It was a routine Monday morning trip to the hills. Sixteen people from Nongshum village in Manipur’s Imphal East district set out around 7 a.m. to collect firewood near the district’s boundary with Kangpokpi. They walked into an ambush. Suspected militants opened fire at a spot called Khongbal Sunurok Uyok, killing two men where they stood and wounding four others. Three people are still missing.
The dead were named as Arubam Ronil, 35, and Lairenlakpam Inaobi, 51, both Meitei men, officials said. One of the injured, identified as Ksh Deven, is in critical condition at Raj Medicity hospital in Imphal. According to one account, the group was loading firewood when the assailants opened fire; villagers recovered the bodies themselves after the shooting stopped.
What followed was as dramatic as the attack. Angry locals carried the two bodies to the state capital and laid them outside the main gate of Chief Minister Yumnam Khemchand Singh’s bungalow in Babupara. Security personnel, taken by surprise by the arrival of the bodies, fired several rounds of tear gas to disperse the protesters. The bodies were then moved to the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Medical Sciences for post-mortem examination. It was not immediately known whether the chief minister was at the residence during the protest; he later visited Raj Medicity to meet the injured and the victims’ families.
For readers outside India: Manipur is a small state in the country’s far northeast, bordering Myanmar. Since May 2023 it has been torn by ethnic violence between the Meitei community, who form the majority in the Imphal valley, and the Kuki-Zo tribal groups who dominate the surrounding hill districts — a conflict rooted in disputes over land rights and affirmative-action quotas. Hundreds have been killed and tens of thousands displaced, and the state has spent long stretches under direct federal rule. The ambush site sits exactly on that fault line: Kangpokpi is a Kuki-majority hill district, Imphal East lies in the Meitei-majority valley.
The ambush was the third violent incident in as many days. On Sunday, at least 15 houses belonging to the Kuki community were torched in a hill village in Manipur’s Kamjong district, forcing civilians to flee into the forest and toward an Army camp; a Kuki civilian was killed and four others sustained bullet injuries, PTI reported. On Saturday night, three Tangkhul Naga civilians were injured when rival armed groups attacked a village at the Kamjong district headquarters.
That sequence — houses torched in Kamjong one day, firewood collectors shot the next — is why this story matters beyond India’s northeast. Manipur sits on India’s eastern gateway to Southeast Asia, in a region of porous borders where armed groups move with relative ease. Every retaliatory killing hardens the ethnic divide and pushes a political settlement further away, and the image of two bodies laid at a chief minister’s gate is its own verdict on how much control the state government is seen to have. Until the cycle of reprisal attacks is broken, trips for firewood in Manipur’s border villages will remain journeys into a war zone.
