Rinmayo Rainam
MA, Tetso College
Living far from Manipur, I grew up hearing distant reports of the 2023 Meitei–Kuki violence, yet it never pierced my daily life. As a political-science student whose academic interest is gender, conflict & peace, and politics, I had always examined conflict through theory rather than lived experience through the cool language of power-sharing frameworks and constitutional provisions. The deepening divide filled me with anxiety not only for the human cost, but for the fragile hope that women’s peacebuilding can still prevail against the momentum of ethnic war.
Across a valley fractured by ethnicity and fire, two communities of women Meitei and Tangkhul have stood in the streets in their traditional dress, sticks in hand, beaten and unbowed, daring the violence to consume them too. It has not and in that refusal lies the seed of peace.
As dawn broke over Imphal in May 2023 and smoke rose from the first burning villages, the Meitei women in their phanek mayek they did not wait for permission they came out. Days later, in the hill districts of Ukhrul, Tangkhul Naga women gathered at church compounds and village entry points, draped in their own shawls and traditional weaves, forming human shields between their homes and the widening catastrophe below. Two communities, separated by ethnicity, altitude, and generations of political grievance united by the same impossible, indispensable act of standing firm.
Meitei Women: The Torchbearers Hold the Line
The Meira Paibi the Torchbearers of Women of Manipur have not come into being due to the 2023 crisis. They have been demonstrating with flaming torches against army follies and The Armed Forces Special Powers Act, in force since the 1980s, has become so deeply ingrained in Manipur that it is as much a part of everyday life as the temples in Imphal. But May 2023 summoned them to other service.
The photographs of the first weeks of the violence depict groups of Meitei women at the crossroads and the boundaries of villages, grandmothers in spectacles, young mothers with infants in their arms had gone home standing in their phanek mayek, cotton blouses, holding bamboo sticks in their hands. They were intercepting military convoys which they thought were moving too slowly towards incinerated neighbourhoods. They were patrolling the outskirts of the localities in such a way that young men could not be kidnapped in the dark. They were fighting armed formations in their very own streets, and demanded names, they demanded that their sons returned.
Many paid a price. Human rights reports of 2023 and 2024 document incidences around Bishnupur, Churachandpur and the environs of Imphal where women demonstrators were shoved, baton hit and arrested by security agencies in tense standoffs. At least in one highly publicized incident, the elderly members of the Meira Paibi, who tried to enter a detention center to inquire about the arrested youth, were beaten with rifle butts. The next morning they had come back.
The presence of these women was meant to send a moral message and hold actors accountable, and their use of traditional attire (phanek) was a conscious symbolic act to express identity, resistance, and legitimacy. The phanek is a sacred burden of the Meitei culture with its woven patterns, which define the community, occasion and womanhood. Wearing it in the street, during curfew, in front of armed men is an assertion of the totality of one cultural identity as a declaration of resistance. It says: this is my name, and thou shalt not take out of this land my name.
Tangkhul Women: Holding the Hills
In the Naga hill districts, especially the Ukhrul the stronghold of the Tangkhul Naga people women organised themselves in a new note yet with equal vigour. Tangkhul Shanao Long and church based women society proved to be first responders not just to the physical crisis but also to the psychological crisis.
Tangkhul women, most of whom wore their own unique textile of handwoven shawls, laden with cultural identity as any Meitei phanek had ever been in the church compounds and in community halls which served to shelter people who had been displaced in the valley fighting. They organized food, medical services and reporting of violations. They were on guard outside houses in which they suspected young men might be enlisted into armed groups. When rumors of coming militias reached the hills they broke human chains at the entrance roads of the villages.
A few Tangkhul women leaders tried something even more challenging: cross-community contact. Operating via church networks and unofficial pressures, Ukhrul women contacted their counterparts in Imphal Valley discovering in many cases that Meitei women were also doing so. These ties did not feature in the news. They were silent, threatening and critical.
There were those who were very costly in their visibility. Some women are described being harassed at the checkpoints as they move between districts by the civil society monitors who accuse them of carrying messages on behalf of the other side. This charge was not quite false. They were transporting something, however, not intelligence, but the obstinate unwillingness to realize that women of Manipur were not sisters, but sisters in arms.
What Their Courage Means for Peace
The presence of these women in this scholarship of conflict and peacebuilding subsector has a name: organic peacebuilders individuals who, outside of mandate or institution, act to curb additional violence and hold the connective tissue of a strained society together.. Studies have always indicated that during post-conflict transitions, the agreement is longer-lasting and fairer when women are not used as symbols, but as architects. The women of Manipur have been working in the architectural work since three years. No one has offered them a seat at the table.
The lack is a political failure that has a practical implication. Meitei and Tangkhul women have already shown through their informal cross-ethnic humanitarian networks, through their village-wide truces, through the record of negotiations with armed factions over the treatment of civilians, that they do have precisely the relationships and moral authority required to give a peace process. It is not only unfair to exclude them in the formal dialogue. It is highly irresponsible.
The Long Road Forward
In 2026, Manipur is a state that is glued together by weariness and the work of its women that goes unnoticed. Political solution is far-off. The militia groups have not been deterred. The exiled have not returned home. In the interstices of this dismantled landscape, however, something is slowly being built up by women who know, perhaps better than anyone, that peace is not the lack of war but the everyday life-threatening human decision to maintain the door open.
All the Meitei women who stood in her phanek at a burning checkpoint and refused to travel have put a stone in that foundation. Each Tangkhul woman who passed a hill-blockade to carry food to a displaced family on the opposite side has laid another. They were whipped, and they came back. They were neglected, and they went on. The only real peace infrastructure that Manipur has at the moment is what they have constructed, without much hype or official acknowledgement.
To have any lasting solution sink into this divided valley, the governments of Imphal and New Delhi need to do what they have so far not done: to take these women into the room. Not as decoration. Not as mourning emblems. As negotiationists, as architects of the community, as the individuals who have done the work which peace demands, at such a great personal sacrifice, in three years. Their courage has been the catalyst. Now it must be allowed to become the compass.
