While Kuki armed groups attack, abduct, and kill Naga civilians, Naga factions are killing Nagas.
Let that indictment burn into the conscience of every self-styled commander, chairman, president, and general. In the very hour when Naga villages in Noney and Tamenglong cry out for protection and justice against brutalization and murder by Kuki militias, Naga guns are turned inward — against Naga chests. This is not resistance. This is not revolution. This is self-cannibalization.
How did a national movement forged in the sacred Morung, consecrated by the blood of our ancestors, descend into a mafia war for turf?
Bloodshed that desecrates national alter
The facts are a national shame.
On August 28, 2026, at Puichi village in Noney district, armed cadres of ZUF-Jenchui and ZUF-Kamson turned their rifles on each other. Dingtiplung Gonmei, Chief Secretary of ZUF-Kamson, was shot dead. The next morning, August 29, at Khumji, a second ambush erupted — Jangailing Gonmei, 37, a ZUF-J cadre, was killed on the spot, six others wounded. In forty-eight hours, two Naga sons dead, six wounded — all by Naga hands.
This was not an aberration. In March, four NSCN-IM Eastern Flank cadres were gunned down in Hongbei in another fratricidal clash.
These are not statistics. These are Zeme killing Zeme. Rongmei killing Rongmei. Naga murdering Naga.
Is this the Naga national movement? Is this the meaning of Kuknalim? While our villages burn, you burn each other’s camps. While our people weep, you manufacture widows, orphans and broken hearths. While the enemy surrounds our ancestral domain, you fight for factional fiefdoms.
This is not leadership. It is collective suicide. It is the most profound betrayal a people can commit against itself — to finish the enemy’s work while the enemy watches and laughs.
The unasked question
You parade yourselves as commanders, chairmen, army chiefs, and national leaders. The Naga people now demand you answer with brutal honesty:
What are you, truly, but butchers dressed in camouflage? Men who summon courage only when the target speaks your own language? Predators who feed on your own kin because you lack the spine, the strategy, and the morality to confront the real threat to our people?
At what point does a national movement cease to be a movement for the people and become a criminal enterprise protecting its own extortion economy? At what point does a faction cease to be an army and become a mafia?
Where were you when Naga villages were torched? Where were you when Naga civilians were abducted, mutilated, and executed on the highways? Where were you when our people were subjected to inhuman acts that defy description? Where were you when mothers waited for hostages who never returned?
You were nowhere. You were hiding in the jungles, conserving bullets for your brothers.
But when a rival Naga faction enters what you call “your territory” — your tax belt, your influence zone — suddenly you discover your guns, your courage, your will to kill. And you spend it all on fellow Nagas.
What kind of leader orders the execution of his own soldier? What kind of Naga pulls the trigger on another Naga? What kind of protector buries the very people he claims to protect?
You are the reason Naga mothers now bury sons twice — once killed by the enemy, once killed by their own. You are the reason children grow up fatherless not because of war with outsiders, but because of war within. What will you tell those children when they ask, “Who killed my father?”
A house that devours itself
Scripture foresaw this precise self-destruction.
Galatians 5:15 thunders: “If you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another.”
We are being consumed.
Genesis began with fratricide — Cain murdering Abel. And God asked Cain, “Where is your brother?” Cain sneered, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Today, every Naga faction that kills a Naga must answer that same question before God and before the ancestors. You have not only failed to be your brother’s keeper — you have become your brother’s killer.
Leviticus 26:29 and Deuteronomy 28:53-57 warn that a besieged and disobedient people, having abandoned covenant and righteousness, will be reduced to eating the flesh of its own sons and daughters. That is not ancient history. That is Puichi. That is Khumji. That is Hongbei. You are politically, morally, and literally eating the future of the Naga Nation.
Mark 3:25 declares with finality: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” We are not standing. We are collapsing. Our enemies do not need to conquer us. They need only to be patient while we annihilate ourselves.
External aggression, internal treason
There are now two wars being waged against the Naga people, and both are lethal.
The first is external — Kuki armed groups attacking Naga civilians, abducting, burning, blocking our lifelines, seeking to erase our presence from our own ancestral lands in Manipur.
The second is internal — Naga factions attacking Naga factions, taxing Naga villagers into destitution, turning every Zeliangrong village into a battleground for factional supremacy.
External violence wounds the body. Internal violence destroys the soul. The first wounds the people; the second destroys the very society those factions claim to represent.
When Naga villagers in Tamenglong and Noney look for defenders against external attack, they find factions busy planning ambushes against each other. This is the definition of spinelessness. Spinelessness is not the inability to fight. Spinelessness is the possession of guns and the absence of moral spine to aim them at the real enemy, and instead aiming them at your own brother.
Naga polity and customary law forbids prostitution — and political prostitution as treason. What greater political prostitution exists than to wear the Naga national flag while murdering Nagas for personal power, money, and influence?
Final ultimatum
Enough is enough. The time for polite appeals is over.
We Nagas do not need endless factional warfare disguised as nationalism. We do not need leaders whose first loyalty is to their faction, not to the Naga people. We do not need guns that are pointed at Nagas in the name of protecting Nagas.
If the Naga cause is truly greater than any individual, any faction, any chairman, then prove it. Now. Unconditionally.
We demand:
1. An Immediate, Unconditional and Verifiable Cessation of All Fratricidal Violence. All Naga factions must cease fire against each other in Zeliangrong areas and across all Naga areas, effective immediately.
2. Accountability Through Customary Law, Not Factional Courts. Perpetrators of Puichi, Khumji, and Hongbei must be tried not by their own factions, but by a Zeliangrong customary court of elders, church leaders, and mothers — under Naga customary law.
3. A Unified Naga People’s Defence, Not Factional Extortion. Replace factional taxation and territorial claims with a single, people-mandated mechanism to protect Naga civilians in Manipur.
4. Naga People First — Above Faction, Above Territory, Above Ego. Common defence, common roads, common future.
Unite or perish. Fight together against our common threats, or continue fighting one another until there is nothing left to defend, no one left to lead, and no nation left to claim.
You are betraying the ancestors who laid down their lives for Naga unity. You are betraying the children who deserve a future free of fear. You are spitting on graves and mocking sacrifice. You are validating the vilest propaganda of our enemies — that Nagas cannot unite, cannot govern themselves, and cannot protect their own people.
Stop killing Nagas.
Stop before there is nothing left to kill.
Stop before you destroy everything your forefathers built with blood.
Stop before you destroy the very people you claim to represent.
Or history will not remember you as freedom fighters. History will remember you, accurately and mercilessly, as the generation that murdered its own people while the enemy watched.
That will be your legacy. That will be your shame. And that shame will never be erased.
Kuknalim.
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Michael Meiphami Shaiza is Co-incharge of BJP Manipur State Political Programmes and Meetings and President of Ukhrul-based NGO Ecological Rehabilitators’ Association (ERA).
(Views expressed are writers’ own and do not, in whatsoever manner, reflect that of Ukhrul Now)
