Police looked on as Meitei mobs targeted Kuki in Imphal: Survivors

The police allowed a free run to Meitei mobs that destroyed churches and tribal homes when Manipur exploded into unprecedented ethnic violence on May 3, survivors of the madness said.

A mob which descended on Imphal’s Paite Veng area on the evening of May 3 did not spare even Dr H Kamkhenthang, a leading anthropologist and author from a Kuki sub-tribe.

He was studying in his library in his bungalow, which he had built with his life’s savings, when all hell broke loose.

Suddenly, a frenzied mob gathered near the locality, pelting stones and shouting slogans asking residents to leave.

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“It was like Germany’s Kristallnacht. All hell broke loose as racial tensions bubbled over and the mob started attacking our houses,” said Hoihnu Houzel, a journalist and daughter of the researcher on north-eastern tribes.

Begged for help

Houzel said she frantically telephoned Manipur chief minister N Birean Singh and other ministers asking for help.

But the mob was allowed to continue with the rampage for two to three hours, she told PTI.

Her old father and other family members hurriedly used a ladder to escape to a Meitei neighbour’s house.

Paite Veng is a colony where many affluent Paite tribal as well as Meitei families lived in the heart of Imphal.

“Everyone I rang up promised help, promised that the army will rescue us but the reality is that the army was sent in much later,” Hauzel said.

Their neighbour Vungkham Hangzo, also from the Paite Zomi community, and his wife Madhumati Khwairakpam, a Meitei, had just finished dinner when the mob came.

Recalling horror

Their daughter Manchin recalled that a church opposite their house was burnt. The mob kept pelting stones at their house too.

All those trying to leave with belongings had their bags snatched away. Some were physically beaten up.

Others were given a passage by neighbours who were part of the mob.

Manchin carried her 86-year-old mother and was the last to leave her house.

Next door, her brother, 56-year-old U Thanlkhanlian, had already started moving into a neighbourhood hotel run by Meiteis for safety where Manchin and her family first rushed to safety.

The police came but remained silent spectators, said Thanlkhanlian. Cars parked on the street were first overturned and then set on fire. In no time, several houses were also torched.

“It seemed pre-planned. The crowd got time to wreak mayhem on Kuki and mixed marriage houses in our locality,” he added.

Life’s savings gone

Manchin said that “lovely houses we had grown up in were licked by flames”.

The aged anthropologist, Thanlkhanlian, Manchin and many neighbours who escape the mob were eventually rescued by the army and taken to a camp.

Most of them left for neighbouring states by air to escape the madness.

Some 40 houses in the quiet neighbourhood and a church were lost forever that night along with a brick kiln and farms on the outskirts of Imphal.

Attackers scrawled on the wall of the property in large letters: “Cannot be sold, cannot be bought.”

All the Paite Veng residents now living in different locations in neighbouring states or Delhi said they would not return. “There is no trust, no peace left,” said Manchin.

“We have to start life afresh, elsewhere there is no other way that I can see,” said Thanlkhanlian.

(With agency inputs)