Guwahati
A thousand-strong mob, armed with petrol bombs, defied curfew restrictions in place to reach the official residence of Minister of State for External Affairs Rajkumar Ranjan Singh at Kongba in Imphal West and torch the house on Thursday night. Heavily outnumbered, the 22-member security team deployed at the residence was helpless.
This was the second attack on the MoS’ residence with the first being last month when the security personnel had to fire in the air to disperse the mob.
The latest incident of violence in the northeastern State, witnessing clashes between the Kukis and Meiteis over the latter’s demand for inclusion in the Scheduled Tribes (ST) category, is a grim indicator to the situation on ground wherein even VIPs with a security cordon are not safe.
Sources said 20-22 security personnel were on duty at the MoS’ residence at the time of the incident. It comes close on the heels of unidentified miscreants torching the house of Nemcha Kipgen, the lone woman minister in the Biren Singh Government.
Both Kipgen and Union Minister RK Ranjan Singh were not at the house at the time of the incident. Singh was in Kerala.
Maintaining the attack as inhuman, the MoS, a Meitei, told a news agency: “It is extremely sad to see what happened last night. I was told that more than 50 miscreants attacked my home at around 10 pm. Damage has been done to the ground floor and the first floor of my residence. Neither me or anybody from my family was present during that time. Thankfully, nobody got injured.”
“An eye for an eye will make the whole world go blind. Violence doesn’t help any cause. Those who are indulging in this violence are doing a huge disservice to the nation. It also reflects that they are enemies of humanity,” Singh maintained.
A security person at the Minister’s house said that the mob threw petrol bombs from all directions during the attack.
“We couldn’t prevent the incident as the mob was overwhelming and we couldn’t control the situation. They threw petrol bombs coming in from all directions, from the bye lane behind the building and from the front entrance, so we simply couldn’t control the mob,” media reports quoted L Dineshwor Singh, Escort Commander, as saying. The Escort Commander said that around 1,200 people were part of the mob.
Clashes broke out in Manipur after a ‘Tribal Solidarity March’ was organised in the hill districts on May 3 to protest against the Meitei community’s demand for ST status.
