Three years ago, on May 5, 2023, Sis Nianghoihching and Nu Kimmalsawm stepped forward with nothing but courage in their hearts and their arms linked in peace, demanding nothing more than equality for their people. They were shot dead.
One was a devoted mother, carrying the weight of family on her shoulders yet choosing to step forward when her people needed her most. The other was a nurse who spent her days healing others, even sheltering and personally escorting colleagues from another community to safety in the darkest of times. These were not women of violence. These were women of extraordinary love and conscience.
On that evening they stood together in a peaceful human chain, unarmed and without threat, asking only that their people be given the same safe passage being extended to others. They did not come to hurt anyone. They came to be heard.
What makes their deaths even more painful and impossible to reconcile is this: in Imphal, armed mobs had dragged Kuki-Zo people out of their vehicles, attacking them in broad daylight, and yet the security forces did not fire a single shot to stop them. But here, on that same soil, a group of unarmed civilians mostly women, forming a peaceful human chain and asking for nothing more than equal treatment, were met with live bullets. The weapons were on the other side. The bullets fell on the unarmed.
That is not a tragedy of circumstance. That is a failure that demands accountability.
In their final moments, Nu Kimmalsawm and Sis Nianghoihching were not running away. They were standing tall, arms outstretched, hearts full of a love for their community that was greater than their fear. That is who they were. That is how they will always be remembered.
Three years have passed. The grief has not. But neither has the gratitude, deep, unending and sacred, of a community that knows what these two women gave so that others could go home safely.
Nu Kimmalsawm. Sis Nianghoihching. You are not forgotten. You never will be.
Source: Manmasi
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