Licypriya Kangujam

Licypriya Kangujam: A Child, a Stage, and a Contested Record

On 11 December 2023 a twelve-year-old walked onto the main stage of COP28 in Dubai holding a hand-made sign: "End fossil fuels. Save our planet and our future." Security removed her within moments, and she later said she had been banned from further participation. It was the single most widely seen act of her career — and also the point at which a story that had been steadily unravelling in the Indian press collided with the world's largest climate summit.

Manipur, and a Conference in Mongolia

Licypriya Kangujam was born on 2 October 2011 in Bashikhong, Manipur, in north-east India, to Bidyarani Devi Kangujam Ongbi and Kanarjit Kangujam Singh, known as KK Singh. She is Meitei. Her uncle is Chinglensana Kangujam.

Her activism began in 2018, after she attended a United Nations disaster conference in Mongolia with her father. She was six. Whatever else is disputed about the subsequent years, this much is agreed: the entry point into international climate politics came through her father, at an age when the distinction between a child's conviction and a parent's project is not merely blurred but effectively unavailable.

The Child Movement

In 2018 she founded an organisation called The Child Movement. Investigations by Indian and international outlets subsequently found that her father directed its activities and controlled the social media accounts and public appearances published under her name. She was reportedly withdrawn from school for at least a year in connection with protest activity — a decision that, in a six- or seven-year-old's life, is not one the child makes.

Parliament, and the Classroom

In June 2019 she protested outside the Indian Parliament for a week, calling on Prime Minister Narendra Modi to pass climate change legislation. It was a straightforward, visible piece of direct action, and it made her nationally recognisable.

She also campaigned to make climate education compulsory in Indian schools. The government of Gujarat subsequently incorporated climate change into its curriculum — a genuine policy outcome, though critics have disputed whether her campaign was responsible for it. In January 2020 she co-signed a letter to the World Economic Forum alongside Greta Thunberg and other activists, urging institutions to end fossil fuel subsidies.

Madrid and Dubai

At COP25 in Madrid in December 2019 she spoke at the conference, met UN Secretary-General António Guterres, and submitted a memorandum on behalf of children. Her attendance was sponsored by the government of Spain and the European Climate Foundation. She was eight years old.

Four years later came Dubai, the sign, and the security detail. The contrast between the two appearances is the arc of her public life in miniature: from sponsored, credentialed participant to unauthorised protester removed from the room.

"Don't Call Me India's Greta Thunberg"

The Indian and international press settled early on a label — "India's Greta Thunberg" — and she rejected it flatly. "Don't call me India's Greta Thunberg and erase my story," she told Scroll.in in February 2020.

It is the sharpest thing on the record under her name, and the most defensible. The comparison did precisely what she accused it of: it made a girl from Manipur legible to Western editors only as a derivative of a Swedish teenager, flattening a distinct movement in a distinct country into a franchise.

The Unravelling

From 2020 the record turned. The *Imphal Free Press* reported that awards she had been credited with before that year were either fabricated or conferred by organisations connected to her father's International Youth Committee. In April 2019 she had claimed an invitation to speak at the UN Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction in Geneva; UN officials later confirmed she had not been an official speaker. Successive investigations — by ThePrint, Vice News, The Quint, the *Imphal Free Press* and *Lux Magazine* — documented fabricated achievements and a carefully managed narrative. In May 2021 her father was arrested on fraud and forgery charges.

The pattern that emerged was not of a child deceiving the public but of a child being deployed.

Why Licypriya Is Called a Genius

The honest answer is that no credible source calls her one, and constructing the claim would compound exactly the problem the investigations exposed. What she was called — relentlessly, by Indian media — was one of the world's youngest climate activists, and the quality actually on display is neither cognitive nor creative. It is performative and rhetorical: the capacity to hold a stage, address heads of institutions, and deliver a message with composure at six, eight and twelve years old. That is a real skill, and it is closer to public speaking and physical nerve than to intellect. It consists of poise under scrutiny, message discipline, and a willingness to keep standing when adults with security passes tell you to leave.

The counter-case is not merely honest but overwhelming, and it belongs to the adults rather than the child. Her father directed the organisation, ran the accounts, and managed the appearances. Awards attributed to her were found to be fabricated or self-conferred through a body he controlled. A claimed UN speaking invitation was contradicted by the UN. He was arrested for fraud and forgery. The most-cited policy success — Gujarat's curriculum change — is of contested attribution.

What survives all of that is small and genuine. A twelve-year-old walked onto the COP28 stage alone with a cardboard sign and said something true about fossil fuels, and was carried off for it. And a nine-year-old told a reporter not to erase her story. Those two acts are hers. The apparatus built around them was not.

Legacy

Kangujam's case is likely to be remembered less as climate history than as a cautionary study in how youth activism can be manufactured — and how readily an international press corps, hungry for a photogenic child with a message, will decline to check. The tragedy is the ordinary one: somewhere inside the fabricated CV is a girl from Manipur who did stand outside Parliament for a week, and did get thrown off a stage in Dubai, and whose actual story was erased by the people promoting it.