‘The North East does not seem to matter beyond violence’: Journalist Hoihnu Hauz on her new book

Hoihnu Hauzel is a journalist who has worked for 15 years and now writes independently. Her work promotes North East India while exploring food history, cultural practice, regional identity and resilience. Her books matter because they preserve personal and community experiences of a conflict that displaced tens of thousands.

Stories the Fire Could Not Burn is a personal account of the ethnic conflict that began on May 3, 2023. Hauzel tracked daily incidents, checked reports, contacted sources and recorded how families were displaced. Requiem for a Home in Manipur is a poetry collection about losing home and rebuilding elsewhere.

Hauzel’s own home was burnt, and her family fled to a neighbouring state. She says writing became her responsibility and her only tool as a journalist. Together, the books keep alive voices and histories that could otherwise disappear during prolonged unrest.

An ethnic conflict is violent struggle shaped by divisions between ethnic or community groups. Such conflicts can affect security, homes, movement and trust, not just political leaders. In Manipur, the violence became especially damaging because people were divided along community lines and innocent residents from both communities faced danger.

The violence began on May 3, 2023, and unfolded as a live, prolonged crisis. Hauzel said leaders called the shots, while poor and helpless people bore the physical brunt. Families were forced to flee, homes were destroyed, and communities became separated. She tracked incidents from the first day.

The article presents the conflict as deeply inhumane and historically significant for an already fractured Manipur. Its continuing effects include displacement, grief and the need to document competing experiences. Hauzel’s work focuses on preserving the voices of people caught inside the violence, not only decisions made by leaders.

The article gives two major measures of the conflict’s scale: more than 300 people died, and close to 60,000 were displaced. These figures matter because they show both the direct cost of violence and the much larger number of people forced away from their homes.

Hauzel tracked displaced families from the beginning, including her own. Her home was burnt, and she helped relatives and loved ones leave safely. She contacted armed forces and official authorities, arranged transport from army camps to the airport, and checked that people reached safety before departure.

The numbers describe a continuing crisis rather than a brief event. Every displaced family also represents lost housing, disrupted relationships and an uncertain return. By recording daily incidents and personal stories, Hauzel gives the figures human meaning and preserves evidence of what happened during the prolonged unrest.

When violence forces families to abandon home, displacement becomes both a physical and emotional rupture. People must escape danger, separate from familiar places and depend on relatives, authorities or armed forces for safe transport. Communities also lose shared spaces, possessions and a sense of security.

Hauzel’s experience shows this process clearly. Her home was burnt, and her family fled to a neighbouring state. She coordinated rescues, called the armed forces and authorities, arranged transport from army camps, and stayed in contact with relatives until they reached Imphal airport and departed safely. Later, she wrote about resettling in a new place.

The effects continue after escape. Hauzel described numbness, grief, sleeplessness and disbelief, while objects from her home carried strong emotions. Her poetry grew from those feelings. The conflict’s close to 60,000 displaced people therefore represent many disrupted lives, not merely a statistic.

Documenting a live conflict takes more than collecting statements after events end. A journalist must follow developments continuously, test claims, compare accounts and understand different viewpoints. The work also demands care because reporting can involve people facing immediate danger, displacement and grief.

Hauzel read every report and tracked incidents each day from May 3, 2023. She called sources, verified events, stayed in contact with authorities and armed forces, and exchanged notes regularly. At the same time, she coordinated the rescue of relatives, contacted officials and checked that family members reached the airport safely.

This combination was emotionally exhausting and surreal, especially because Hauzel’s own home had burned. Yet she kept notes from conversations with different stakeholders and continued documenting events. Her experience shows why conflict reporting requires persistence, verification and responsibility. It also shows how personal involvement can make the work harder while revealing the crisis’s human cost.

Manipur lies in northeastern India and is one of the eight states commonly grouped as the North East region. This regional setting matters because the area contains many distinct communities, languages and histories. The article itself only says Hauzel promotes the North East through her writing and ventures; it does not provide a geographic list.

Using established geographic knowledge, the other North East states are Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura. The region includes communities such as Meitei, Kuki-Zo, Naga, Mizo, Khasi, Garo, Bodo and many others. These names are broader context, not details supplied by the article.

The article focuses on Manipur’s conflict and its division along community lines. Hauzel’s writing connects the region with food history, cultural practice and regional identity. That work matters because documenting local voices can preserve histories and experiences from communities affected by unrest.

Political and social divisions can become violence when group identity is treated as a barrier between people. Leaders may make decisions or claims that deepen mistrust, while ordinary families experience the consequences. Competition over safety, belonging and historical memory can then produce separate accounts of what happened.

The article describes Manipur as already fractured and says the conflict divided people along community lines. Hauzel observed that leaders called the shots, while poor and helpless people stood at the physical forefront. Innocent lives from both communities were at stake. Homes burned, families fled and more than 300 people died.

Displacement can deepen the divide because communities become separated and personal loss shapes memory. Hauzel’s documentation records conversations with different stakeholders and preserves voices from conflict zones. That record may help show how people experienced the same prolonged unrest differently, while keeping attention on the human cost rather than only on leaders’ actions.