The Tragedy of Khanpi and the Politics of Selective Valor

When the State Hunts Its Own Shield: The Tragedy of Khanpi and the Politics of Selective Valor
By Putin Touthang

Joint Secretary

Frontline Area Welfare Committee

In the pre-dawn silence of November 4th, 2025, the Indian Army descended upon Khanpi village in Churachandpur district, executing what it termed a "counter-insurgency operation." By sunrise, four United Kuki National Army (UKNA) cadres lay dead—sons of the soil, guardians of the vulnerable, now reduced to blurred faces in a press release. The official narrative, as always, was swift and sanitized: "neutralization," "threat elimination," "restoration of peace." But for the Kuki people, this was not peace—it was a rupture. Not protection—it was betrayal.

The UKNA is not a foreign militia. It is a manifestation of communal desperation—a response to abandonment, to the erosion of ancestral dignity, and to the state's chronic failure to protect its hill citizens. These men did not wield arms for conquest; they stood as sentinels in a landscape where Meitei militants from across the Myanmar border roam freely in Imphal and valley districts, unchallenged and unaccounted for.

The question is not whether the UKNA posed a threat. The question is why the Indian state reserves its sharpest blades for those who shield the marginalized, while turning a blind eye to those who prey upon them.

This is not an anomaly—it is a pattern. A pattern of selective enforcement, of ethnically skewed militarism, and of a state apparatus that treats hill resistance as criminality while normalizing valley aggression as political expression. The killing of these four UKNA cadres is not a tactical success—it is a moral failure. It is a declaration that the lives of Kuki defenders are expendable, that their sacrifices are unworthy of recognition, and that their deaths are mere footnotes in a narrative authored by power.

Let us interrogate the aftermath:
- Has this operation restored trust between the hills and the state?
- Has it quelled the trauma of displacement, erasure, and fear?
- Has it dignified the aspirations of a people who seek only safety and self-determination?

The answer is unequivocal. This act will not heal—it will haunt. It will not unify—it will fracture. The Indian Army may claim valor, but there is no heroism in hunting your own citizens without dialogue, without due process, and without historical understanding.

We do not romanticize violence. We honor courage—the courage to protect, to speak, to endure. The UKNA cadres who fell in Khanpi were not faceless insurgents. They were sons, brothers, and defenders of a community that refuses to be erased. Their deaths demand more than silence. They demand a reckoning.

If the Indian government seeks peace, let it begin with truth. Let it begin with dismantling the architecture of bias, with holding valley militants to the same standard, and with recognizing that security cannot be built on selective slaughter.

Until then, we will mourn. We will remember. And we will resist—with words, with dignity, and with the unyielding conviction that our legacy will not be buried beneath the boots of silence.

👉Kukiland - Kuki Country

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