Govind TekaleManipur’s Indigenous Communities Are Reaching Toward China After India Failed Them
For over three years, the hills and valleys of Manipur have burned — not metaphorically, but literally. Churches torched. Villages razed. Women paraded naked through streets. Over 250 people dead, more than 60,000 displaced, and thousands of homes reduced to ash. The conflict between the valley-dominant Meitei community and the hill-dwelling Kuki-Zo tribes has created one of independent India’s most sustained and underreported ethnic crises.
And yet, when Manipur’s Kuki-Zo communities look to New Delhi for justice, they see a government that has been either absent, indifferent, or — in their telling — complicit. That perception of abandonment has now curdled into something more alarming: some tribal leaders and community organisations in India’s northeast have reportedly opened lines of communication with Beijing, viewing China as a potential lever of pressure against an Indian state machinery they no longer trust to protect them.
This is the story of how a government’s failure to govern becomes a geopolitical crisis.
## Who Are the Kuki-Zo?
The Kuki-Zo peoples are a broad ethnolinguistic grouping of Tibeto-Burman origin who inhabit the hill districts of Manipur, parts of Mizoram, Nagaland, Assam, and across the border in Myanmar and Bangladesh. They are predominantly Christian — the result of Baptist and Presbyterian missionary activity in the 19th and 20th centuries — and have maintained distinct customary laws, governance structures, and land tenure systems under Schedule V and Schedule VI protections in the Indian Constitution.
Historically, they were granted special protections under Indian law precisely because colonialism and state-building had already marginalised them once. The Inner Line Permit system, which restricts outsiders from settling in these areas, was meant to protect their land and identity. But in practice, these protections have been selectively enforced, politically weaponised, and steadily eroded.
The Kuki-Zo have long demanded either a separate administrative district or a Union Territory — “Kukiland” or “Zale’n-gam” in different formulations — arguing that co-existence within a Meitei-dominated state government has become impossible. That demand, largely ignored in New Delhi, is now at the heart of everything that has followed.
## May 3, 2023: The Day Everything Broke
The immediate trigger for the current phase of violence was a High Court order in April 2023 recommending that the Meitei community be considered for Scheduled Tribe status — a change that would allow Meiteis to buy land in the hill districts, which Kuki-Zo communities have long viewed as an existential threat.
On May 3, 2023, during a “Tribal Solidarity March” protesting this order, violence erupted. Within days, it had spread across the state. The pattern that emerged was deeply disturbing to human rights observers: state police and Meitei civilian militias appeared to coordinate attacks on Kuki-Zo villages, while the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) and Army units largely stood by or arrived too late.
Videos and testimonies documented police handing weapons to Meitei mobs, Kuki-Zo civilians being shot while fleeing, and women being sexually assaulted. The most infamous footage — two Kuki-Zo women being paraded naked by a mob — took two months to reach Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attention, and only after it went viral globally.
“The Prime Minister found time to inaugurate airports. He could not find time for us,” said one Kuki-Zo civil society leader in a widely circulated statement.
## New Delhi’s Dereliction: Three Years of Silence
Under the Indian Constitution, the central government has the power to dismiss state governments or impose President’s Rule when a state fails to maintain law and order. That power has been used more than a hundred times in Indian history, often for transparently political reasons.
In Manipur, where ethnic cleansing has been documented by the UN Special Rapporteur, multiple human rights organisations, and journalists from across the world, President’s Rule has not been imposed. Chief Minister N. Biren Singh remains in office.
The Union Home Ministry, led by Amit Shah, has flown in delegations and issued statements. Peace talks have been announced and then quietly abandoned. But the structural issue — that a state government is accused of facilitating violence against one ethnic community — has never been directly addressed.
Critics note that Manipur, like most of India’s northeast, is a BJP-governed state, and that imposing President’s Rule would embarrass the party. Electoral arithmetic in a small state also matters: the Meitei community, which supports the BJP and Biren Singh, constitutes the valley’s majority and commands the legislature.
The Kuki-Zo, dispersed across the hills, constitute a smaller vote bank nationally — and one that already felt politically homeless even before the conflict.
“We voted for the Indian state. We served in its armies. We built its roads. And when they came for us, India looked away,” said a displaced woman from Kangpokpi district, speaking to a human rights documentation team in 2024.
## Enter China: Desperation, Geopolitics, and a Dangerous Opening
It is within this context that reports began emerging — first in Indian strategic affairs circles, then in international media — that certain Kuki-Zo civil society and diaspora organisations had begun reaching out to Chinese embassies and Chinese-linked organisations.
This is not, at present, a case of armed groups receiving Chinese weapons or funding in the manner of Cold War proxy conflicts. What appears to be happening is more political and symbolic: representatives of Kuki-Zo groups abroad — particularly in the United Kingdom, the United States, and parts of Southeast Asia — have reportedly met with Chinese diplomatic officials to present documentation of the crisis, appealed to Chinese-funded media platforms to cover the conflict, explored whether China’s growing influence with Myanmar’s military junta could be leveraged to ensure the safety of cross-border Kuki-Zo kin, and in some cases floated the idea of “internationalising” the conflict in ways that would embarrass India at multilateral forums where China holds influence.
Indian intelligence agencies, sources suggest, have monitored these contacts with significant alarm. The northeast has long been a sensitive frontier — China borders Arunachal Pradesh, which it claims, and the region sits astride supply routes vital to India’s strategic posture.
## Why China? Understanding the Logic of the Desperate
To outside observers, reaching toward Beijing may seem paradoxical — China is an authoritarian state with its own devastating record of suppressing indigenous and ethnic minority communities, from Tibet to Xinjiang.
But the logic of the desperate is not the logic of the comfortable. For Kuki-Zo communities that have watched three years of violence go unpunished, the question is not “who shares our values?” but “who has leverage over India?”
Several dynamics make China a compelling — if dangerous — calculation for some community voices:
1. **The Myanmar connection.** Large numbers of Kuki-Zo ethnic kin live in Chin State and Sagaing Region in Myanmar. Since the 2021 military coup, these communities have been caught between the Tatmadaw (Myanmar military) and resistance forces, and have experienced their own atrocities. China exerts significant influence over Myanmar’s junta. If Chinese pressure could secure protection for Kuki-Zo in Myanmar, it would serve community interests independent of the India conflict.
2. **Diplomatic embarrassment.** India has recently positioned itself as a global leader, hosting the G20, championing the “Global South,” and speaking internationally on democracy and human rights. Kuki-Zo advocates see the opportunity to expose the gap between India’s international posture and its domestic failures — and China, which regularly weaponises human rights discourse against India on issues like Kashmir and Arunachal Pradesh, is a willing platform.
3. **The abandonment calculus.** “We have exhausted every Indian institution,” said one diaspora voice who spoke on condition of anonymity. “The Supreme Court has moved slowly. The National Human Rights Commission issued reports and nothing changed. The Parliament barely debated it. When every door inside the house is locked, you look for a window.”
4. **Leverage, not loyalty.** Most analysts who have spoken with Kuki-Zo civil society leaders emphasise that the approach to China is tactical pressure, not ideological alignment. “They want India to act. They want Modi to feel that the silence has a cost. China is a tool for that calculation, not a partner,” observed one northeast India researcher at a Delhi-based think tank.
## What Indian Security Analysts Are Saying
The Indian strategic community is alarmed — but its alarm is directed differently depending on the analyst’s ideological priors.
Right-wing commentators close to the BJP have used the China contacts as evidence that the Kuki-Zo are “anti-national” — a framing that indigenous rights advocates describe as a classic colonial deflection tactic: when indigenous people protest their treatment, accuse them of foreign conspiracy rather than address their grievances.
But more sober security analysts acknowledge the root cause problem. “You cannot create a vacuum of justice and then be surprised when adversaries fill it,” said one retired Intelligence Bureau officer in an interview with an Indian magazine. “This is a strategic failure as much as a humanitarian one.”
The parallel with Kashmir is not lost on observers. Decades of state violence and democratic exclusion in Kashmir created openings for Pakistani influence. The formula in Manipur looks familiar: suppress indigenous grievances, fail to hold perpetrators accountable, watch as communities look beyond India’s borders.
“Manipur is not Kashmir,” cautions one northeast scholar. “But the playbook of exclusion is the same.”
## The Role of the Church and International Networks
The Kuki-Zo communities’ Christianity has given them something valuable that many other marginalised Indian communities lack: robust international institutional networks. Baptist and Presbyterian churches in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia have been significant channels for documentation, fundraising, and advocacy.
The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom cited Manipur in its 2024 report, specifically highlighting the targeting of churches. Multiple US Senators and members of Congress have raised the issue with the Indian Embassy. The European Parliament passed a resolution expressing concern.
It is within these international Christian networks that some of the outreach toward China is said to have occurred — not through churches themselves, but through secular diaspora advocacy groups that operate in the same networks and have explored every available pressure point.
## The Displaced: Numbers Behind the Rhetoric
While geopolitical analysis fills column inches, the human reality of Manipur’s crisis sits in relief camps in Churachandpur, Kangpokpi, Tengnoupal, and across the border in Mizoram.
According to the Kuki-Zo Civil Society coalition’s own counts — figures the Indian government has neither confirmed nor substantially disputed — over 60,000 people remain displaced. Thousands are in formal relief camps. Many more live with relatives or in makeshift shelters on land they are not sure they will be able to return to.
Children have missed years of school. Farmers have missed seasons of cultivation. Elderly community members have died in camps, far from their ancestral villages. Trauma rates documented by medical volunteers are described as equivalent to conflict zones in sub-Saharan Africa.
The economic cost to these communities is incalculable. Decades of development — NGO-funded schools, community-built roads, local clinics — have been destroyed. Starting over, even in safety, would take a generation.
And they are not safe. As recently as mid-2026, fresh incidents of violence have been reported, even as the broader conflict appears to have settled into a grim, entrenched division: Meitei in the valley, Kuki-Zo in the hills, with a de facto ethnic boundary that movement across risks life.
## The Demand That Won’t Go Away
The Kuki-Zo political demand — a separate administration — has not diminished with the violence. If anything, it has hardened. Three years of conflict have made the prospect of living under a Meitei-dominated Manipur government feel not merely inconvenient but existentially threatening.
The central government has consistently refused to engage with this demand. Officials describe it as “not on the table” and assert that India’s territorial integrity makes new state or Union Territory formations politically impossible in this context.
But India has created new states before — Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand were all carved from larger states in 2000 — and the northeast’s map has been redrawn multiple times since independence. The refusal to engage feels, to Kuki-Zo communities, less like constitutional principle and more like political calculation in Meitei’s favour.
“They created Telangana when the pressure was enough,” observed one Kuki civil society leader. “We are learning what it takes to create pressure.”
## What Justice Would Actually Look Like
When Kuki-Zo civil society organisations are asked what they want, they typically articulate a set of demands that are neither radical nor unprecedented in the Indian context:
1. **Accountability** — prosecution of those who ordered, participated in, and covered up atrocities, including state officials and police personnel
2. **Rehabilitation** — full restoration of displaced communities to their homes, with security guarantees
3. **Political recognition** — a separate administrative arrangement that ensures Kuki-Zo political representation is not perpetually subordinated to Meitei demographics
4. **Constitutional protection** — enforcement of existing tribal land protection laws that have been selectively applied
5. **Impartial investigation** — removal of state-level investigation bodies with documented Meitei bias, replaced by central or judicial oversight
None of these demands require India to cede territory. None require China’s involvement. All of them require political will that has, so far, been absent.
## The Risk of the China Gambit
Even among Kuki-Zo advocates who understand the desperation that has driven some community voices toward Beijing, there is concern about the strategic risks.
China’s interest in the northeast is not altruistic. Beijing has historically supported insurgencies in India’s northeast as instruments of pressure — funding groups like NSCN factions in earlier decades, maintaining ambiguity about its support for various armed organisations. Any Chinese “support” for Kuki-Zo causes would come with strings, conditions, and interests that do not align with indigenous self-determination.
More immediately, the China contact gives Indian security agencies and the BJP government an excuse to frame the entire Kuki-Zo political movement as a security threat rather than a legitimate political demand. In India’s current political climate — where dissent is regularly labelled as “anti-national” or “foreign-funded” — this framing is not merely rhetorical. It has led to arrests, raids, and the closure of organisations under laws like FCRA (Foreign Contribution Regulation Act) and UAPA (Unlawful Activities Prevention Act).
“We are trapped,” admitted one Kuki-Zo diaspora activist. “If we stay quiet, nothing changes. If we shout loudly, they call us agents. And if some of us in desperation reach out to the only power that India actually fears, they use it to justify everything they’ve already done to us.”
## What the International Community Can Actually Do
The more productive avenues for Kuki-Zo communities lie not in Beijing but in forums where India’s democratic standing actually matters — the UN Human Rights Council, the US State Department’s human rights reporting, the European Parliament, and bilateral dialogues with India’s democratic partners.
India’s relationship with the United States, the European Union, Japan, and Australia is premised partly on shared democratic values. Sustained, documented advocacy in these contexts can create real costs for Indian inaction.
The UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples has noted the Manipur situation. Sustained engagement to produce a formal country visit request, followed by a published report, would significantly raise the international visibility of the crisis in ways that are harder to dismiss as “anti-national interference.”
## Conclusion: The Price of Abandonment
The story of Manipur’s Kuki-Zo communities reaching toward China is, at its core, a story about what happens when a state fails its citizens badly enough and long enough.
It is a story about the consequences of political impunity — of letting a state government instrumentalise ethnic violence for electoral benefit, of allowing displaced people to rot in relief camps for years, of ensuring that no senior official ever faces accountability for any of it.
India is a democracy. Democracies derive legitimacy from the consent of the governed — from the belief, however provisional and tension-ridden, that the state will protect its citizens equally, that the law applies to perpetrators regardless of ethnicity, that political demands will be heard through peaceful channels rather than suppressed.
When that belief is destroyed — when a community comes to believe that the Indian state will never protect them, will never prosecute those who harmed them, will never hear their political voice — they do not simply accept their fate. They look for other options. And in the geopolitical landscape of South and Southeast Asia, China is always one of those options.
The solution to Manipur is not better surveillance of who the Kuki-Zo are talking to. The solution is justice, accountability, and a political settlement that makes the Indian state worth trusting again.
That solution still exists. It will not exist forever.
Source: User-provided transcript. Karmactive covers stories at the intersection of technology, environment, and community power. If you’re part of a local organizing effort, reach out.
