The ten Kuki MLAs are gambling with their lives and their political futures while the house burns around them. UKNA, an armed group, has publicly sentenced them to death for even considering joining the government. The Kuki Inpi has forbidden it. The KNO-UPF have branded it betrayal.
Yet eight of the ten still refuse to sign a simple, collective declaration rejecting ministerial berths.Why this deadly hesitation? Because power is a stronger drug than fear.
Insiders whisper that at least two are already being sounded out for full cabinet berths—not minor portfolios—in the proposed “popular ministry”. Six months in power, even five, is enough to pump central funds into their constituencies, hand out contracts, and blunt anti-incumbency before the next election.
Valley BJP MLAs facing the same voter anger are thinking exactly the same way: grab the berth now, survive later.The calculation is cold: once a Kuki MLA swears in as minister, the same CSOs and armed groups issuing blood-curdling threats today will fall silent tomorrow.
Power commands obedience. Threats evaporate when the man with the red beacon arrives in a bullet-proof convoy. Diktats are only for the powerless.That is why not all ten bothered to attend the Guwahati meeting that produced the feeble “clarification” of 17 November. The absences were deliberate. A divided house is already forming—some ready to defy death threats for a taste of power, others terrified of both Imphal and the hills.
Meanwhile, ordinary Kuki citizens are being sold a cruel illusion: that these ten leaders are fighting for Separate Administration while secretly negotiating their own return tickets to the Manipur Assembly.
People do not want press releases managed by two conveners. They want their own elected representatives to speak with their own mouths and stand with their own necks on the line.A functioning, inclusive “popular government” is the only mechanism left that can unlock rehabilitation packages, release central funds, reopen blocked roads, and force the bureaucracy to move a single file for the displaced. Empty Assembly benches and endless boycotts deliver nothing except another night of hunger in the camps.
If the ten of you once found the unity to jointly demand President’s Rule—knowing full well it would collapse the very government you now eye—then you can surely find the elementary courage and transparency to sign a one-page declaration today stating you will take no part in any ministry under the present dispensation.
Governments in Manipur will be formed with or without you; the valley numbers are already sufficient. Your only real leverage, your only lifeline to face the voters again, is the moral credibility that comes from rejecting power now in exchange for funds, projects, and visible development later.
Without that stance, most of you will be swept away in the next election—either by fresh faces backed by Delhi or by the fury of a people betrayed twice over.The hard truth no one dares print: your fate is bleak either way.
Join the government and CSO may boycott you. Stay out without a united, public stand and Delhi will simply import new candidates, and you will still lose your seats.
There is only one act left that can still salvage honour and perhaps safety: a joint, signed, public declaration by all ten—today—that you reject any role in the present Manipur government and stand fully with the Kuki Inpi directive.
Anything less is a confession that personal ambition outweighs both the lives already lost and the lives now explicitly threatened.Issue the joint declaration today—all ten signatures—and you prove you stand with the displaced and the demand for Separate Administration.
The ordinary displaced mother in a relief camp—whether in Imphal or Churachandpur—does not need another press clarification issued by two conveners. She needs her MLA inside the Assembly, fighting for her ration card, her child’s school, her road home. But she also needs to know her MLA has not sold her cause for a red-beacon car.
Leadership is not measured by who shouts the loudest boycott; it is measured by who has the courage to take a clear, united stand when death threats and cabinet berths are both on the table.
The threat is real. The camps are real. The hunger is real.The clock is not just ticking. It is loaded.Sign the declaration—or keep negotiating in the dark!
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