A Viral Claim, A Divided Reality: What Really Happened in Manipur?

It begins, as so many dangerous things do, with a post that makes your heart stop. A message began circulating across social media, carrying a photograph and a story that seemed to demand immediate outrage. The Indian Army, the claim said, had shot two women dead in Manipur and then set their houses on fire. Not only that, the post insisted, the act had been carried out on the direct orders of Lieutenant General V. M. Bhuvana Krishnan, the Commander of the Eastern Command. The implication was staggering: not just a tragic accident, but a deliberate, sanctioned act of violence by the highest military authority in the region. The post, shared by an account named Anushi Tiwari, used emphatic language and emojis, warning that the situation in Manipur had seriously deteriorated because of this supposed military atrocity. It was the kind of message that travels fast, because it confirms the worst fears people already hold about a conflict-ridden region. It invites anger, it demands justice, and it leaves no room for nuance. And because it arrived with images, because it used the names of real places and real commanders, it looked disturbingly plausible. The trouble is, almost none of it was true. A careful, detailed investigation has shown that the viral claim is false and deeply misleading. It took two separate, already tragic incidents that occurred on the same day in different districts of Manipur—September 15—and stitched them together into a single fiction designed to blame the Indian Army for violence it did not commit. To understand how this happened, and why it matters, we have to separate the threads that the viral post so carelessly and deliberately tangled.

The viral claim itself was a masterclass in the kind of misinformation that thrives in times of ethnic tension and political turmoil. The post did not simply report an incident; it framed it as a command decision, a cold-blooded execution ordered from the top. The account behind it used the official handle of the Manipur Police in the post, as if to lend the claim institutional authority, and pointed directly at the Eastern Command and its commander by name. The message read, in effect, that on the orders of the Indian Army’s Eastern Command chief, two women had been killed and their homes set ablaze, and that as a result the entire state was spiraling into crisis. It was designed to inflame. It was designed to be shared. And it was. People who saw it reacted with horror and anger. Some called for accountability. Others demanded an international investigation. A few, perhaps more cautious, asked for proof, but in the echo chamber of social media, caution is often drowned out by certainty. The post played into a narrative that has been building for months, maybe years, in Manipur—the idea that security forces are not neutral protectors but active participants in the violence, carrying out orders from above to destroy communities. That narrative has real power. It has been used to justify everything from protests to armed resistance. And when a message arrives that seems to confirm it, complete with visuals of burning houses and a named military officer, the reflexive response is to believe, to share, to grieve, and to rage. But the facts, as they emerged through rigorous fact-checking, tell a completely different story. They tell of a day when two separate tragedies unfolded in two separate places, when unidentified gunmen killed two women in one village, and when a different, frightening attack on another village led to an exchange of gunfire and a fire that destroyed houses. And nowhere in any of those events was there credible evidence of Indian Army soldiers shooting women or burning their homes. The only thing connecting the two incidents, it seems, was the date on the calendar and the willingness of someone to exploit grief for propaganda.

Let us look, then, at the first of those incidents, because behind every line of a fact-check there are real people whose lives were shattered. On the morning or afternoon of September 15, in the quiet, vulnerable village of Leisangphai in Tamenglong district, two Kuki women were shot dead. They were not killed by soldiers in uniform, according to every credible report that has emerged. They were killed by unidentified armed attackers—a phrase that appears repeatedly in the reporting and carries with it a heavy, unresolved sorrow. Who were these attackers? What were they hoping to achieve? Why did they target two women? These questions may never be answered, and that absence of closure is itself a form of grief for the families and the community. The women had names, families, neighbors, histories. They were not abstractions, and their deaths were not a mere incident to be filed away or, worse, to be repurposed for a political message. They were human beings caught in the crosswinds of a conflict that has already claimed too many lives. The fact that they were Kuki women matters, because in the current context of Manipur, with the ongoing violence between the Meitei and Kuki communities, every death carries an ethnic weight that can either soothe or ignite tensions. The absence of any attribution of responsibility for their deaths is itself a wound. But what is clear, from the fact-checking that followed, is that no investigation, no report, no official statement has linked the Indian Army to this attack. It was a tragic, violent event, but it was not a military operation. And the failure to identify the actual perpetrators should not be papered over with a false accusation against the army, because that does nothing to bring the women back and does everything to deepen the very divisions that make such violence possible in the first place.

The second incident is more complicated, and it is here that the viral post found its most compelling—and misleading—visuals. Later that same night, around 10:30 pm, the Naga village of Chawangkining in Kangpokpi district came under attack. According to reports from The Times of India and The Hindu, suspected militants launched an assault on the village, and security forces—specifically, Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel stationed in the area—returned fire. What followed was not a quick skirmish but a long, terrifying night. The exchange of fire reportedly continued for nearly six hours, until around 4:30 in the morning. Villagers huddled in fear as gunshots echoed through the darkness. The security forces, according to an official quoted in the reports, managed to prevent the attackers from entering the village itself. That fact is crucial, because it suggests that the soldiers and police officers involved were acting as defenders, not aggressors. They were protecting the Naga villagers from an armed assault. But in the chaos of the gunfight, two wooden houses on the outskirts of the village caught fire and were burnt. How exactly the fire started is not entirely clear from the reports. It could have been from stray bullets, from explosives thrown by the attackers, from a defensive action gone wrong, or from some other cause altogether. What is clear is that the houses burned, and the images of those burning houses became the visual evidence used in the viral post. The post looked at that fire, looked at the two dead women from a different village earlier in the day, and decided—without evidence, without investigation, without any respect for the truth—that the Indian Army had shot the women and set the houses on fire on the orders of a senior commander. The reality, as reported, is that two separate groups of victims in two separate villages suffered terribly on the same night, and the only people who stood between the second village and a potentially far worse massacre were the security forces who exchanged fire with the attackers for six hours. To blame those security forces for the very attack they were trying to repel is not just wrong; it is obscene.

The investigation into the viral post did not stop at reading news reports. Fact-checkers performed a reverse image search on the visuals used in the claim, and what they found further dismantled the story. The same images and footage had appeared on the YouTube channel of Ukhrul Times, a known regional media outlet, and the accompanying description linked them specifically to the September 15 attack on Chawangkining Naga village. In other words, the visuals were not evidence of the Indian Army shooting women; they were evidence of a fire that broke out during an exchange of gunfire between security forces and suspected militants. This is not a minor detail. It shows that whoever created the viral post deliberately took real footage from one incident and repurposed it to illustrate a completely different and false narrative. They also dragged the name of Lieutenant General V. M. Bhuvana Krishnan into the story, despite the fact that no credible source, no official statement, and no news report has linked him to either of the two incidents. The Eastern Command, based outside Manipur, had no apparent connection to the events on the ground that night, at least as far as any reliable evidence shows. Yet his name was used, perhaps because a high-ranking officer adds an air of conspiracy and authority to a story that otherwise might be questioned. This is a pattern common in modern misinformation: take a real tragedy, add a powerful villain, sprinkle in some unverified visuals, and share it as quickly as possible so that the retraction, if it ever comes, is barely heard. The damage, however, is done. People who believed the post will continue to believe it, because a lie that confirms their worldview is far more comfortable than a truth that complicates it. And the families of the two women, the residents of the burnt houses, the soldiers and police who risked their lives—all of them are left to navigate a story in which their real suffering has been twisted into a tool for political violence and division.

What, then, is the honest conclusion? The claim that the Indian Army shot two women and burned their homes in Manipur on the orders of the Eastern Command commander is false and misleading. It is a conflation of two separate incidents that happened on September 15: the killing of two Kuki women by unidentified armed attackers in Leisangphai village, Tamenglong district, and the attack on Chawangkining Naga village in Kangpokpi district, where suspected militants exchanged fire with security forces for six hours and two houses were burned. In neither incident is there credible evidence of Indian Army involvement in the deaths of the women or the burning of the houses. The viral post linked them together for the sake of a narrative, and fact-checkers, using news reports and reverse image searches, have shown how that was done. None of this is to diminish the horror of what happened. Two women are dead. Houses are in ashes. A village spent a night in terror. These are real tragedies, and they deserve real attention, real investigation, and real justice. But justice cannot be built on a lie. When we attribute violence to the wrong party, we not only exonerate the true perpetrators—whoever they may be—but we also deepen the cycles of hatred and revenge that have already torn Manipur apart. The people who shared the viral post may have believed they were standing up for the victims. In fact, they were doing the opposite. They were weaponizing the victims’ deaths to drive more division, more anger, and more violence. And that is a betrayal of the very people they claim to defend. In a region as fragile as Manipur, where trust is already scarce and where every incident can ignite the next, the truth is not a luxury. It is a matter of life and death. So the next time you see a post that makes your heart race with rage, pause. Ask who is telling this story, and why. Ask what evidence exists beyond the image and the anger. And remember: behind the viral claim, behind the misinformation, there are real people—grieving mothers, burned homes, exhausted soldiers, and a community desperately trying to survive. They deserve better than a lie dressed up as outrage. They deserve the truth, no matter how uncomfortable or inconvenient that truth might be.