AN OPEN LETTER TO NEMCHA KIPGEN, LM KHAUTE, AND LALSANGLUR IN PARTICULAR AND OTHER KUKI-ZO MLA IN GENERAL
From a People Who Buried Their Dead While You Guarded Your Chairs
~ You were elected to represent the Kuki-Zo people.
~ You were entrusted with our voices, our lives, and our future.
On 4 Feb 2026, that trust began to bleed.
As villages burned across Kangpokpi, Churachandpur, Tengnoupal, and the Imphal fringe, as innocent men were shot, women hunted, children orphaned, and entire communities displaced, the Kuki-Zo people waited for leadership.
~ What we received was silence dressed as restraint.
~ What history will record is betrayal.
WHEN OUR PEOPLE WERE KILLED, YOU CHOSE NORMALCY
Between May and June 2023, Kuki-Zo villages were erased from the map.
~ Our sisters were paraded naked and raped.
~ Innocent children and our beloved brother, sisters, mother and fathers were mercilessly mutilated and murdered.
~ Churches were torched.
~ Homes reduced to ash.
~ Civilians fled into forests and relief camps with nothing but terror and memory.
And yet:
~ You did not resign to force national attention.
~ You did not shut down governance in protest.
Instead, governance continued. Assemblies functioned. Power remained intact with your individually interested motive. You enjoy people's fund and acted as if you get entirely cut-off from the killer government.
~ You may call this strategy.
~ The people call it abandonment.
SILENCE IS NOT NEUTRALITY—IT IS A POSITION
~ Do not insult the intelligence of a grieving people by calling your inaction "constraints."
~ Our students, women, village volunteers, and civil society organisations took to the streets knowing arrests would follow.
~ Some lost livelihoods. Some were jailed. All took risks.
*You, who had constitutional power, chose caution.*
A youth from Kangpokpi, who lost two cousins in May 2023, said what many feel:
_"We faced bullets. Our leaders feared losing posts."_
In moments of mass violence, silence sides with the status quo—and the status quo was soaked in Kuki-Zo blood.
RELIEF CAMPS ARE NOT POLICY—THEY ARE EVIDENCE OF FAILURE
~ By late 2023, relief camps became semi-permanent prisons.
~ Children dropped out of school.
~ Farmers lost seasons.
~ Families were barred from returning to ancestral land.
*And still, political life resumed as if this was an administrative inconvenience.*
A mother in a Saikul relief camp asked a question you have never answered:
_"If my son's death did not move you, what will?"_
Your comfort told us something devastating:
Our suffering had become manageable.
DO NOT ASK US TO FORGET
This letter is not written in hatred. It is written in memory.
We remember:
~ The funerals without justice
~ The villages without return
~ The leaders without defiance
You may still hold office.
But understand this clearly:
👉 You no longer hold moral authority over a traumatised people.
HISTORY IS WATCHING—AND IT IS UNFORGIVING
History does not remember who remained "balanced" during slaughter. It remembers who stood up and broke ranks.
By choosing political survival over moral rupture, you have placed yourselves on the wrong side of Kuki-Zo history.
This is not a threat.
It is a reckoning.
~ The Kuki-Zo people are no longer silent.
~ The youth are watching.
~ Memory is organising.
And one truth will not be buried with the dead:
_When our people were murdered, your silence spoke louder than any speech._
From
A People Who Buried Their Dead (While You Guarded Your Chairs)
~ W/A
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