When love crosses war line: Kuki man meets Meitei mom-in-law

Imphal: Three years of conflict, checkpoints, and fear — and yet, a son-in-law’s duty did not wait any longer.Anthony Naulak, a man from the Paite tribe of the Kuki-Zo community, walked into an Imphal home on Saturday and touched an elderly Meitei woman’s feet.

She is his mother-in-law. That simple act — ancient, instinctive, human — carried the weight of everything Manipur has lost since May 2023.For nearly three years, the valley and the hills have lived as two separate worlds — divided by fire, suspicion, and blood. Travel between Kuki-Zo-dominated hill districts and the Meitei-majority Imphal valley has been, for many, unthinkable. For Anthony, it was deeply personal.Married to a Meitei woman, he had watched the distance between him and her family grow — not out of broken love, but out of a broken state. On Saturday, freshly landed from Delhi, he chose her family first — before meetings, before press briefings, before politics.“I have been here since my childhood. I feel somewhat secure. I trust the people here,” he told reporters — words that sound ordinary until you hold them against the backdrop of nearly three years of ethnic violence.

But Anthony did not come only for family. He came armed with a larger mission — the plight of internally displaced persons rotting in relief camps, forgotten by policy, surviving on hope. He has filed PILs, moved the Supreme Court, appeared before the Justice Mittal Committee. Now he’s come to appeal directly to the new govt under chief minister Yumnam Khemchand Singh — to finally turn promises into action.“People are literally suffering. Those in relief camps, and those outside who receive even less support,” he said.His visit lands in a state still raw with grief. Just last month, a Meitei youth named Rishikanta was shot dead in Churachandpur while visiting his Kuki-Zo fiancée. His killers filmed it. The footage spread like a wound reopened.Inter-community couples in Manipur carry a conflict that was never theirs to start — and yet theirs to survive every single day.Anthony Naulak’s visit won’t end the war. He knows that. But in a state starved of symbols, a man crossing the valley to touch his mother-in-law’s feet — without security, without ceremony, without permission from fear — is not a small thing.It is, perhaps, the most honest ceasefire Manipur has seen in a long time.