The Kuki Organisation for Human Rights Trust (KOHUR), a Special Consultative Status NGO with the United Nations Economic and Social Council (UN-ECOSOC), categorically condemns the malicious distortion of history and the incitement to ethnic hatred contained in the interview given by Mr. Thuingaleng Muivah, General Secretary of the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Isak-Muivah), to The Week (Namrata Biji Ahuja, Chief of Bureau, Delhi), published on 25th June, 2026 under the inflammatory title “India uses Kukis to fight a proxy war against Nagas.”
KOHUR places on record that the statements attributed to Mr. Muivah are not an honest recollection of history but a calculated act of historical revisionism designed to dehumanise the Kuki-Zo people, to manufacture a moral pretext for past atrocities, and to legitimise the continuing campaign of violence against innocent Kuki-Zo civilians along the India-Myanmar frontier.
I. Setting the Historical Record Straight
In his interview, Mr. Muivah claims that Tangkhul villages such as Ngahui, Chingjaroi and Chingsui were “plundered by nomadic Kuki marauders” and that “the British armed the nomadic Kukis.” These assertions invert the historical truth.
First, far from being “nomadic marauders,” the Kuki chiefs of the Ukhrul and Kamjong tracts were, in the period preceding Indian independence, the recognised custodians of order across these hills. In an age when inter-village feuds and head-taking raids between one Tangkhul village and another were endemic, it was the Kuki chiefs who functioned as the de facto judges, arbiters and peacekeepers among the warring Tangkhul villages. The territorial authority of the Kuki chiefs and their role in restraining inter-village bloodshed is a matter of settled record in the administrative and ethnographic literature of the colonial period.
Second, the punitive actions taken by Kuki chiefs against certain Tangkhul villages during the Anglo-Kuki War of 1917–1919 were not acts of unprovoked aggression. During that war — one of the most significant indigenous uprisings against the British Empire in this region, in which the Kuki nation fought the imperial forces — a number of Tangkhul villages chose to serve the British army as spies, guides and informants against the Kuki resistance. Those villages were penalised by the Kuki chiefs precisely because they had sided with the colonial enemy in a war of resistance. To recast this wartime accountability, nearly a century later, as evidence of “Kuki savagery” is a deliberate and dishonest manipulation of history.
It is a matter of bitter irony that Mr. Muivah invokes the Anglo-Kuki War to malign the Kuki people, when it was the Kuki nation that bled in open revolt against the British Empire from 1917 to 1919, and again rallied to the cause of Indian freedom by aiding Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and the Indian National Army. The Kuki-Zo record of resistance to colonial rule and loyalty to India requires no certificate from the NSCN-IM.
II. From Falsified History to Genocide
KOHUR is constrained to state that the falsification of history by Mr. Muivah is not a harmless academic exercise. It is the ideological instrument by which the NSCN-IM has, over three decades, justified the systematic ethnic cleansing of the Kuki-Zo people.
Armed with this manufactured narrative of historical grievance, the NSCN-IM under Mr. Muivah unleashed a campaign of organised terror against unarmed Kuki-Zo civilians. The campaign began in earnest after “quit notices” were served on Kuki villages in 1992 and escalated into one of the gravest episodes of ethnic violence in the post-independence history of the region. By the count maintained by Kuki Inpi Manipur, the apex body of the Kuki people, more than 900 innocent Kuki-Zo men, women, children and elderly were killed and over 350 Kuki villages were uprooted during the NSCN-IM-led violence of the 1990s, with tens of thousands rendered homeless.
The single most notorious atrocity of that campaign was the massacre of 13th September 1993 at Joupi, Janglenphai and the surrounding villages of present-day Tamenglong, in which around 103 unarmed Kuki villagers — men, women and children — were butchered in a single day as they fled their homes after being served quit notices. The Kuki people commemorate this period of slaughter every year as Sahnit-Ni (Black Day). To this day, not a single perpetrator has been brought to justice. It must be underscored that the overwhelming majority of those killed in this campaign were not combatants but the most helpless of civilians — women, children and the elderly — slaughtered solely because they were Kuki and because they held ancestral land coveted for the project of an expanded “Nagalim.”
III. The Pattern Continues in 2026
The same ideology of hatred that Mr. Muivah propagates in his interview is being acted upon, with lethal effect, at this very moment. Since mid-May 2026, a series of premeditated attacks attributed to the NSCN-IM and allied factions has once again targeted vulnerable Kuki-Zo settlements in Kamjong, Kangpokpi and the adjoining border belt.
On 13th May 2026, three prominent Kuki-Zo church leaders — Rev. Dr. Vumthang Sitlhou, President of the Thadou Baptist Association India (TBAI); Pastor Kaigoulun Lhouvum; and Pastor Paogoulen Sitlhou — were ambushed and killed near Kangpokpi while returning from a Baptist convention. Rev. Dr. Vumthang Sitlhou had, only shortly before his killing, led a delegation of Kuki Christian leaders in peace consultations with Naga Christian counterparts. That a man of peace was answered with bullets exposes the true intent behind the NSCN-IM’s rhetoric. Subsequent attacks claimed further Kuki-Zo lives, including Haogin Lhouvum, a farmer shot in his paddy field near Lasan on 9th June 2026; Jangngam Hangshing, a village volunteer killed during a funeral; and two church leaders, Head Deacon Letminlun Haokip and Youth Chairman Lunminthang Haokip, killed when armed assailants crossing from across the international border attacked Kultuh village in Kamjong district on 11th June 2026, burning homes and a church.
KOHUR has separately welcomed the steps being taken by the competent authorities, including the transfer of investigation into the killing of the three church leaders to the National Investigation Agency, and reiterates its demand that the cadres, commanders and conspirators responsible be identified and handed over for prosecution under the law.
IV. Demands of KOHUR
In light of the foregoing, the Kuki Organisation for Human Rights Trust demands:
1. That Mr. Th. Muivah and the NSCN-IM immediately and unconditionally retract the false and inflammatory historical claims made in the said interview, which constitute incitement to communal hatred against the Kuki-Zo people.
2. That the Government of India and the Government of Manipur take cognisance of the use of historical falsehood as an instrument of incitement, in violation of the spirit of the ceasefire to which the NSCN-IM is a party.
3. That the long-pending demand for justice for the more than 900 Kuki-Zo victims of the 1990s ethnic cleansing, including the martyrs of the 13th September 1993 massacre, be finally addressed through a credible judicial process.
4. That the perpetrators of the ongoing 2026 killings of Kuki-Zo civilians and church leaders be apprehended and prosecuted without fear or favour, and that vulnerable border villages be afforded the protection to which they are entitled as citizens of the Republic of India.
KOHUR affirms that the Kuki-Zo people remain committed to peaceful coexistence with all communities, including their Tangkhul-Naga neighbours, with whom they share a long history of common habitation. But peace cannot be built upon falsehood. It is precisely the distortion of history into an engine of hatred — of which Mr. Muivah’s interview is the latest example — that has cost this region thousands of innocent lives.
Truth is the first condition of reconciliation, and KOHUR will continue to defend the historical truth and the human rights of the Kuki-Zo people before every competent national and international forum.
(This is a press statement issued by KOHUR’s Department of Information & Publicity on June 26, 2026)
The Hills Journal
K. Salbung, Churachandpur
Manipur-795128
