A makeshift helipad occupies the space where the Baptist Church stood on a plateaued mound in Somdal, the most discussed village in Manipur’s Ukhrul district bordering Myanmar. The church was dismantled in September for two reasons: at about 100 years, it was too old to be safe for prayer services; and it could yield the most strategic spot for a helicopter carrying a Naga leader — only slightly younger than the church itself — to land on October 22.

Thuingaleng Muivah, the 91-year-old general secretary of the extremist National Socialist Council of Nagalim (NSCN) and a devout Christian, probably missed the church when he alighted from the chopper that carried him from adjoining Nagaland’s Dimapur via district headquarters Ukhrul, 25 kilometres from Somdal terrestrially. To most of the village’s 4,500 people around the chopper, however, the landing of their godfather on a spot once commanded by a house of god was surreal.

“The church will be rebuilt soon, but the moment he landed in its space was divine,” said 88-year-old Mashithi Moinao, for whom Muivah graduated from an “elder brother” to the avakharar over the six decades he was away from Somdal, his birthplace. Avakharar in the Tangkhul tongue means godfather or a father figure. Somdal and much of the Ukhrul district are dominated by the Tangkhuls, a Naga community whose members form the core of the NSCN, more familiar to the world beyond as the Isak-Muivah faction of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland or NSCN (I-M). The faction is named after Muivah and Isak Chishi Swu, the co-founder of the armed group, who died in June 2016.

Out of the intensive care unit of a hospital in Dimapur less than three months ago, Muivah has not been in the best of health.