The Silent Siege: India’s Forgotten War on the Kuki-Zo

Imphal, the capital of Manipur, lies just 60 km from Kuki-Zo hill towns like Churachandpur, Kangpokpi, and Tengnoupal as the crow flies. Yet for the past two and a half years, that 60 km has become an uncrossable chasm. 

To leave Manipur for education, medical treatment, employment, or even to celebrate Christmas with family, a Kuki-Zo resident must now undertake a punishing 600-800 km detour through a neighbouring state.

The journey begins with a flight from any mainland Indian city to Aizawl, Mizoram – a ticket that costs ₹10,000–₹15,000 one way. From Aizawl airport, bone-jarring hill roads descend 10–12 hours to Churachandpur (Lamka), followed by another 3–5 hours to districts such as Tengnoupal or Kangpokpi. The reverse journey is identical. Total cost per person: ₹25,000–₹35,000 and three to four days lost to travel. For a community whose per capita income is among the lowest in India, this is not an inconvenience; it is economic strangulation.

Since May 2023, when ethnic violence exploded between the majority Meitei in the Imphal Valley and the Kuki-Zo tribes in the surrounding hills, the Kuki-Zo have been effectively expelled from the state capital and its airport. More than 60,000 remain displaced. The arterial road linking the hills to Imphal and beyond remains fractured by buffer zones, checkpoints, and mutual fear. Sporadic gunfire and drone-bomb attacks have continued into late 2025.

The human toll is measured not only in the 258 confirmed deaths but in the slow haemorrhage of opportunity. Students miss university semesters. Cancer patients die waiting for chemotherapy unavailable in the hills. Businesses collapse. A generation is being quietly unmoored from India’s economic mainstream.

Also Read: A homeland torn asunder: Why India must fulfill its historic debt to the Kuki people

The Kuki-Zo response has been measured and constitutional: repeated appeals for a new civil airport in Churachandpur or Kangpokpi districts; regular, subsidised helicopter services; alternative all-weather highways; and the strengthening of hospitals and colleges in their areas. Every plea has met the same response – silence from both the state government and the Union Home Ministry in New Delhi.

When Meitei organisations protested a temporary hike in airfares from Imphal’s Bir Tikendrajit Airport in 2024, flights were increased and fares capped within days. When Kuki-Zo leaders begged for a single weekly chopper service to Guwahati or Kolkata, they were offered “namesake” services that flew twice in six months and then stopped.

This is not administrative lethargy; it is discriminatory governance laid bare.

Human Rights Watch, the European Parliament, and India’s own National Commission for Minorities have documented evidence of state complicity in the 2023 violence – police escorting armed Meitei militias, government bulldozers razing Kuki churches days after the clashes, and the systematic rewriting of land records to erase tribal ownership in fringe valley areas. Under President’s Rule since February 2025, central forces have been accused of partisan policing, firing on Kuki villagers defending their fields while turning a blind eye to valley encroachments.

The cumulative effect is what Kuki-Zo intellectuals now openly call “economic genocide” – death by a thousand bureaucratic cuts. A community is being made to choose between slow suffocation in the hills or permanent exile.

Delhi’s refusal to grant even the modest demand of a separate administration (a Union Territory with legislature, as recommended by a committee of Kuki-Zo MPs in 2024) is couched in the language of “territorial integrity.” Yet the same government carved out two new Union Territories in Jammu & Kashmir in 2019.

As Christmas dawns in the bullet-scarred churches of Kuki-Zo areas, thousands of Kuki-Zo families are spending savings they cannot afford on tortuous journeys just to hold their parents and family back home one more time. Their question is no longer about development; it is about survival: Does India still consider them citizens worthy of protection, or merely an inconvenient minority to be managed into oblivion?

The international community, which rushed aid after the 2004 tsunami and the 2015 Nepal earthquake, watches in near silence as an internal displacement crisis festers on the India–Myanmar border, metres away from refugee flows in the opposite direction. Beijing and Western capitals alike have strategic interests in a stable Northeast; none have pressed Delhi publicly on Manipur in over a year.

India’s Constitution promises special protection to its tribal peoples. Article 371C mandates a Hill Areas Committee with veto power over legislation affecting the hills – a body that has been rendered toothless for decades. The Sixth Schedule, designed precisely for situations like this, remains denied to Manipur’s tribal districts while being generously extended elsewhere.

Peace in Manipur will not return through more tripartite talks that exclude the displaced, nor through drone surveillance and CRPF bunkers alone. It requires three immediate, verifiable steps:

1. Commissioning of a 50-seater civil airport in a Kuki-Zo majority district by mid-2026, with central funding already allocated under the UDAN scheme but lying unspent.

2. Immediate sanctioning of required funds to construct alternative roads connecting all Kuki-Zo districts and to construct full-fledged district hospitals for Tengnoupal, Kangpokpi, and Pherzawl districts.

3. An independent judicial inquiry, headed by a sitting Supreme Court judge, into state complicity and discriminatory resource allocation since May 2023.

Until Delhi acts, the siege of the hills continues – not with tanks, but with tarmac denied, helicopters grounded, and highways that only one community may safely use.

This Christmas, while the rest of India sings of joy to the world, a quarter-million Indian citizens in the eastern Himalayas are learning what it feels like to be slowly erased from their own country.

The clock is ticking louder than church bells.