Naga-Kuki strife began with a drunken brawl. But five months later, Manipur faultlines run deeper

On the night of February 7, a fight broke out between four drunk young men in a small town in Manipal’s Ukhrul district.

Two of them were Tangkhul Nagas, the majority community in Ukhrul. The other two were Kukis.

Typically, a brawl such as this would have been settled by village chiefs from both communities.

But the matter did not end there.

A day later, an abandoned Kuki home in a nearby village was set on fire. In retaliation, about 20 houses belonging to the Tangkhul Naga community were set ablaze.

For two more days, fires scorched villages around Litan, the tiny commercial town where the fight took place. Gunfights broke out. According to police records, seen by Scroll, 74 homes belonging to both communities were set ablaze.

By all accounts, the violence in Litan lit a fire between Kukis and Nagas in a state that has already seen a ‘partition’ on ethnic lines in 2023 after fierce clashes between Kukis and Meiteis left at least 260 dead.

A month after the arson and gunfights in Litan, the killings began.

At first, two Kukis were found in the hills near the town. They had been shot dead. In April, two Naga men were killed on the highway that connects Ukhrul to Imphal via Litan.

In the last six months, the violence between Nagas and Kukis has spread to more hill areas of Manipur, where both tribal groups live in close proximity, leading to a cycle of abductions, revenge killings and economic blockade. At least 25 people have died in the conflict so far. More buffer zones – to demarcate Kuki from Naga areas and vice versa, which neither side is allowed to cross – have come up.

But how did a petty fight in a town cascade into deadly clashes? Why did Nagas, who had been studiously neutral in the conflict between Kukis and Meities, harden their stance against another tribal community?

Scroll travelled to Ukhrul, Imphal, Senapati and Kangpokpi to investigate. We found that from Litan onwards, at the heart of the dispute is a contestation over land and territory.

Senior Manipur police officials and top central security officials called it a “fight of domain” or “jurisdictional control of land” between Kukis and Nagas, who have a history of animosity. What has strained the relationship further is the Kuki demand for a “separate administration” within Manipur and the narrative pushed by both Meiteis and Nagas that “Kukis are not indigenous to the state”.

The Litan brawl

The town of Litan abuts the National Highway-202, a storied mountainous road that runs between Imphal and Nagaland’s Mokokchung, and goes through Ukhrul.

On the night of February 7, two Naga men were walking by a road in Litan, when one of them switched a torch on. The light fell on two Kuki men, in an inebriated condition by the roadside. Tempers flared, an argument started. A group of five Kuki young men then arrived in “support” of the latter and badly beat up one of the Naga men.

That very night, Kuki residents told Scroll, the Naga man, Stalin Shimray, a teacher, went to the Kuki chief of Sereikhong village, where his assailants lived, and reported the violence against him.

Both parties decided to settle the dispute through customary law practices the next day.

“The intention was to solve the problem,” said 39-year-old Wungreikhan Kasar, the village chief of a Naga village Sikibung. “The culprits should have come to the customary court or the victims’ family. But they did not turn up.”

The Kukis, too, accused the Nagas of not turning up.

“On February 8, the Kuki chief and his cabinet waited for the Naga man to turn up,” said Mercy Khongsai, a member of a Kuki civil society group and an office bearer of Kuki Students’ Organisation, Ukhrul. “Definitely, the Kuki man was supposed to be penalised for spilling blood.”

Instead, she alleged, the Sikibung village chief, Kasar, and other Naga people went to the Kuki chief’s home and threatened him.

According to a first information report filed at the Litan police station, when the youths went to the Kuki chief’s home, demanding that the culprits be handed over, the situation escalated.

“This led to pelting of stones against each other,” the FIR read. Clashes and arson followed.

But was this about a drunken brawl in the first place? Scroll’s reporting shows that the Nagas and Kukis in the area have, for decades, been embroiled in a dispute over land.

‘Our forefathers gave them this land’

The Kuki settlement in Litan Sareikhong village, according to Naga accounts, dates to the 1940s.

“They forcibly settled here in the 1940s,” said Kasar, the village chief of Sikibung. The Naga village on top of a hill overlooks the Kuki village of Litan Sareikhong.

The Nagas claim that Sikibung has “jurisdiction” over Sareikhong.

Kasar told Scroll that the Kuki settlement had been evicted by authorities in 1955, but they “settled in a nearby area”. “Even in 1967, a district judge in Imphal had declared that Sareikhong and Litan belong to our village, Sikibung. But the state government did not evict the Kukis.”

In 1973, Kasar said, the Nagas “made a compromise” and signed an agreement allowing Kukis to stay there, if they paid the Nagas Rs 20,000.

“The land was given to them by our forefathers,” said Kasar. “But they breached the agreement.”

The Nagas said that the amount was never paid in full by the Kukis, “making the agreement invalid”. The Kukis deny the claim, saying the settlement was carried out in 1974.

The long-festering dispute came to a head in September 2024, when the Tangkhul Naga Long, the apex body of the community, issued an administration order declaring that Litan comes under the jurisdiction of Sikibung.

A month later, the Isak-Muivah faction of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland, the largest and most influential of Naga insurgent groups, also declared that Litan is an “ancestral land of Sikibung since the days of the forefathers”.

The NSCN (I-M) is currently in talks with the Centre for a “sovereign” state of Greater Nagaland encompassing parts of Manipur’s hill districts.

In the backdrop of this disagreement, the fight at Litan was read by the Nagas as an example of Kuki aggression.

“They don’t honour us, the landlords,” said Kasar. “They are the tenants. They are staying at the mercy of Nagas. But they want to dominate us, they don’t want to live under Tangkhuls. They want to evict Nagas from that area in Litan bazaar.”

Lalboi Haokip, who heads the Kuki Students Organisation in Ukhrul, countered the Naga claim. “The dispute at Litan appears to be a completely local disturbance, but the Tangkhul Nagas have expanded it into a full-blown inter-communal conflict,” he said. “Taking advantage of a small incident, the Nagas want us to vacate the Litan area.”

Haokip also claimed that the land belonged to their “ancestors”. “The Ukhrul district does not belong to Tangkhuls only.”

There are around 14 designated Kuki villages in Ukhrul district, he said.

“These villages are duly gazetted and recognised by the government,” Mercy Khongsai, the Kuki Students Organisation member, told Scroll. “This essentially means the ownership of the land belongs to the villagers, not to Tangkhuls,” Mercy said.

Khongsai objected to what she called the dominating behaviour of the Nagas.

“They have a superiority complex,” she said. “They say Kukis should not reply but only listen and be well-behaved in front of the Tangkhuls. They openly said in front of the higher officials during the Litan dispute that the Kukis should know who the real landowners are.”

Kasar, the village chief of Sikibung, however, insisted that the Nagas had to assert their rights if they wanted to stop Kukis from taking over their land.

The fight in Litan was not a small incident, he said. “It is all linked as the Kukis want to expand the territory,” Kasar told Scroll. “They want to dominate the areas and eliminate the Nagas from the Litan area. They want to make it part of a Kuki homeland.”

Competing homelands

For decades, militant groups from each of Manipur’s ethnic groups have fought for their vision of a homeland.

Nagas have fought for Nagalim, a sovereign state that would include Nagaland, Naga-dominated areas of Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh and Assam as well as Myanmar. Kukis fought for Kukiland, which covers most of the Manipur hills, and overlaps with the proposed Naga homeland. Meitei militant groups have fought for a sovereign state of Manipur, encompassing the Imphal Valley as well as the hills – which Naga and Kuki groups resented.

The Nagas account for about 20 per cent of Manipur’s total population. Most of them live in the hills surrounding the valley, home largely to the Meiteis, the state’s dominant ethnic group.

The hilly terrain is also home to the Kukis, who constitute the third-largest demographic group in the state. Conflicts between groups have often arisen because of competing claims to land, which emerge from competing histories.

While there were reports of clashes since colonial times, the political demands and armed movements have only made the enmity more hostile and intensified.

In 1993, this Naga-Kuki dispute led to bloody ethnic clashes, which resulted in killings of hundreds, and burning of villages. Thousands of people were turned out of their homes. The violence lasted for five years.

According to Kukis, NSCN (IM) cadres “uprooted” over 350 Kuki villages. Many of the Kukis displaced in those clashes settled in Litan and the area around Sareikhong.

A map, an aspiration

Since the outbreak of ethnic clashes between the Meitei and the Kuki-Zomi-Hmar communities in 2023, the Nagas have taken no side.

But the Kuki groups’ growing demand for a separate administration that would span most of the Manipur Hills has made the Nagas anxious.

A senior Naga police official from Manipur told Scroll that Nagas began to get restive after a purported map of Kukiland began to crop up on social media platforms. It included Naga areas like Chandel, Tengnoupal and a huge chunk of Ukhrul district and even Kamjong district.

Scroll could not confirm if this is a map endorsed by the Kuki groups.

“They are claiming so much land belonging to the Nagas as part of the separate administration,” he said. “Because of that aspiration the Nagas feel very threatened.”

The senior Naga police official added: “The Nagas think they need to fight back to protect their traditional land. It [conflict] is basically an issue of jurisdictional control of the land. It is not a drunken or superficial fight. ”

The Naga political leadership in the state agreed.

A Naga MLA told Scroll: “The Kuki people want to establish a separate administration, which will include many Naga areas especially in Kangpokpi, Chandel and Tengnoupal districts. But this is not their own ancestral homeland. That’s the root cause of the present conflict.”

A ‘reasonable demand’

Kuki leaders, however, said that the separate administration they have proposed will encompass only areas with Kuki habitations.

Seilen Haokip, spokesperson of the Kuki National Organisation, said that the Kukis have been demanding a union territory since 2023 because they cannot go back to live under the Imphal valley anymore.

“The Meitei, the majority in Imphal, have chased us out,” he said. “We can’t go back there. We have been forced back to our ancestral lands in those hill districts,” he said.

The KNO, a conglomerate of tribal armed groups, signed a ceasefire – called the suspension of operations or SoO agreement – with the Centre and the state of Manipur in 2008.

Since the 2023 clashes, the KNO is one of two Kuki umbrella groups negotiating with the Centre for a separate Union territory. “We submitted the demand to the Centre during talks on September 1, 2023. We reiterated that same demand in November 2025,” he added. “It’s a continuation. It’s not a new demand.”

The proposed territory would be under Article 239A of the Constitution, which empowers Parliament to create an administrative unit out of geographically fragmented areas, as in the case of Puducherry. “It will be an administrative map comprising areas in the hills of Manipur inhabited by Kukis,” Haokip said.

That map, Haokip said, would include Kuki inhabited areas in Churachandpur, Kangpokpi Pherzawl, Tengnoupal, and Chandel. “But there would be pockets in Ukhrul, Kamjong, Senapati, Tamenglong and Noney. We are not claiming all of those areas, only our inhabited areas.”

He argued that the demand was “reasonable”. “We are reasonable and rational enough not to include Kuki-inhabited areas in Nagaland, Meghalaya, or Tripura,” Haokip said. “We are doing it within the context of present-day Manipur. Unlike the NSCN-IM, we are not asking for territorial integration of all Kuki-inhabited areas. If the government is going to deny us that, then God help us.”

Janghaolun Haokip of Kuki Inpi, apex body of the community in Manipur, said the Centre’s negotiations with Kuki SoO groups have made the Nagas nervous. “These clashes may have been conceived as a way to block a separate administration agreement with the Centre,” he claimed.

The indigenous question

In the conflict, the narrative of Kukis as “unwanted and non-indigenous” and “illegal migrants” has gained strength.

The Naga MLA, for instance, claimed that Kukis are “very recent migrants, they only came around the 1830s”. “They are mostly from Myanmar,” he explained. “[Across the hills], the British would settle one Kuki village between two Naga villages. There were killings and fighting between 1840 and 1917. That sowed the enmity between us.”

Kuki scholars have disputed this. A Delhi-based scholar from the Kuki community pointed out that recent academic research, by historians like J Guite, used “latest genetic studies [to show] that Kukis have roots in the Indian subcontinent stretching to more than a millennia”.

“But figures like Thuingaleng Muivah, the head of the NSCN-IM, have been most successful in framing Kukis [as illegal immigrants] to mobilise and unite Manipur Nagas politically,” the Kuki scholar said. “For him, ‘othering’ the Kukis is instrumental in the construction and consolidation of modern Manipur Naga identity.”

The contestation is not only over history.

An advisor to Manipur Chief Minister Yumnam Khemchand, who requested anonymity, alleged “that most of the recent Kuki migration” has happened in the hills and not the Meitei inhabited valley. “Nagas have realised this recently. There is an old anxiety among the Nagas that Kukis are taking away their land and this has been reinforced again.”

However, there is no official data on Kuki migration within the state.

The senior Naga police official added that the current conflict has brought Nagas and Meteis together on one demand – for a National Register of Citizens with 1951 or 1961 as a cut-off date to check “illegal Kuki migrants.”

Political scientist Kham Khan Suan Hausing warned that invoking an arbitrary timeline to determine who is “indigenous” in Manipur “is unconstitutional and only likely to promote violent conflicts”.

‘A long haul’

Five months after that first fight, Litan Bazaar resembles a war zone.

On the morning of June 21, when we reached there, most of the shops were either shut or had been abandoned. Burnt homes and charred two-wheelers, the remnants of the February 7 arson and violence, were strewn around.

Hundreds of central security forces had descended on the town, and were patrolling the area with armoured military vehicles.

In the hills surrounding Litan, Scroll found that bunkers had come up in the villages, where armed Nagas and Kukis took position, their guns trained at each other.

The bridge over the Thoubal river, next to the Litan police station, had been turned into a de facto “border”. No Kuki can travel to Ukhrul beyond this point while Nagas cannot cross the bridge without the escort of security forces.

The Naga MLA alleged that the Litan clashes had been engineered to “extend the boundary of the Kangpopki district”, where the Kukis are in the majority, to Thoubal river right next to the Litan police station.

He pointed out that Kuki armed groups had opened fire at Sanakeithel, a Tangkhul Naga village encircled by at least 11 Kuki villages, along the highway. “They want to eliminate that village to create a passage from Kangpokpi to Ukhrul.”

Lalboi Haokip, from the Kuki Students’ Organisation, countered that Kuki villages in the Litan area have come under heavy fire because Naga armed groups want to wipe out their villages and force all Kukis out of Ukhrul.

Their villages, he said, had been “isolated” and surrounded. The supply of essential commodities was down to a trickle. “The administration has not done anything to make us feel secure,” he said.

A central security official posted in Ukhrul also told Scroll that “the Tangkhuls now want to drive Kukis from the Litan area.”

A senior office bearer of United Naga Council, the apex body of Nagas in Manipur, told Scroll that there “has been increasing pressure on the Naga armed groups to flush out these Kuki villages in Litan”.

“It would take them only a few hours to clear the villages but they are not doing it as they are in a ceasefire agreement with the government and because of the presence of Army and Assam Rifles,” he added, referring to the NSCN(IM).

Both communities told Scroll that they were in it for the long haul.

“This won’t stop soon,” said another security official posted in Litan. “The Kuki-Naga conflict lasted for four-five years in the 1990s. They are prepared for a longer run.”