The Road Not Taken: Lamnunthem Singson's Final Journey and the Ruptured Cartographies of Manipur

The body of Lamnunthem Singson did not return to Imphal. It came home, but not through the state capital, its corridors of power and protocol. Instead, it crossed into Manipur through Nagaland’s Dimapur Airport, nearly 200 kilometres away from her family’s home in Kangpokpi. From there, it traced the winding roads of Nagaland and northern Manipur quietly and deliberately, bypassing the Valley and arriving far from the coordinates of official mourning.

Lamnunthem was a young Kuki flight attendant from a family once settled in the heart of Imphal’s Old Lambulane. She died in the skies above Ahmedabad, not long after takeoff. The ill-fated Air India Flight 171 she was serving in as cabin crew, suffered a catastrophic engine failure and plunged into a farmland outside the city. She had been filling in for a colleague who had fallen ill.

But in death, her journey home became something else: a commentary on the cartography of grief in a state where every movement is political, every route a negotiation with danger, memory, and distrust. “For those of us who have lost so much and still feel unsafe, why would we even consider going through Imphal?” asked Ngamlienlal Kipgen, Lamnunthem’s cousin. “This route may be our new normal, but it was anything but normal this time. People came together to honour my sister, bringing us so much comfort.”

The Manipur government had made arrangements to receive her at Imphal airport. A press release was issued, security was promised, and coordination was pledged. Civil society groups in the Valley called for a respectful welcome. The state was prepared for a ritual of closure. However, Lamnunthem’s family—displaced, disillusioned, and doubly exiled—chose another path, refusing both the ceremony and the route. It was a decision made in sorrow and a verdict on the state of affairs. A declaration that no matter what the official line may claim, safety and dignity do not lie in government guarantees— not in a city that once drove them out, or in a capital where the wounds of last year's violence are yet to scab.

By deciding to take a longer, more arduous, but safer route to bring her home, Lamnunthem's family transformed her last journey into a statement of principle, not out of fear, they claimed, but out of wisdom that distinction matters. It is not cowardice that avoids the Valley but rather the knowledge that peace here is skin-deep, brittle, held together by the presence of central forces, and unravelled by every incursion across the invisible lines now etched between communities.

The Afterlife of Exile

They say death ends a life, not a story. In Manipur, it doesn't even end the exile. When Lamnunthem's remains were transported through Dimapur airport, bypassing Imphal, it was not logistics but history that dictated the route. The family once lived in Old Lambulane, a neighbourhood in Imphal. They fled in May 2023, when mobs swept through mixed localities and turned homes into ashes and people into Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). Like thousands of others, her family relocated to Kangpokpi, living not just in a different place but in a different reality cut off from the Valley by geography, politics, and fear.

Imphal, in theory, is the capital of all communities in Manipur. In practice, it has become a city that many no longer claim. For the Kuki-Zomi tribal communities who once lived there, sent their children to its schools and worked in its offices, the city now exists on the other side of an invisible wall. Their churches, their most sacred spaces, were burned during the violence, compounding the loss of home into the erasure of spiritual sanctuary. “The Dimapur route has been the only route we’ve taken since our family was displaced,” Kipgen said. “It’s our new normal now.” It is not an emotional breakdown that Lamnunthem's family was unable to bring themselves to return there, even during their time of grief and after being reassured of their safety.

It signifies something more profound, which is losing a sense of identity and raises a concern that the other internally displaced people who, twenty-four months and one week after the violence started, are still residing in relief camps and elsewhere throughout the country in their makeshift homes. It is about the roads not taken every day, patients rerouting ambulances, students skipping exams, and traders losing markets because the line between the Valley and the Hills is no longer just a metaphor. It's a buffer zone with checkpoints, armoured vehicles, and arbitrary and exacting protocols. It is memory weaponised into geography.

The Architecture of the Divide

Manipur's buffer zones are neither depicted on any map nor included in government brochures. They are not recognised by the constitution. And yet, they exist unmistakably etched into the lives of its people, dictating who moves where, when, and if at all. In the aftermath of the 2023 ethnic violence, central security forces carved out informal corridors of separation. Army units, Assam Rifles, and paramilitary columns were stationed along what are now called “buffer zones”—thin strips of land between Meitei and Kuki-Zomi habitations, meant to hold back mobs, de-escalate gunfire, and maintain the peace that politics could not. But these zones have not held back grief or offered safety.

In September 2024, Limlal Mate, a 65-year-old retired havildar from the Assam Regiment, left his home in Kangpokpi and attempted to enter Imphal. He never returned. His body was later found in a field in Lairensajik, suspected to have been abducted and killed after inadvertently crossing into Meitei-held territory. His family never received his remains.

In theory, buffer zones are meant to prevent precisely this. In practice, they are fragmented, militarised, and challenging to enforce. Security personnel admit they are overstretched. Mobs frequently overwhelm posts, drones are used for surveillance and provocation, and identity cards have become separation instruments. In one instance, a Rapid Action Force officer recalled tear gas shells being thrown back at them by civilians—an inversion of control that undermines the very premise of law and order.

Yet, it is not just the terrain that is split. Legitimacy itself is fractured. Meitei civil society groups, including Meira Paibi collectives, have denounced buffer zones as unconstitutional, accusing Assam Rifles of bias and calling for their removal. On the other side, Kuki organisations insist on their enforcement, citing the failure of the Meitei-dominated state police to ensure their safety. Each community believes the other has captured the state, the security apparatus, and even the national narrative. It is in this climate, where the law has ceded logistics and governance to gridlock, Lamnunthem’s journey must be understood. Her family didn’t just reroute to avoid risk; they rerouted because the very infrastructure of movement has become ideological. For the Kuki-Zomi, crossing into Imphal is to re-enter a state they no longer trust to protect them.

The Borders of Mourning

According to the official account, Manipur was prepared to welcome Lamnunthem Singson. Civil society organizations like COCOMI called for a public gathering at Imphal airport to show solidarity in mourning, while the state government issued a press release promising full logistical support. They had prepared the reconciliation motions. But this script never saw completion. No aircraft landed in Imphal. There were no crowds. The body arrived at the Dimapur Airport in Nagaland, avoiding the capital and the spectacle. Here, there was no miscommunication. A breach of confidence occurred.

Kipgen, Lamnunthem’s cousin, described the moment they landed in Nagaland: “At Dimapur airport, hundreds from different communities came to receive us. Along the entire route from Nagaland to Manipur, people stood with candles in their hands. We could never have imagined that kind of reception. It brought our family so much comfort.”

On June 19, 2025, just hours before Lamnunthem's casket crossed into Manipur, the violence continued to write its own script. In Bishnupur district, a Meitei farmer, Ningthoujam Biren Singh, was shot while working in his paddy field, reportedly injured. Later that evening, during a cordon-and-search operation across the buffer zone, Hoikholhing Haokip, a Kuki woman and the wife of a local village chief, was found dead in the crossfire.

Each side responded in kind: accusations, protests, counter-statements. The Meitei community blamed armed Kuki groups for the attack on the farmers. The Kuki Women's Organisation for Human Rights held Valley-based armed groups responsible for Haokip's death, citing repeated violations of the buffer zone by Meitei militants. The border had claimed one life and wounded another, and still, no one could say who might be next.

This is the arithmetic of violence in Manipur now: symmetrical in suffering, asymmetrical in recognition. The buffer zones, meant to separate warring factions, have become contested spaces where accountability is diffused, and truth moves slowly, if at all. Mourning, too, is divided. There is no shared vocabulary of loss. No joint funerals, no gatherings that cross ethnic lines. A woman dies in Langchingmanbi, and Bishnupur erupts not to grieve with but to grieve against. Even compassion now travels within fault lines.

The state's attempt to turn Lamnunthem's return into a symbolic healing moment only sharpened the divide. Public statements presumed that the airport was still a neutral space and that the idea of Manipur was intact enough to mourn together. But that stage has long been dismantled. Yes, central security was offered. However, the family's calculation was not one of logistics but of legitimacy. Even with armed escorts, they could not entrust the rituals of mourning to a place that had erased their right to live.Their silence, detour, and absence from the performance amounted to something deeper than avoidance. It was refusal. Not loud, but lasting. A refusal to be folded back into a narrative they no longer recognised. A quiet insistence that their grief belonged to them and them alone.

The Long Road to Healing

In the Kangpokpi hills, not far from where Lamnunthem's family had rebuilt their lives after fleeing Imphal, Lamnunthem's journey came to an end. But there was more to her journey home. It showed the fault lines of a state split not only by ethnicity or geography but also by belief: faith in peace, faith in the safety of institutions, and faith in reciprocation. It quietly declared that Manipur remains at war with its own reflection, where peace is proclaimed on platforms but dissolved behind closed doors. The state has grown quieter but not calmer since the buffer zones were drawn. Fear has not diminished, but headlines have. The formal separation between the zones has not been resolved. Armed groups continue to function. Deaths among civilians are still occurring. In camps and cluster villages, children grow up with the next town feeling like a different country.

Against this backdrop, Lamnunthem's family made a choice that speaks louder than any press note. They chose the longer road because the shorter one, for them, no longer exists, neither in memory nor in trust. The state may frame this as an emotional decision made under duress. In truth, it is a mirror held to governance, infrastructure, and every promise unkept. Trust, once broken, is not restored by bulletins and escorts. It requires reckoning, not performance.

“Lamnunthem was the glue in our family,” Kipgen said. “She was bright, vivacious, and she supported her family as an only daughter. She had grit and a love for family that none of us can ever hope to match.”

And so, Lamnunthem did not return to Imphal. That road may open again one day, but only when the state learns to listen, not just to the loudest voices but to the silences of those who once believed in it and no longer do. Until then, every journey like hers will remain a passage and a protest, a quiet refusal and a reminder that healing, like justice, has no shortcuts.

Sangmuan Hangsing is a researcher and alumnus of the Kautilya School of Public Policy