Two-and-half years into Manipur’s ethnic conflict, a new word has entered in everyday speech with surprising ease: Kukiland. It appears on protest banners, in political speeches, in hurried social media posts. It is offered as an answer to trauma, a shield against humiliation, a promise that after all the burning and displacement, there will be a place that is finally “ours”.
But once the heat of the slogan fades, a more stubborn question remains: where, exactly, is Kukiland supposed to be? Not on a banner. Not in a memorandum. On a real map, with real neighbours.
In present Manipur, borders do not begin with ink on a surveyor’s sheet. They begin with the road someone no longer dares to take, the village a friend quietly tells you to avoid, the pause that now sits in a conversation that used to be easy. The hills and valleys speak through these small hesitations. If one listens carefully, each direction answers the Kukiland question in the same way: this land is already lived in, already remembered, already claimed by Nagas, by Zomis, by Meiteis, and by Kukis themselves.
Also Read: Manipur Unfinished Crisis: A Ticking Time Bomb Beneath Suppressed Silence
Seen from this angle, Kukiland starts to look less like a workable homeland and more like a contradiction: an exclusive claim laid over a geography that was never empty, never singular, and never waiting to be renamed. What we are left with is not a clear destination, but a paradox, a homeland imagined on top of other people’s homes, a place that exists most fiercely where it cannot honestly be drawn.
The Valley: A Capital Turbed Into a Distant Country
The Imphal Valley used to mean routine rather than drama to Kukis. It was where they once went for college admissions, hospital appointments, government offices, and wholesale markets. Imphal was not always welcoming, but it was still the place where papers were signed, salaries were processed, and futures were imagined. It was the capital in the simplest sense: the place life eventually led back to. That time is over.
Since May 3, 2023, whole localities that once held Kuki homes have been emptied out and refilled. Streets where neighbours shared water taps and school runs are now patrolled and claimed by formations, such as the Arambai Tenggol and other Meitei organisations, who see the absence of Kukis not as a wound but as the new normal. What began as a temporary flight has solidified into a quiet, long-term exile. The longer the silence around return continues, the more it feels less like an interruption and more like a verdict.
Also Read: Manipur at the Crossroads: Water, Culture and the Science of a Fish-Eating State
Today, when Kuki survivors speak of Imphal, it is in the past tense. “We used to live there.” “Our children went to school there.” “We don’t know what happened to the house.” The city that once anchored their everyday lives has slipped into the category of foreign capitals, places they once knew intimately but can no longer enter without fear. The idea of sharing the same administrative space with the Meiteis has thinned out, replaced by a dull recognition: that door is shut.
This is one of the deepest currents pushing the demand for Kukiland. It is, in part, a way of saying: if the capital is no longer ours, we will imagine another centre. But that logic also reveals something uncomfortable that often goes unsaid: any realistic version of Kukiland, as it is now imagined, cannot include the Valley at all.
In Kuki’s mind, Imphal has already been written off as a loss rather than a negotiating chip. Kukis used to associate regularity rather than drama with the Imphal Valley. The proposed homeland begins from a hollowed-out middle, a map whose original centre has been mentally cut away. It is a project built from absence rather than presence, a future sketched on the edge of a capital that has turned into a distant country.
The Northern Hills: One Land, Many Maps
If the Valley has turned into a distant country, the northern hills, Tamenglong, Senapati, Kangpokpi, Ukhrul, present a different kind of problem. Here, the issue is not a vacuum but a crowding of claims. The same slopes, rivers, and ridgelines are asked to carry too many futures at once: a contiguous Nagalim for Nagas, a protective Kukiland for Kukis, and beneath both, the ordinary geography of villages that never moved.
The Naga–Kuki clashes of the 1990s did not end the story; they merely pressed pause. The old resentments lived on in memory, in how people spoke of “their” land and “our” dead. After 2023, it did not take much for those embers to glow again. Liangmai organisations accused Kuki groups of “unprovoked” attacks. Elderly men were reportedly abducted near Kangpokpi. Houses were burnt in Kamjong. Each incident revived a familiar fear that the region could slide back into the cycles of intimidation and reprisal that marked the earlier decade.
Also Read: HIV/AIDS in UKhrul: The Role of Public Health
Running through all this is the unresolved question of Kangpokpi. When the district was carved out in 2016, Nagas saw it not as routine reorganisation but as a deep political slight. Land they regarded as ancestral was folded into a district where their presence became numerically and administratively thinner. Agreements that the area would not be separated without Naga consent were ignored. On paper, it was a change of jurisdiction. On the ground, it felt like being written out. The map not only redraws boundaries; it rearranges dignity.
For displaced Kukis, these hills now look like a narrow corridor of survival, the only way to breathe with the Valley shut and the south overcrowded. For many Nagas, the same movement reads as deliberate encroachment layered over an earlier injustice. A new Kuki village is not just a cluster of houses; it is interpreted as a marker on an advancing front. In such a charged terrain, even a footpath cut through a forest can be read as a political line.
To speak of an exclusive Kukiland here is, therefore, to ask for more than safety. It is to ask that land already embedded with Naga memory and grievance be rebranded as somebody else’s homeland. It turns living neighbours into shadows on their own hills. A claim that pretends the north is open space waiting to be named does not merely misread the map; it erases the people who have never left it.
The Southern Shelter: When Refuge Turns Heavy
If the north is contested and the Valley is closed, the southern district of Churachandpur, Lamka in everyday speech, appears, at first glance, to be the most natural Kuki stronghold. On the map, it looks like the one remaining place where Kuki numbers, churches, and councils converge into a kind of rear base. On the ground, the story is more fragile.
When the violence began, Zomi communities in Lamka did what they had done in earlier crises: they opened church halls, school buildings, and public spaces to tens of thousands of fleeing Kukis. Families slept on classroom floors. Kitchens were improvised in courtyards. Pastors and volunteers moved quietly between camps. For a while, it felt like an echo of the 1990s, when Zomis had sheltered Kukis escaping Naga aggression. The message was simple: despite everything, kinship still held.
Hospitality, however, is not the same as surrendering your town. Over time, the weight of prolonged displacement began to press on local nerves. Everything simmering beneath the surface broke through on December 18, 2023, when Kuki mobs struck Zomi localities in the heart of Lamka, exposing the strain in one sharp moment. Zomi neighbourhoods watched as processions pushed through their streets, properties were damaged, and slogans cast their hesitation as disloyalty. Beneath that single day lay a much longer archive of unease: the 1997 Kuki–Zomi conflict that left deep scars, the renaming of Tuibuang as Tuibong, the eviction of Zomi government employees from Kuki-dominated areas, and the persistent sense that decisions were increasingly dictated by armed actors who did not answer to everyone.
Today, two truths sit side by side and grind against each other. For many Kukis, Lamka is the last piece of solid ground left in Manipur, the only place where they feel they can walk without constantly looking over their shoulder. For many Zomis, the same town feels as if it is slipping away in slow motion—not emptied overnight like Imphal was for the Kukis, but altered, overshadowed, and increasingly defined by someone else’s crisis and command.
Relief has hardened into quiet resentment; hospitality has thinned into guarded courtesy. And in this charged atmosphere, even small gestures acquire the weight of provocation. The recent appearance of Kukiland scrawled across fences and compound walls in the Zomi heartland of Lamka is read not as a harmless slogan but as a warning, a ticking time bomb of territorial assertion in a place that was never surrendered.
To sketch an exclusive Kukiland here is not a neutral act. It is to take a town that Zomis still experience as their centre and rename it as the heart of someone else’s homeland. It turns a temporary sanctuary into a permanent claim. Such a project would not merely rearrange administrative lines on a map; it would shift the moral centre of Lamka without the consent of those who have long called it home. In doing so, it repeats the very pattern Kukiland claims to resist: building one community’s safety on top of another community’s erasure.
Kukiland as Emotionally Geography
None of this is to belittle Kuki’s suffering. If anything, the impulse behind Kukiland begins from a place of raw hurt. When a community has watched its neighbourhoods burn, its capital turn into enemy ground, and its people shuttled between relief camps with no clear future, the instinct to imagine a land of one’s own is deeply human. In that sense, Kukiland is less a policy demand than a form of self-defence: a place in the mind where there is finally a line no one can push you beyond, a promise that there will be some patch of earth where you are not hunted, misnamed or treated as expendable.
The trouble begins when that emotional geography is laid over the actual map. The terrain that is being spoken of as Kukiland is not an empty canvas waiting for a new name; it is already dense with other people’s histories and anxieties. The northern hills carry Naga memories of dispossession and misrepresentation, sharpened by the way districts like Kangpokpi were carved without their consent. The southern town of Lamka holds generations of Zomi life, now overlaid with a growing fear of being demographically and politically edged out in a place they still regard as their own centre. The Valley, once shared in complicated ways, is now mentally written off in Kuki conversations as a lost capital, a place that exists only as a wound that cannot be reopened.
A homeland imagined on such ground is not built on a stable foundation; it is built on flight. It is mapped not with neighbours but against them. That is the core of the paradox: the more Kukiland is conceived as a sealed, exclusive territory, the less solid the ground beneath it becomes. The very landscapes being claimed are also home, historically, emotionally, and politically, to other communities who have not gone anywhere and have no intention of disappearing to make way for someone else’s refuge.
Ask, then, where Kukiland is supposed to be. On paper, it appears as a future state or Union Territory carved out of Manipur’s hill districts. In practice, every stretch of that land is already thick with other names and meanings: ancestral Naga country in the north; long-inhabited Zomi neighbourhoods and churches in the south; roads and trade routes that Meiteis, too, have depended on, traversed and fought over. To take this mosaic and call it Kukiland is not just a bold demand; it is a contradictory one, because it assumes exclusivity in a region where exclusivity has never been the reality.
To press that claim is, inevitably, to invite trouble from all three sides at once. For Nagas, any expansion of Kuki territorial imagination deepens the old grievance that their land is being gradually written over, especially around places like Kangpokpi and the frontier subdivisions. For Zomis, the sight of Kukiland slogans on walls and fences in Lamka does not read as a cry of pain alone, but as a signal that their town might be recast as someone else’s heartland while they are still standing in it. For Meiteis, the insistence on Kukiland confirms the fear that the horizon has shifted from coexistence to permanent separation, hardening the divide that already tore the Valley and the hills apart in 2023.
In a land as densely inhabited, in memory as much as in bodies, as Manipur, no territory can be repackaged into a single community’s sanctuary without deepening every existing crack. Kukiland, looked at honestly, is not a blank space waiting to be coloured in. It is a contradictory land, already settled, already narrated, already saturated with the grief and claims of Nagas, Zomis, Meiteis and Kukis alike. To insist that it belongs exclusively to one people is not just unrealistic. It risks turning a wounded community’s longing for safety into the spark for the next round of unrest, a dream of protection that could, if pursued without heed to neighbours, pull the whole region back towards the edge.
Beyond the False Exit Door
So what, then, is left to imagine? If we set aside the slogans and look squarely at the land, Kukiland in its current form is not an escape route from the conflict; it is a false exit door. It gives the comfort of believing that safety lies in sealing oneself away, in drawing a line that keeps trouble on the other side. But Manipur’s geography has never obeyed such clean divisions. Every ridge is another community’s foothold. Every valley carries overlapping memories. Every path eventually leads to someone you cannot simply write out.
No durable future can be built on the fantasy of ethnic fortresses. The work ahead is harder, slower, and far less glamorous. It demands confronting old administrative wounds like the creation of Kangpokpi; acknowledging the Zomi unease in Lamka; recognising Naga fears of erasure; and ensuring that displaced Kukis are not left to languish as permanent refugees in their own state. It requires institutions that protect communities without isolating them, and political arrangements where rights are not traded like concessions but shared as necessities.
The real question, then, is not “Where is Kukiland?” but something more honest and more urgent: What kind of Manipur can allow all its people — Kuki, Naga, Zomi, Meitei to live without fear?
Until the state begins to answer that, Kukiland will remain what it has always been: not a location, but a wound; not a homeland, but a longing; not a map, but a metaphor born of a community’s deepest hurt. And metaphors, no matter how powerful, cannot replace the hard labour of justice.
In Manipur, no one has the luxury of imagining a future that excludes their neighbours. The hills and valleys simply do not permit it. The only way forward is not to search for a land that never existed, but to remake the one that always has.
(The views expressed are that of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Ukhrul Times. Ukhrul Times values and encourages diverse perspectives. The author can be reached at korenlenchung@gmail.com