Manipur: Can’t CM Biren Singh’s football stadium project wait?

It’s not really unexpected for Manipur to plan a world-class football stadium there, given that the state has been the hub of the sport in the country for a while now. Far better an idea than say, the upcoming international cricket stadium in Varanasi — famous for its ghats and temples rather than producing any cricketer of repute.

However, the unveiling of such a plan by N.Biren Singh, the state's beleaguered chief minister — even if he is also a former footballer himself — could not have been more ill-timed.

Singh, who leads the BJP government in the North-Eastern state, has been playing the thick-skinned politician for close to one-and-a-half years now, all the while Manipur has been on fire — ever since the simmering strife between the Meiteis, wanting tribal rights, and the Kukis, who strive to hold on to the little those rights offer them of a harder living in the hills, exploded into borderline civil war.

A conservative figure from the Human Rights Watch puts the death toll at 200, while more than 60,000 people have been displaced and have been living in cramped shelters for than a year. The fires may at best be burning lower right now, but the sporadic violence continues and nothing has really been resolved by the recent 'meet' in Delhi.

Yet Singh has seized this moment to announce plans for a stadium, along with a number of development projects, during his visit to see Kiren Rijiju, union minister for parliamentary affairs and minority affairs, also himself from the North-East.

’We discussed advancing major development projects in the state under the purview of the ministry of minority affairs. In addition, deliberated on developing a world-class football stadium in Manipur to nurture talent and uplift sportspersons,’ Biren Singh posted on his X handle. 

In better times, such news would have been music to the ears of the football-crazy public of Manipur, but both ministers seem to have forgotten the situation on the ground. Months of ethnic violence have made anxiety over protecting the home and hearth and prayers for normalcy the norm, not the adrenaline of an ardent rivalry in a common love for the sport.

The damage inflicted on football in particular — the sport which has seen a series of women footballers from the state excelling on the international stage, alongside the likes of Rennedy Singh or Gourmangi Singh — has been severe.

The incident of Chinglensana Singh’s house being burnt down in Churachandrapur last year — while the footballer was away for an AFC Cup play-off match — was yet a ‘lesser’ one of the disturbing news items to come out of Manipur in May 2023.

A number of Manipur football insiders tell of how the Premier League was stopped midway. The Manipur Youth League had already been stopped, and two of the Manipur teams in the I-League — the Neroca FC and Trau FC — had fared several notches below expectations, handicapped by curfews and cancelled practice sessions and the unavailability of support staff and accommodation for players.

Talent aplenty

What is even more galling is that the state, which has historically drawn on its talent pool from the majority Meitei community as well as the Kukis, who were Christians, can no longer have them representing itself. Yet Manipur still continues to send more than 50 players to different teams in the ongoing Indian Super League (ISL), with Punjab FC alone accounting for eight of them.

At the junior level, eight boys from the privately owned Classic Football Academy in Imphal make up for a third of the current Under-17 national team too!

Naoba Thangjam, director of the academy, told National Herald, ‘’No doubt football has taken a beating here due to the uncertainty here over last one-and-a-half years. There is relative peace right now, but for football to flourish, we need the right environment.’’ That was before the more recent flare-up of violence.

The need of the hour, then, is to restore confidence in the young footballers, so they can first return to the turf again to resume the ‘beautiful game’.

Let the regular tournaments and camps also get underway. Till then, the stadium can wait!