New Delhi: Yumnam Khemchand Singh, the 62-year-old Meitei BJP MLA who is set to become Manipur chief minister at a time when the state is passing through a challenging phase, has never been the one to mince words.
At a meeting in mid-2024, when Manipur was burning, Khemchand openly told N. Biren Singh to step down as CM amid growing public anger over his government’s inability to restore peace.
A BJP leader who had attended the meeting told ThePrint that Khemchand said all party MLAs were willing to resign along with Biren. “The CM heard him, but did not say much.”
In the months that followed, Khemchand, considered close to the RSS, became a vocal critic of the former CM.
He did not cow down even after over two dozen men brandishing guns arrived in jeeps outside his Imphal residence in June 2024, when the ethnic conflict in Manipur was still simmering. The men stepped out of their vehicles and started moving towards the gate of Khemchand’s house.
CCTV cameras installed at the gates captured the commotion. Security personnel came to the gate, the police were alerted and the armed men were forced to retreat, two state BJP leaders and a security official, who wished to not be named, had told ThePrint.
Khemchand was also among the BJP MLAs called to Delhi by the central leadership to get a sense of the ground situation on multiple occasions, and conveyed to them that resentment against Biren Singh was growing and could cost the party electorally.
He was not wrong. In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP lost both its seats in the state.
Khemchand was also one of the MLAs who—days before Biren Singh stepped down as CM on 9 February 2025—was in Delhi and told the central leadership about the imminent threat from a section of BJP MLAs to back the Congress’s no-confidence motion in the state assembly, potentially toppling their government. It was a crucial input that pushed the party’s central leadership to demand Singh’s resignation.
Ironically, it was Biren Singh who proposed Khemchand’s name as the BJP’s legislative party leader Tuesday.
Not always anti-Biren
Khemchand, however, was not always anti-Biren. A two-time MLA from Singjamei constituency in inner Imphal, he was made the assembly Speaker in the first term of Biren Singh’s government between 2017 and 2022.
“Back then, he was a Biren loyalist. He became the Speaker as a first-time MLA,” said a second BJP MLA, who did not want to be named.
When the BJP got re-elected in 2022, Khemchand continued to be a favourite. He was given a cabinet berth, handling key portfolios including municipal administration and housing development; rural development and panchayati raj; and education.
In December 2025, Khemchand posted a picture on X after earning a 5th dan black belt from the Global Traditional Taekwondo Federation in Seoul at the age of 62.
The Class 10th pass joined politics in the early-2000, but fought his first election in 2017.
First Meitei MLA to visit Kuki relief camp
In the aftermath of the conflict, Manipur was divided on ethnic lines with the Meiteis confining themselves to the Valley and the Kuki-Zo to the hills.
The divide was so deep that people from the two communities did not dare to enter each other’s territory. It was amid this volatile situation that Khemchand became the first Meitei MLA to visit relief camps housing internally displaced people from the Kuki-Zo community in the hill district of Ukhrul last December, over two and a half-years after ethnic violence first erupted in the state.
His visit, however, drew a lot of flak from Kuki-Zo civil society organisations. They called his visit “unauthorised” and “politically motivated”, and said that the MLA visited the relief camps when most of the people living there were not present.
(Edited by Gitanjali Das)
Also Read: By the river, armed men came. Then there was smoke, screams & a Manipur village in ruins