The renewed and aggressive demand for NRC in Manipur by Meitei groups is not about documentation or citizenship. It is a dangerous political project designed to question the very existence of the Kuki people on their own ancestral soil. To brand the hill people as foreigners in their own homeland is to deliberately touch the red line that has kept a fragile coexistence in this state. This rhetoric is not a call for verification; it is a call for another ethnic war in the Northeast region.
We must be clear about history, identity and geography. The Meitei live in their ancestral land of the valley, the Kuki and Naga live on their ancestral land of the hills. This is not a settlement pattern created yesterday. It is an existence etched by centuries, protected by tradition, customary laws, and the Constitution of India. The hills are not an empty frontier for valley expansion. They are home. They are identity. They are our burial grounds, our sacred groves, and our future. This existing ethnic boundary, land and identity must be given absolute respect.
What does NRC mean in the Manipur context? It means using the state machinery to delegitimize the tribal hill people, to prepare ground for land alienation and demographic engineering. We have seen this script before. First, you call the hill owners illegal immigrants, then our villages are called illegal encroachments, then our rights are called special privileges that must be revoked. This is how you manufactured the 2023 conflict and now you are calling for another wave? When you deny a people’s nativity, you deny them everything.
Let us not forget that peace in Manipur has always rested on one unwritten covenant: respect the hill-valley divide. The valley is yours, the hills are ours. Touching that line has always brought bloodshed, and we are still counting the bodies from 2023. The demand for NRC is the same old politics of dominance wrapped in nationalist language. If the valley-centric leadership truly wants peace, it must stop seeing the hills as a problem to be solved.
The truth that history cannot erase is this: the Kuki are the landowners of the Manipur hills. Our chieftainship system, our village boundaries, our ancestral forests — all predate the modern state. Kuki-Zo, Zo, Zomi is another topic for another group, but when it comes to land, identity and politics in Manipur and internationally, Kuki is the only historical landowner and political identity. The Meitei have never lived or died in the hills. Your history, your settlement, your cremation grounds and temples are all in the valley. You have no village, no chief, no ancestral graveyard in the hill areas. How can you now claim to be indigenous to a land where you have never buried your ancestors?
If Meitei has no history in the hills, why this desperate obsession with hill land today? It is not about NRC, it is about land. The hills have been protected by Article 371C and tribal rights because they belong to the tribals. The attempt to bring NRC and then declare Kukis as foreigners is simply a legal trick to break those protections and grab tribal land. The Kuki people will never accept this. Our land is not negotiable.
And finally, this must be said clearly without any sugar-coating — if the Meitei cross this red line, there will be more bloodshed and it will be worse than 2023. We have shown enough restraint, we have lost enough lives. So the Meitei must know your right and your limit. Your right is in the valley, your limit ends where the hills begin. Don’t cross the red line.
Therefore, I say this to all right-thinking people of the Northeast — let us not touch the red line. Let Delhi also hear it clearly: you cannot bring peace by entertaining demands that seek to uproot one community to appease another. Protect tribal land rights, respect ancestral boundaries, and stop this dangerous narrative of foreigners. Otherwise, history will repeat itself, and the entire Northeast will burn again.
