kuki rebuttals as “fabricated history”—but every shout just adds fuel to the same fire. Right now, whenever someone like him dares to speak what he believes is the truth, half the state applauds and the other half reaches for a gun. That is not a society; that is a countdown. We cannot keep living on borrowed time like this.