The long wait for closure for families of ‘missing’ people in Manipur

The police are often helpless as the ethnic clashes have made coordinated investigation encompassing the hills and the valley next to impossible.

Jul 29, 2023 - 07:30

The long wait for closure for families of ‘missing’ people in Manipur

Naorem Prakash Singh’s family last saw him on May 11. The 42-year-old, according to his wife Naorem Sanatombi, had gone looking for rice in the granary attached to their home.

The family at the time had been living in Sanatombi’s parents’ place in the town of Nambol in Manipur’s Bishnupur district. Their own home, around 40 km southwards, in a village called Torbung Bangla in the same district, had come under attack from a mob on May 3, when ethnic clashes had erupted between the Meitei and Kuki communities.

Torbung Bangla, precariously located along the border of the Kuki-dominated hills and the Meitei-majority Imphal valley, had come under an onslaught so severe that it was almost completely obliterated in a matter of hours.

By May 11, the initial ferocity of the violence seemed to have subsided. Prakash Singh, his family said, thought it was a good time to make a quick trip back home to retrieve what the mob had left behind. He was supposed to be back in a few hours – but he has not returned to date.

“We heard that he was captured by the Kukis,” said Sanatombi. “But there is no confirmation.”