“END FOSSIL FUEL NOW!”
The sharp cry broke through the monotony of the COP28 plenary session in Dubai in late 2023, where world leaders sat discussing climate action. The mood at the meeting was somber; activists and several delegates were disappointed with the talks’ lackluster commitment to a “transition” from fossil fuels. As her words rang out, a 12-year-old girl ran onto the stage clutching a hand-scrawled sign: “END FOSSIL FUEL. SAVE OUR PLANET AND OUR FUTURE.”
For a brief moment, Licypriya Kangujam was the center of attention. Security quickly intervened — a tall man more than twice her size whisked her away. The audience, stunned by the sudden disruption, began clapping. Ambassador Majid Al Suwaidi, Director General of COP28, offered a word of admiration for the passionate young activist, encouraging another round of applause.
The media immediately drew parallels between Kangujam and Greta Thunberg, whose “How dare you?” speech at the 2019 UN Climate Summit had catapulted her to global fame. Media and environmental groups lapped up Kangujam’s protest at COP28, given that there had been few that year due to restrictions placed on the event by the United Arab Emirates. Kangujam was already a prominent activist in India; her social media showed her meeting with the late pope and she was a special envoy to Timor-Leste, an island nation extremely vulnerable to climate disasters. As often happens, the press was thrilled by the idea of a celebrity child heroine, a new voice demanding urgent action. But behind the applause lay a complicated story of how Kangujam had arrived at that moment.
Watching from afar was her father, Kangujam Kanarjit Singh, known to many in Indian climate activist circles as KK Singh. Singh had not traveled abroad in years due to his arrest and imprisonment in India on charges of fraud, cheating, impersonation, and forgery for his role in running elaborate scams targeting young activists in India and abroad. Singh lived with his family in the city of Noida in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, where he had for years carefully orchestrated his daughter’s activism and image through public protests, well documented on her social media account. At the age of eight, she held a sit-in protest outside the Indian parliament urging Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to pass a climate change law, and she attended COP25 in Madrid in a trip reportedly sponsored by the Government of Spain and the European Climate Foundation.
In 2021, however, Singh was arrested and jailed for eight months, and his family went underground to escape media attention on the young activist. After securing bail, Singh receded from view. But he continued to position his young daughter as the face of Indian climate activism. He lurked in the background of his daughter’s achievements, raising questions about the degree to which he was using her to advance his own agenda and the potential costs he was inflicting on her.
It was Singh’s Facebook feed that first caught Prajesh Khanal’s attention. It was 2017, and Kangujam’s father was constantly posting photos of himself with UN delegates, political leaders, and NGO professionals from India, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal in events organized by a group he founded, the International Youth Committee, or IYC. “Singh’s face was all over social media,” said Khanal, a climate activist in Nepal, who was 18 at the time.
IYC advertised itself as an international youth organization “working to provide a policy framework and practical guidelines for national action and international support to improve the situation of young people around the world,” according to a now inactive Facebook page. In 2015, Singh hosted an event called the World Youth Summit in Manipur’s Imphal city, which he had billed to the local media as a “UNESCO program.”
Khanal thought that the group looked legit. “Back then, there were very few organizations that were especially focused in South Asia,” said Khanal. “I wanted to get out, get started on a bigger platform out of Nepal, so it looked good at that point.” He paid $460 for a membership to IYC and to cover his expenses to participate in an “Exchange Program” with events in Japan and Europe that IYC had heavily promoted on Facebook. A year later, IYC canceled those events, promising something in Paris instead. It took two years of waiting and follow-ups going nowhere before Khanal realized that no exchange program would ever take place.
Around 2019, Khanal noticed that Singh had “started disappearing from social media.” Taking his place in activist feeds was his young daughter. “Something is fishy,” Khanal recalled thinking.
After Covid-19 hit and everything shuttered in 2020, Khanal wrote to the Nepal embassy in India and India’s ministry of external affairs asking for legal action to be taken against Singh. A year later, Singh was arrested in Delhi on charges related to Khanal’s complaint and that of an Indian activist, along with accusations of fraud and defaulting on payments from locals in his home state. Singh also stands accused of defrauding youth activists from Tanzania, Azerbaijan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Mauritius, Nigeria, the Philippines, Bhutan, and Vietnam. (The case against him is ongoing. Singh did not reply to requests for comment.)
By then, his daughter had already been elevated to mini-celebrity status in India. She had a verified account on Twitter, a visible presence participating in student-led climate strikes, and gave TEDx talks on climate change activism. She had also already received some scrutiny: An Indian news publication, the Imphal Free Press, had uncovered that every award she’d supposedly won, at least before 2020, had either been made up or bestowed on her by IYC. The Imphal Free Press also debunked claims that she had been invited to speak at UN events. Her father denied all the allegations, calling them “baseless”; he said that the stories had been invented to punish his daughter for declining Modi’s offer to select women leaders to take over his account on International Women’s Day in 2020.
Still, that didn’t turn people off Kangujam, who at eight years of age, with her endearing confidence and conviction in speaking about climate change, seemed like little more than an uncontroversial goodwill ambassador.
“I thought it was quite cool that someone so young was doing something so amazing. And I didn’t question her age too much,” said a climate activist who met Kangujam at a 2020 protest against a road widening project in the southern Indian city of Bengaluru (they asked not to be identified out of fear of repercussions from Singh). The activist described her as initially “quiet,” which they thought might have been in response to the large number of people at the protest.
“But the minute the media came, there was a personality switch, and her father was directing her to tell the media that she organized the protest,” said the activist, who said Singh made her climb on top of a bulldozer with a poster. He later shared the protest pictures on her social media accounts, claiming Kangujam had stopped the bulldozer. “I was just stumped,” the activist said.
Kangujam’s rise came amid a shift in the landscape of climate activism in India — from Greenpeace-style, collective, dramatic stunts to a newer model focused on individual celebrity and influencer-style messaging that made stars out of young activists. Greenpeace India was “extremely elitist,” according to Neha Saigal, who worked with the group around 2015; most of the participants in their flashy banner drops or other actions were urban and privileged by caste and class. Nonetheless, she said, the young people who participated were truly there out of their passion for a better planet, not self-promotion. “This whole thing of making youth icons,” she said. “That was never there.”
To be sure, anxiety around climate change among India’s youth is genuine and widespread, as the country suffers from extreme heat, weather events, and a climate disaster policy that is reactive at best. A 2021 study on 10,000 children from 10 countries including India found that more than 59 percent were “extremely worried” about climate change, reporting “betrayal” from their governments. In 2019, the Indian youth activist Ridhima Pandey joined 15 child petitioners from around the world, including Thunberg, to lodge a complaint with the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child that would label the failure to tackle the climate crisis a “violation of child rights.”
“This whole thing of making youth icons, that was never there.”
But recently, Kanjugam’s public profile has turned to promoting more controversial causes. Her family is originally from Manipur, a northeastern Indian state that shares a long border with Myanmar. For nearly two years, Manipur has been mired in a civil war since clashes broke out between the Kuki-Zo tribes and Meitei Hindus. It began almost overnight in early May 2023, after false claims of mass rape of Meitei Hindu women spread across the region’s hills and central valley. As per official figures, more than 250 people have died, and some 60,000 were displaced.
Kangujam, who belongs to the dominant Meitei Hindu community, quickly started sharing posts on social media portraying Meiteis as victims — despite evidence that the Kuki-Zo community bore the brunt of the early violence. With over 100,000 followers at the time (she currently has 212.9k), her posts reached over 200,000 accounts on X. Since then, her online agenda has included advocating the Hindu nationalist stances of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — at least as they benefit Meitei interests — and platforming disinformation around real-time violence happening in Manipur. More disturbingly, the then-12-year-old openly supported the Arambai Tenggol, an extremist Meitei militia accused of targeting Kuki-Zo communities. In early 2024, she publicly donated military equipment, including thermal drones, to the group, which she calls a “people’s movement.” She was photographed with the commander in chief of Arambai Tenggol, who is under investigation for allegedly looting arms from state police armories.
Her actions marked a troubling departure from environmental advocacy, and yet, online, she has justified them by describing the conflict as a “climate war” between communities who “love nature” and those who “hate nature.” She posts about the conflict mostly in Meiteilon, the Manipuri language, which keeps her followers in the rest of the world clued out to her more extremist positions. The support she has in Manipur, said Dennis Lallienzuol Hmar, a youth climate activist from the Kuki-Zo-dominated Churachandpur district, who first met Singh and his family while attending IYC’s World Youth Summit in Imphal, “is not for her climate journey, but her hate mongering.”
The enthusiasm for youthful climate activists is based in part on the presumption of their innocence. Unlike their adult counterparts, children are seen as untainted by wider politics. That makes them better screens for adults to project their own beliefs. (It’s worth noting that, in the international media’s eye, Thunberg herself has turned from a prophetic truthteller into a “propagandist” for her support of Palestinian rights.)
Kangujam’s social media presence has not only taken advantage of the power of child messengers, but also benefited from the fact that her more extreme views are comfortably aligned with powerful political interests in India’s increasingly repressive political climate. So, while the young activist might appear to outsiders as “India’s Greta Thunberg,” she has been able to avoid the censorship and repression other activists in India regularly face, and has room to blur the lines between a liberal cause such as climate change and an extremist agenda of ethnonationalism in Manipur.
“What separates her from someone like Greta is that while Greta is speaking for the oppressed, this child is being made to toe the government propaganda on an oppressed community,” said Hmar.
At whose behest remains the unsettling question. As a consequence of her posts about Manipur, Kangujam has been subjected to sharp criticism on social media, and publicly threatened with sexual violence — the disturbing, if sadly predictable, result of putting a young girl’s profile on a polarizing violent conflict.
“This child is being made to toe the government propaganda on an oppressed community.”
Keisam Pradipkumar, the Chairperson of the Manipur Commission of Protection of Child Rights, got involved with Kangujam’s case in 2021, after news of Singh’s arrest went viral and Kangujam’s photos were splashed all over the media. “If she is found to have been manipulated by her father,” Pradipkumar wrote at the time, “then she is a child in need of care and protection.” But he told me later that he had spoken with the family and that there was no evidence to prove that she was being manipulated by her parents. Investigating further would not fall under the mandate of his commission, he said.
Manipur has been placed under presidential rule by the BJP government since early February, ostensibly to foster dialogue between the two communities and bring peace. Yet faith in any process of accountability has been undermined by evidence that the BJP-led state government is implicated in the violence. In a recording leaked last year, the state’s chief minister N. Biren Singh, who has since resigned, was heard discussing war strategies with Arambai Tenggol, the militia that Kangujam has promoted. (The politician called the tapes fake, but independent forensic reports suggest otherwise.) As Human Rights Watch has noted, “armed militant groups, government-backed vigilantes, and state security forces” have yet to be brought to justice for abuses and rights violations.
Meanwhile, climate circles and the media orbiting them have apparently remained blissfully unaware of the young teen activist’s troubling turn to nationalist jingoism and bigotry. Even as she was fundraising for an armed militia, she was invited to meet Pope Francis in Rome for a documentary on climate solutions. Other Indian environmental activists and journalists I spoke with find it galling that no one seems to be probing deeper into her politics or her father’s role in them.
Khanal, for his part, no longer expects a refund of the money or time he lost to IYC, which sold him on the dream of becoming a high-flying networker attending conferences abroad. Now in his mid-20s, the Kathmandu-based activist is rooted to the ground, working on human rights and local governance, educating young people on sustainable growth. He still supports young people coming forward to talk about climate change, he said, “But let it come voluntarily. Let’s not make children a means to forward our agenda.”
Makepeace Sitlhou is an independent journalist and producer based in India. She was previously a Fulbright fellow at Arizona State University. You can find her work at makepeacesitlhou.com
Here's why we publish
Feminist thought is increasingly banned from universities and marginalized in billionaire-owned media. We’re proud to publish it. While these institutions are firing feminists, we’re hiring them — as brave journalists, writers, and artists who challenge ideas about gender at every level.
If this matters to you, please support Lux today. Independent media depends on you.