Air India crash: Divided Manipur unites in grief at death of two crew members – one Kuki, one Meitei

Manipur has come together to mourn the deaths of two of citizens – one Kuki and one Meitei – who were among the ten cabin crew members onboard the Air India flight that crashed in Ahmedabad on Thursday.

The crash killed all but one of the 241 of the people aboard. The exact number of people killed on the ground has yet to be determined by on Friday the police said they had sent 265 bodies for postmortems.

Nganthoi Sharma Kongbrailatpam, 21, was from Thoubal district. Lamnunthem Singson, 28, had been displaced from Manipur’s capital Imphal by the ethnic violence that erupted in May 2023 and was living in the Kuki-dominated hill district of Kangpokpi.

The conflict between Manipur’s two major communities, the Meiteis and the Kuki-Zo, has left 260 people dead and displaced more than 70,000 people from their homes.

Manipur’s civil society groups across the chasm have expressed their sorrow at the deaths.

“They worked side by side in the skies, representing unity in diversity – a symbol of hope and harmony amidst today’s troubled times,” said the North East Society at Ambedkar University Delhi in a statement.

On Saturday, The Sangai Express, the most widely circulated English daily in the state, published an editorial on June 14 titled “Saluting Nganthoi, Lamnunthem:...

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