Unbreakable (Mary Kom) by Mary Kom

Author:Mary Kom [Kom, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: HarperCollins India
Published: 2013-11-25T05:00:00+00:00

7

The other face of Manipur

My own life had been limited to coping with the hardships of poverty and then the rigours of my sporting life. But that one incident woke me up to the reality of the world around me.

Manipur has been an insurgency-torn state since the 1980s. With a population of a mere twenty-seven lakh, it is home to over thirty militant groups. They are best known to the outside world by their acronyms, most notably NSCN-IM, NSCN-K, UNLF and KNO.

These groups dominate different areas where they run parallel governments, each with its own constitution and vision for the future. People who live in remote villages with no police or army security are the most vulnerable. Chiefs of villages are given demand letters, and if they fail to fulfil the militants’ wishes, they are kidnapped, very often never to return. Sometimes the demand is for supplies, at other times that the village should arrange recruits for one or the other organization.

After Christmas Onler and I returned to Imphal on 27 December. As we were relaxing over a cup of tea, the phone rang: unknown insurgents had kidnapped my father-in-law. He had just stepped out of the house to collect coal for the meiphu, a traditional heater that’s used in every Manipuri home during the winters. An eyewitness later told us that some men walked up to him and asked him to follow them for a talk. For a while, no one noticed his absence. When the family finally realized he was gone, an alarm was raised and the whole village turned up to search for him. Because there was no electricity in the villages (there still isn’t), it was dark everywhere. The frantic search yielded no results. There was a forest right next to the village and insurgents found it easy to wreak havoc and escape into it. Later that night, my father-in-law was found dead some distance away. To this day we do not know who killed him. That there was no demand for money or any other kind of intimation from the insurgents made the whole situation even more painful and frustrating for us.

By the time we reached the village, he had already been found dead. The shock and grief we felt then is beyond anything I have the capacity to describe. Onler was devastated. Till then, it had never occurred to us that we would ever be directly affected by the political problems of our state. These sorts of things always happened to other people. It was a while before the reality, that we were the victims of insurgency, actually sunk in. Friends and relatives started pouring in. New Year’s Day was bleak. It remains the most painful chapter in our lives.

At the funeral people came to pay their respects. We were insecure and afraid. Who were the killers? Why did they kill him? What did they want? Would they come again? We stayed in the village until 2007 dawned cold and bitter, and then returned to Imphal.

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