Book extract: ‘Silenced, scapegoated and scarred’

Title: Stories the Fire Could Not Burn

Author: Hoihnu Hauzel

Publisher: Speaking Tiger

Price: Rs 499 (paperback)

Words often betray us when we need them most. They falter in the face of grief, lose their strength when asked to hold pain, and remain powerless before the scale of violence some communities are made to endure. No sentence, no matter how carefully crafted, can truly carry the weight of a people’s suffering. They cannot resurrect the dead, nor can they console the displaced or erase the nightmares of the violated.

The events that have occurred in Manipur beginning on 3 May 2023 are more than a crisis. It is a wound that refuses to close — one that language alone cannot mend.

And yet, we must try.

This book is my attempt — not as a historian or a journalist, but as a witness — to speak of the unbearable silence that has followed the storm. It is not a scholarly work. It does not pretend to be neutral. It is a personal account, rooted in lived experience: in the voices of my family, my friends and a community that has been repeatedly silenced, scapegoated and scarred.

[…]

I write this for the thousands who were displaced — those who fled with nothing but the clothes on their backs, and those who did not flee in time. I write for those who, despite having lost everything, still insist on the right to return, to rebuild, to be heard.

I think of the night we fled — how silence hung heavier than the air, how we carried not just our belongings but our memories, our dead, our dread. That night, we didn’t just leave behind homes. We left behind parts of ourselves we may never be able to reclaim.

And still, there are those whose suffering eclipses even our flight.

[…]

Late at night on 11 April 2023, a loud knock shook Pastor Nengzahau V. Haupi and his family out of their sleep. ‘Hou gat lo, hou gat lo.’ Get up, get up. It was 2 a.m. ‘Thok oh, thok oh’. Come out, come out, the voices demanded. There was a group of men at the door confiscating their phones and asking them to vacate their house.

Nengzahau V. Haupi, fifty-four, had been serving as a pastor at the Evangelical Baptist Church in Tribal Colony, a colony in the West of Imphal, sandwiched by other colonies like Angom Colony, Soibam Leikai, Sanjenthong, Wahengbam Colony, Zomi Villa. Pastor Haupi had come to this church after dedicating twenty years in the Evangelical Baptist Convention Church in the interiors of Manipur.

Tribal Colony is where the Kuki-Zomi/Mizo community had lived for decades. The land on which it stood had long been considered a marshy, uninhabitable area and was believed to have come into being in the late 1960s and early 1970s, developed by the government — possibly under the leadership of R.K. Dorendra or Yangmaso Saiza, both of whom later served as Chief Ministers of Manipur. The colony was set up on government land as transit quarters for hill government employees posted in the valley, a small but important effort to bridge the hills and the plains back then.

The church was established in 1974, the year I was born. From a small mud structure, it had evolved into a pucca building through the contributions and efforts of the Kuki-Zomi/Mizo community living around it. This was where the community residing in the vicinity came together. A sense of kinship pervaded the space; after all the community had nurtured the church like a baby, building and nourishing it brick by brick.

[…]

This particular church was constructed in 1974, long before the Supreme Court’s 2009 directive (in Union of India vs. State of Gujarat and Others, after which the state government, in 2010, issued a notification prohibiting unauthorised construction of religious structures in streets, parks or other public spaces), and had stood peacefully for decades as part of the social and spiritual fabric of the locality.

The demolition of such a long-established place of worship appeared difficult to reconcile with the intent of the government’s own notification, which expressly allowed for relocation or regularisation in suitable cases.

[…]

‘Hou gat lo, hou gat lo.’

A JCB was roaring outside, demolishing the church.

The family were given a fleeting five minutes to gather their belongings. Pastor Haupi and his son scrambled in the dark, using the dim light of their phones to gather essentials. The pastor packed his wife’s garments, important documents and his record book. His son, overwhelmed and emotional, grabbed whatever he could.

Amidst the chaos, Pastor Haupi tried to remain calm, drawing strength from a passage he once read about how parental calmness affects children. He prayed for resilience and thanked God for allowing him to witness this trial, believing he was chosen to endure it. At dawn, they stood and watched as the bulldozer moved in. Their house and the church fell quickly, stone by stone, under the machine’s steady force. The destruction was fast and final. By the time daylight settled over the village, the church was gone.

Not a wall remained standing.

Pastor Haupi stood apart, shoulders heavy, his heart aching with sorrow. He looked over the rubble, the splintered wood, the shattered glass, and felt the weight of it all press against his chest. Yet amid the devastation, there was something else — a flicker of gratitude. Bittersweet and strange, it came from the unshakable strength he found in his faith, even as everything around him crumbled. When I spoke to him months after this, he broke down.

Word spread quickly. By mid-morning, church members began arriving one by one, then in groups drawn not by obligation, but by something deeper. Grief, yes, but also love. They circled the ruins, their feet crunching over debris, their eyes red. Then, without cue or command, a hymn rose. Faint at first, then stronger.

Voices cracked with emotion sang in harmony, lifting a familiar melody into the heavy air for the last time in that place where they all stood. Others joined in, some barely whispering the words through tears.

‘Hallelujah, amen.’