Pastors’ Killing Exposes Fragile Rule in Manipur After President’s Rule
By Mangpi Haokip
May 29, 2026
A girl at a camp for displaced people in Churachandpur, Manipur. Photo by Newsreel Asia
The recent killing of three Kuki Baptist pastors in an ambush showed that Manipur’s three-year conflict has widened beyond the Meitei-Kuki divide. The attack came barely three months after President’s Rule was revoked and a new council of ministers was sworn in. What began in May 2023 as violence between the valley-based Meitei community and the Kuki-Zo tribes had already claimed hundreds of lives and displaced tens of thousands, most of them from the tribal Kuki-Zo communities.
The political sequence that culminated in New Delhi’s direct intervention began with the resignation of the then chief minister, N. Biren Singh, on Feb. 9, 2025. Five days later, the constitutional machinery of the state was effectively suspended with the formal imposition of President’s Rule. The state’s Legislative Assembly was placed in “suspended animation,” a constitutional euphemism for a deep freeze. By August 2025, Union Home Minister Amit Shah was on the floor of the Lok Sabha announcing a six-month extension of the initial six months of President’s Rule.
From President’s Rule to a Claimed Return to Normalcy
In its attempt to project a return to normalcy, the Union government lifted President’s Rule on Feb. 4, 2026. The move was expected to end one year of constitutional limbo and resume the normal business of the state. The optics appeared carefully crafted, and the timing carried the clear imprint of electoral calculation. New Delhi appeared to be setting its sights on the 2027 Assembly election, when Manipur will return to the polls, with the current Assembly due to end its term in one year. Restoring a functioning government under such circumstances was a sine qua non.
The new cabinet embodied a calculated arithmetic of ethnic proportionality, with a Meitei chief minister in Yumnam Khemchand, a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) veteran and two-time Singjamei legislator widely regarded as a “consensus” figure. Khemchand’s temperament and political standing were expected to secure appeal on different sides of the divide, unlike his predecessor, Biren Singh, who came to embody many of the predicaments and grievances of the Kuki-Zo people.
New Delhi attempted a reset through Khemchand. Alongside him were two deputies, one representing the Naga community and the other the Kuki community. It signalled the BJP’s familiar social-engineering playbook, a tested formula for managing competing ethnic, communal and political groups through co-option and enough power-sharing to keep each stakeholder tied to the arrangement.
The party has adopted, refined and replicated this model in some of the country’s most complex and combustible constituencies, where the appearance of balance has often served as a functional substitute for peace. Nemcha Kipgen of the BJP, representing the Kuki-Zo community from 50 A/C Kangpokpi, and Losii Dikho of the Naga People’s Front, representing the Naga community from 48 A/C Mao, were installed as the state’s first deputy chief ministers. The post of deputy chief minister had no precedent in Manipur’s political history, and its sudden introduction raised as many questions about intent as it answered about governance. It also marked a conspicuous departure from Manipur’s long-standing constitutional convention on cabinet composition.
The May 13 Ambush
The attack on the three Baptist pastors on the morning of May 13, 2026 marked one of the biggest developments in the state’s unending cycle of violence in the recent past. The convoy of clergymen was returning from Churachandpur district in Manipur’s southern region, a Kuki-Zo-dominated belt, after participating in the maiden United Baptist Convention meeting. The United Baptist Convention had recently split from the Manipur Baptist Convention, a conglomerate of Baptist Christian groups in Manipur. After the initial rupture of 3 May 2023, Kuki-Zo groups within the MBC exited to form their own congregation.
The attack took place between Kotjim and Kotlen in Kangpokpi district. It claimed the lives of three pastors, Rev. V. Sitlhou, Rev. Kaigoulen and Pastor Paogoulen, and left four others seriously injured. Condemnations followed, including from the chief ministers of three North Eastern states, Meghalaya, Nagaland and Mizoram. Nagaland Chief Minister Neiphiu Rio wrote on X, “I strongly condemn the brutal killing of Kuki Church leaders in Manipur. Such barbaric violence against innocent lives is unacceptable and has no place in any civilised society. Condolences to the bereaved families and the church community during this time of grief.”
On May 3, 2026, barely 10 days before the ambush of the convoy of pastors, Kuki-Zo people throughout the country marked the third anniversary of the May 2023 Manipur violence under the theme “Separation Day.” The commemoration pointed to the entrenched geographical and demographic cleavage that makes up the state’s ethnic fault lines. The attack, coming just days after a solemn commemoration, exposed New Delhi’s attempt to impose a hollow, manufactured peace in a state where the very idea of peace had lost credibility. It also served as a damning indictment of a security apparatus that, for all its heavy presence on the ground, remained structurally insufficient.
NSCN-IM, Proxy Violence and Plausible Deniability
The attack was widely attributed to the Zaliangrong United Front-Kamson faction (ZUF-K), a group alleged to have been backed and, at times, sheltered by the National Socialist Council of Nagalim-Isak Muivah (NSCN-IM). For decades, the NSCN-IM has allegedly functioned as a de facto parallel government in the Naga-dominated hill districts of Manipur. Its ceasefire with New Delhi since 1997 and the 2015 framework agreement with the Government of India have allowed the group to operate with civilian authority in many areas. Many argue that, since the ceasefire agreement with the Centre, the armed outfit has strategically cultivated proxy organisations to carry out acts of violence, targeted killings, looting, extortion, illegal taxation and systematic intimidation of civilian populations in the hill districts of Manipur while maintaining plausible deniability and continuing to exert control on the ground.
This template carries a deep ideological contradiction. The NSCN-IM was built on the foundational doctrine of “Nagalim for Christ,” a vision of a sovereign Naga homeland rooted in Christian identity. The targeted killing of church pastors and religious leaders, therefore, sits in grotesque conflict with the morally laden and spiritual edifice on which the movement was supposedly built.
When P.K. Mishra, a former Director General of the Border Security Force and a seasoned expert on insurgency in the Northeast, in a statement to News9 attributed the killings to the “NSCN-IM-backed ZUF-Kamson,” the alleged involvement of the ZUF-K group gained further credibility.
Two interrelated propositions emerge from this course of events.
The first concerns state capacity. The inability of the security apparatus to prevent, deter or conclusively attribute responsibility for the May 13 ambush more than two weeks later points to a larger institutional deficit. Responsibility for the attack remains the subject of mutually contradictory claims among armed and civil society groups.
The second concerns the structural transformation of the conflict itself. What began in May 2023 as a bilateral antagonism between the Meitei and Kuki-Zo communities has, in the past three years, created permissive conditions for the escalation of inter-community and intra-insurgent disputes. More recently, relations between the Kuki-Zo and Naga peoples, another group of predominantly Christian tribal communities in Manipur’s hills, have deteriorated, with clashes breaking out in several places.
The ongoing issue of hostage-taking on both sides marks the latest episode in the renewed and fractured relationship between the Kukis and Nagas. The Naga-Kuki schism, dormant since the conflict of 1993 to 1998, has resurfaced in a regional security setting marked by an over-supply of weapons, a fragmented insurgent ecology and contested narratives over territorial entitlement and land use. Pre-existing rivalries between the NSCN-IM, the ZUF and various valley-based insurgent groups have also acquired renewed operational significance in this environment.
The cumulative evidence does not support the proposition that Manipur has entered a post-conflict phase, even though formal indicators of constitutional restoration have been put in place, including the revocation of President’s Rule, the constitution of an inclusive coalition cabinet, the resumption of legislative business and declaratory commitments to reconciliation. If anything, the killing of the three pastors has suggested that violence in Manipur has metastasised into institutionalised bloodshed and disorder.
Three years after the rupture of May 2023, the fault line has widened. It has cut into communities that were initially outside the conflict. The fissure has crept into spaces that had previously been spared, including the church, civil society and platforms built for dialogue and reconciliation. That people travelling through the state on affairs of faith and community have now been targeted may be the most troubling development of all.
The restoration of representative government in February 2026 has, on the evidence currently available, reconstituted the form of governance without reconstituting its substance. Peace, in any meaningful operational sense, remains elusive.
(Mangpi Haokip is a research scholar at University of Hyderabad.)
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Newsreel Asia.
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