A year ago, two soldiers came back from helping flood survivors. They never made it home. On Friday, the town of Nambol made sure the world didn’t forget.
Around 1,800 residents — ordinary people, community elders, and young men and women — gathered at Nambol in Manipur’s Bishnupur district on September 19 to mark the first anniversary of one of the most heartbreaking ambushes to have hit the region in recent memory. The mood was heavy. The kind of silence that doesn’t need words.
Naib Subedar Shyam Gurung and Rifleman Ranjeet Singh Kashyap of 33 Assam Rifles were the men they came to honour. Two names. Two families forever altered. Two soldiers who, on that same date in 2025, were returning from flood-relief operations in the Imphal Valley — serving the very people of this state — when armed attackers struck their column at Nambol Sabal Leikai. Both were killed. Five others were injured.
Think about that for a moment. These weren’t men on an offensive mission. They were coming back from humanitarian work — helping communities that had been ravaged by floods. And they were killed for it.
The tribute ceremony brought together residents, community representatives, and youth who stood together to pay their respects and express solidarity with the 33 Assam Rifles. There were no grand speeches that emptied the moment of its weight. Just people showing up. And that, in itself, said everything.
What happened on September 19, 2025 was not just an attack on two soldiers. It was an attack on the idea of service itself — on the kind of quiet, unglamorous duty that doesn’t make headlines until something goes terribly wrong. Gurung and Kashyap had been doing exactly what soldiers are asked to do in times of disaster: put the public first. The ambush that followed their return was a brutal reminder of the reality that personnel in conflict-prone zones like Manipur carry every single day.
The first-anniversary programme wrapped up with a collective tribute, but the gathering’s message went beyond remembrance. Participants renewed calls for peace, harmony, and peaceful coexistence in a state that has been fractured by ethnic tension and violence for years now. Community leaders used the occasion to appeal for unity — not just as a platitude, but as a genuine plea from people who have watched their neighbourhoods become battlegrounds.
There’s something quietly powerful about a community gathering not out of anger, not out of political calculation, but out of grief and gratitude. Nambol didn’t erupt. It remembered. It stood together, 1,800 strong, in a place where standing together publicly takes a certain kind of courage.
Manipur has seen too many moments like this — moments where the cost of conflict becomes unbearably personal. Shyam Gurung and Ranjeet Singh Kashyap were not statistics. They were soldiers who chose service over safety, and paid the ultimate price on a day that was supposed to be the end of a mission well done. The least the living can do is remember them. Nambol did exactly that — and it did so with its heart wide open.
A state at peace would not need anniversaries like this. But until that day comes, remembering the fallen may be the most human thing Manipur can do.
