Dear Davids

Amidst this ongoing conflict in Manipur, there is one name that stands apart from the rest which has now become a rallying cry. Not because the other names are not as important, forgotten or because the horrors inflicted upon them are any less but because in the sea of multi-syllable, tribe specific names of those slain by the Meiteis, this name stands out with its simplicity, its ease of recall and because the name cuts across tribe lines, is ubiquitous across the kindred Kuki-Zo tribes and is a name both Jews and Christians in the community hold in high regard.            

The name is David.         

Langza, the place where David hailed from is a small farming village, located about 33 kilometers to the east of the heart of Lamka town with many hillocks separating them. Its isolation and proximity to Meitei dominated areas had made it very vulnerable. Most residents of the village had already sought shelter in relief camps and villages closer to the main town leaving only a few sparsely armed volunteers to look after the village. Before sunrise on the 2nd of July, 2023, a Sunday, two months after the start of the ethnic conflict, Meitei militants under the cover of darkness that mirrored their evil intention attacked and burned down the entire village including three churches. David Thiek, a 31 year old village youth who was one of the few volunteers keeping watch over the village was caught alive by the Meiteis who then proceeded to torture him by first gouging out his right eye, then both his arms one after the other while he was still alive. They then beheaded him and burnt whatever remained of his body. Volunteers who went to the village with security forces after the Meiteis had left found his decapitated head hanging on a bamboo fence and recovered some bone fragments from a pile of ash where his mutilated body had been burnt.            

David was the older of two siblings. His mother died when he was six. He was working in the hospitality sector in Mumbai but he returned home after the pandemic in 2020 to take care of his disabled father. His horrific murder poured oil on a burning fire, re-igniting the passions of an already incensed community. The slogan ‘We Are David’ became a new rallying call. Many social media warriors on X (Twitter) took his name; t-shirts with the slogan were printed and worn by many as a symbol of unity and resistance; posters were put up all over town. The brutality of his murder once again reminded a nation of the bestiality of the Meiteis; the manner in which his blood was spilled boiled his brethren’s blood.    

That was on the 2nd day of July. Almost four months have again passed since, and almost half a year since the conflict was imposed upon us on the 3rd of May 2023. Most of our deaths came in those initial days when our people were hunted and slaughtered in the streets of Imphal and in the peripheral areas, all of them brutal beyond imagining. We all felt the horror, and we responded with tribal might. We all came together, stepping over our past differences, shaken out of our clannist identities, now bonded by the grief that we shared and a common enemy of godless militants out seeking our complete annihilation. Like our forefathers of old, we drew our lines and mustered our forces, their ghosts whispering to us tales of valor and promises of battlefield glory. With but God on our side and everything else on the side of the enemy, we took on the might of a state. We dug deep into our pockets and matched ten of their barrels with one of ours, held by a man worth ten of them. We countered them wherever the battlefield was – on the frontlines back at home where we exchanged bullets and traded casualties and in cyberspace where our diaspora, free of the stifling internet ban at home, rose to the occasion and fought lies with truth, taking our cause international.          

But as the days, weeks and months passed, with our frontlines having some semblance of order, giving us the feeling of safety behind those lines and with attacks coming fewer and further in between, and in light of the inescapable fact that in order to sustain a war that shows no signs of a resolution six months in, we started coming out of the cocoon of war and restored some semblance of normalcy. Because if there is one thing that history has taught us it is this – our forefathers did not lose the fight against the British Empire for lack of bravery or might but for lack of sustenance. Hence we restarted our own economy. Activities that had been put to a grinding halt by the war slowly came back to life. Our deserted streets once again brimmed with life and our settlements that bore the silence of a nation in mourning and in war started fitting into the old pre-war clothes.      

Fitting in too well, in fact. We have taken to the new normalcy a little too enthusiastically. Some have forgotten that we are still at war. We have falsely equated a required normalcy with peace. We are getting too comfortable with the situation when we should still be very uncomfortable as the war is far from over. We should be squirming in our seats, on our beds, thinking about the violence and false vilification that has been inflicted upon our community, upon our people. In the valley, our enemy still bays for our blood. Not a day passes when those in the valley do not think about ways to break us; no time between sunrise to sunset and sunset to sunrise that they don’t utilize for considering plans to end this war on their terms. They still train, radicalize and arm their people for war and churn the wheels of state machinery to their leverage whilst our memory of May 3rd, its following days, of July the 2nd, seems to have faded in the cacophony of our manufactured normalcy. We seem to have lulled ourselves into a false sense of comfort, learning to live with the war rather than actually trying to win it.        

Remember your childhood, those glorious peaceful times before all this war when you didn’t have a worry and the world was much simpler? We owe that kind of future to our children, the ones in our homes and the ones displaced, having a ghost of a life in relief camps. The outcome of this war will decide what kind of memories they will have looking forward. We cannot erase this nightmare from their memory, but we can fight so that they will never have to face this kind of ethnic-cleansing again, in a land rightfully ours without any pretender having the guts to spin false narratives to grab it from us, a land where they can grow up and grow old in peace. If we can present our next generations that peace for their future by fighting with all our might now, isn’t that a fight worth fighting with all our might, attention, resources and will to the end? They caught us sleeping on the 3rd of May. We were rudely woken up to the war that was waged upon our very existence by a community of deceitful, dishonorable and now world-known disreputable people who feed on lies. Let us not fall asleep again. Now that we’ve been awaken, let us keep up the spirit and be at full alert. Let’s not rest on what we have done so far because the fight isn’t over. The enemy is waiting and hoping for us to grow weary, or to give up, or to break apart inside. Let us resolve to turn their hopes into their nightmares. Let us make them regret the day they picked on us. They stated the war. Let us resolve to end it on our terms and not give up or grow weary till our future is secured.   

News cycle is short. People’s memory and attention to such things are usually short-lived. We gained the nation and world’s attention when a video of our women went viral. That news cycle has long passed. North India faced a huge monsoon catastrophe recently. That news cycle too has passed. Who remembers that the Ukraine war is still going on? Now the attention of both the nation and the world is on Israel. We can forgive the outside world for having a short memory about a civil war going on in a little known corner of India and going about with their lives but we cannot afford ourselves the same forgiveness. You and I, people from the Kuki-Zo community directly affected by these events cannot let a passing day take down with its setting sun the gravity of the pain and anger felt on the 3rd of May. We cannot let it dilute the sense of unity and brotherhood that gave us a common purpose, a shared cause, not while the threat still exists and our demand for a separate administration remains ignored and unfulfilled. We cannot afford to let our memories dim while our people still remain unburied and thousands remain in relief camps with no place to return to and call a home. We fight for something only for as long as we care about it. And we can care only if we remember and keep it in our hearts daily. Remember David. Remember LS Mangboi Lhungdim who gifted us with a song of unity, now baptized in his blood.               

Remember the hundreds dead, the homes, lands and livelihood lost. Remember the pain. Remember the anger. Remember the brotherhood. Remember the Cause.     

I am David. You are David. We are David. Remember why we remember. As long as we do not lose sight of who and what we’re fighting for and what is at stake, we’re in the fight. If we lose sight of that, we’ve already lost even though the war is still upon us.