KOHUR welcomes transfer of church leaders' ambush case to NIA, condemns Manipur Home Minister's move to shield Arambai Tenggol

The Kuki Organisation for Human Rights Trust (KOHUR) has welcomed the State Government's decision to hand over the investigation into the ambush killing of three Kuki-Zo church leaders to the National Investigation Agency (NIA).

Placing its full trust in the professionalism and impartiality of the NIA, KOHUR demands that the agency deliver justice to the bereaved families swiftly, completely, and without a single day of avoidable delay.

In a release issued on Wednesday, KOHUR stated that the families have grieved long enough; nothing short of the identification, arrest, and prosecution of every perpetrator and conspirator will suffice.

"Yet, at the very moment the State professes to seek justice for these slain church leaders, KOHUR is appalled and outraged by the conduct of the Home Minister of Manipur, Govindas Konthoujam, who has publicly stated that he held discussions with the DGP so that 'no further arrests' are made of members of Arambai Tenggol, and that efforts are underway to avoid further crackdowns on the outfit following the NIA's arrest of its cadres," KOHUR stated.

KOHUR claimed that the fact that the State's own Home Minister would openly work to halt lawful arrests of an armed radical group is nothing less than a public confession of complicity.

Condemning the statement of the Home Minister, KOHUR stated that Arambai Tenggol is not a civil society body. It is a heavily armed Meitei militia that has been characterised by international analysts as a "radicalised armed militia", alleged to have engaged in mass killings, rapes, looting, and arson, and which, during the conflict, virtually ran a parallel government in Manipur.

KOHUR stated that:

(i) The charges that stand against Arambai Tenggol and its cadres are grave and well documented. It stands accused of the killing and lynching of Kuki-Zo civilians and of orchestrated, destructive raids that burned Kuki-Zo villages and properties to the ground.

(ii) It stands allegedly involved in the brutal assault on the late Vungzagin Valte, the senior BJP MLA from Thanlon, who was savagely attacked by a mob in Imphal on 4 May 2023, immediately after attending a security meeting at the Chief Minister's Office—an assault that left Vungzagin with multiple grievous injuries and partial paralysis, and from whose injuries he ultimately succumbed in February 2026, KOHUR stated.

That a sitting elected legislator of the ruling party could be beaten nearly to death in the State capital, and that no special inquiry was ever instituted into the attack despite his own written appeal to the Prime Minister, lays bare the impunity these armed actors have enjoyed.

(iii) It stands accused of sexual violence against Kuki-Zo women, with Amnesty International documenting at least 32 incidents of gender-based violence attributed to its members since May 2023—including the 4 May 2023 incident in which Kuki-Zo women were paraded and assaulted—without a single member having faced prosecution.

(iv) It stands accused of the destruction of more than 200 churches, part of a broader anti-Christian campaign in which over 800 attacks on Christians in Manipur were documented in a single year. It also stands accused of looting arms and ammunition from State police armouries, a fact recorded by Human Rights Watch in its 2025 report.

(v) It stands accused of summoning the elected representatives of the State—37 MLAs and two Members of Parliament, including a Union Minister of State for External Affairs—to Kangla Fort on 24 January 2024, where, with the entry gate manned by its own foot soldiers rather than the Manipur Police, it compelled them to take an illegal oath and sign its demands in broad daylight, an act widely described as a hostile takeover of the State machinery and a direct assault on the Constitution of India.

(vi) It stands accused of manhandling and physically assaulting elected MLAs, including legislators of the ruling party and Opposition Congress members who refused to submit to its dictates, and of assaulting police personnel during the 2023 violence.

"When an organisation carries such a catalogue of crimes against the people and against the constitutional order itself, the duty of a Home Minister is to ensure the full force of the law falls upon it—not to broker an understanding with the police machinery to spare it from arrest," KOHUR said.

"To shield such an outfit while professing concern for the victims of terror is a contradiction so stark that it collapses the State's own moral and legal credibility," the release stated.

The human rights body stated that the injustice becomes starker still when set against the treatment of the Kuki-Zo community.

In cases arising from the killing of Meitei persons, more than fifty innocent Kuki-Zo civilians—including leaders of Kuki civil society organisations—were arbitrarily and indiscriminately arrested and have languished in jail for over two years.

Even after these detainees secured bail from the Gauhati High Court, the State machinery responded by filing fresh, multiple FIRs against them solely to return them to custody. In several cases, after bail was lawfully granted, the State Government invoked the National Security Act (NSA) for the sole purpose of putting them back behind bars.

While the accused cadres of an armed militia are protected by the Home Minister himself from arrest, innocent members of the Kuki-Zo community are hounded from one FIR to the next and detained without trial under preventive detention laws.

Such conduct is not law enforcement but selective persecution along ethnic lines. Such partiality and discrimination against the Kuki-Zo tribal community—practised by the State Government and acquiesced in by the investigating agencies—strike at the very heart of the equality guaranteed by Article 14 of the Constitution of India, violate the right to life and liberty under Article 21, and offend the most basic tenets of human rights to which this nation and the international community are committed, KOHUR added.

"One community's accused are shielded; another community's innocent are caged. No constitutional order can survive such a double standard," the release stated.

KOHUR therefore demands that the State Government immediately withdraw and disown the Home Minister's call to halt arrests of Arambai Tenggol; that no executive interference be permitted to obstruct the NIA, the police, or any agency from acting against every person and organisation accused of crime, irrespective of community; that the practice of re-arresting bailed Kuki-Zo detainees through fresh FIRs and successive NSA detentions cease forthwith, and that those wrongfully held be released; and that a single, equal standard of justice be applied to every community in Manipur.

KOHUR further stated that justice that is selective is not justice at all; peace cannot be built upon the protection of perpetrators and the persecution of the innocent; and the Kuki-Zo people will not accept it.