Death stalks the streets of insurgency-ravaged Manipur all the time where the only certainty is the uncertainty notwithstanding heavy deployment of Army, paramilitary personnel and commandos all armed to the teeth.
The city turns into a ghost town just after 6 p.m. with people starting to rush back home from their work place while most of the business establishments, restaurants down their shutters at the stroke of the dusk. All the cabs, auto rickshaws go off the road, forcing the people to remain inside the safety of their house.
The only thing that remains on the dark streets and lanes of the city are armed commandos dressed in camouflage fatigue and armoured vehicles of the commandos patrolling the city.
“It is dangerous to keep open my shop till late in the evening as ‘they’ (militants) may come asking for money (extortion). Disobeying their diktat means inviting death. Even police commandos are not trustworthy as they also sometime harass people at the drop of the hat,” said a trader in heavily guarded Thangal Bazaar in the heart of the city.
Government employees posted in different remote parts of the state are living a very insecure life as the threat from militants always haunts them. An executive engineer, Tomal Singh, and a section officer, L Mangi Singh, of Manipur State Electricity Department were abducted by militants from Tamei sub-division of Tamenglong district of the state last Friday and have remained untraced since then.
The family members of the abducted persons informed the media that they had been abducted in connection with a demand of whooping Rs 15 crore slapped by a militant outfit called United People’s Party of Kangleipak (UPPK). The family members have urged the government to secure release of the two government employees even as some civil society groups staged protest in the city denouncing “abduction for money” by ultras.
The situation in the state has turned for the worse post July 23 “fake encounter” killing of a former militant, Sanjit Kumar, and a pregnant women, Rabina Devi, in the heart of Imphal city in broad daylight by Manipur police commandos.
The protest led by Apunba Lup, an umbrella organisation of civil society groups, is still continuing with the state government failing to respond to their key demand of exemplary punishment to the commandos involved in the “fake encounter”. The meetings so far held between the state government and Apunba Lup have failed to resolve the issue. Top leaders of the Lup are still in jail after they had been booked under the National Security Act during the height of the protest.
