New Delhi: Yumnam Khemchand Singh, the 62-year-old Meitei BJP MLA who is ready to turn into Manipur chief minister at a time when the state is passing by means of a difficult section, has by no means been the one to mince phrases. 

At a gathering in mid-2024, when Manipur was burning, Khemchand brazenly informed N. Biren Singh to step down as CM amid rising public anger over his authorities’s incapacity to revive peace.

Within the months that adopted, Khemchand, thought-about near the RSS, grew to become a vocal critic of the previous CM.

He didn’t cow down even after over two dozen males brandishing weapons arrived in jeeps exterior his Imphal residence in June 2024, when the ethnic battle in Manipur was nonetheless simmering. The boys stepped out of their autos and began shifting in direction of the gate of Khemchand’s home. 

CCTV cameras put in on the gates captured the commotion. Safety personnel got here to the gate, the police have been alerted and the armed males have been pressured to retreat, two state BJP leaders and a safety official, who wished to not be named, had informed ThePrint. 

Khemchand was additionally among the many BJP MLAs known as to Delhi by the central management to get a way of the bottom scenario on a number of events, and conveyed to them that resentment in opposition to Biren Singh was rising and will price the get together electorally.    

He was not flawed. Within the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP misplaced each its seats within the state. 

Khemchand was additionally one of many MLAs who—days earlier than Biren Singh stepped down as CM on 9 February 2025—was in Delhi and informed the central management concerning the imminent risk from a bit of BJP MLAs to again the Congress’s no-confidence movement within the state meeting, probably toppling their authorities. It was a vital enter that pushed the get together’s central management to demand Singh’s resignation.

Satirically, it was Biren Singh who proposed Khemchand’s identify because the BJP’s legislative get together chief Tuesday. 

Not at all times anti-Biren

Khemchand, nevertheless, was not at all times anti-Biren. A two-time MLA from Singjamei constituency in internal Imphal, he was made the meeting Speaker within the first time period of Biren Singh’s authorities between 2017 and 2022. 

“Again then, he was a Biren loyalist. He grew to become the Speaker as a first-time MLA,” mentioned a second BJP MLA, who didn’t wish to be named. 

When the BJP bought re-elected in 2022, Khemchand continued to be a favorite. He was given a cupboard berth, dealing with key portfolios together with municipal administration and housing growth; rural growth and panchayati raj; and schooling. 

In December 2025, Khemchand posted an image on X after incomes a fifth dan black belt from the International Conventional Taekwondo Federation in Seoul on the age of 62. 

The Class tenth cross joined politics within the early-2000, however fought his first election in 2017.

First Meitei MLA to go to Kuki aid camp

Within the aftermath of the battle, Manipur was divided on ethnic traces with the Meiteis confining themselves to the Valley and the Kuki-Zo to the hills. 

The divide was so deep that individuals from the 2 communities didn’t dare to enter one another’s territory. It was amid this unstable scenario that Khemchand grew to become the primary Meitei MLA to go to aid camps housing internally displaced folks from the Kuki-Zo group within the hill district of Ukhrul final December, over two and a half-years after ethnic violence first erupted within the state. 

His go to, nevertheless, drew a variety of flak from Kuki-Zo civil society organisations. They known as his go to “unauthorised” and “politically motivated”, and mentioned that the MLA visited the aid camps when the general public dwelling there weren’t current.

(Edited by Gitanjali Das)

---

Additionally Learn: By the river, armed males got here. Then there was smoke, screams & a Manipur village in ruins

---