Assembly Elections 2022: Manipur CM’s son-in-law’s fleet footedness has served him well

MLA of Sagolband, RK Imo Singh has won twice from the constituency. (Photo credit: Twitter/@imosingh)

One of the most powerful candidates in the Manipur state elections is also a controversial one.

MLA of Sagolband, RK Imo Singh has declared assets worth a little over Rs 5 crore, which seems conservative but still is five times the declared assets of his father-in-law and the Chief Minister of the State, N Biren Singh.

But his notoriety does not come from his relative prosperity. That comes from Imo’s ability to ‘adapt’.  

Imo has switched party affiliations twice in the last decade–in 2014, he left Manipur State Congress Party and joined the Indian National Congress; and in 2020, he was expelled from INC and a little over a year later he joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). 

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The INC had shown him the door in August 2020, after he failed to show up for the party’s no-confidence motion against the state’s BJP-led government. It was the second time that year that he was acting against the interests of his parent party. Two months before that, in June 2020, he had voted for BJP’s candidate Leishemba Sanajaoba in Rajya Sabha. 

Sanajaoba secured 28 votes while INC nominee T Mangibabu bagged 24 votes. In the 60-member Manipur assembly, 52 members cast their votes. The remaining eight members, including three BJP MLAs, who had resigned from the primary membership, did not exercise their franchise. The seven rebel Congress MLAs, who had earlier joined BJP, were allowed to enter the assembly to cast their votes.

But Imo accused former CM and opposition leader O Ibobi Singh for his expulsion. Imo said that Singh wanted to control the party as he fancied. 

After a few months of joining the BJP, in January 2022, Imo was rewarded pretty generously. He was given the party ticket to contest from Sagolband, from where he had won twice–2012 and 2017. It infuriated his new political colleagues, that Congress defectors were being favoured over BJP veterans. They burnt effigies of CM N Biren Singh and the BJP state president Sharda Devi.

But 45-year-old Imo has a knack of landing on his feet. As he should, because he comes from a political family and is married into another.

He is the son of former chief minister of Manipur, R.K Jaichandra Singh, a prominent Congress leader and first Union Minister from Manipur during Rajiv Gandhi’s prime ministership. 

His wife is Biren Singh’s daughter Anjubala Nongthombam. They have two children.

A political observer and a voter in Sagolband, Konthoujam Chaoba said that Imo has many things going for him. One, he is with the party with a majority in the House. Two, “being the son-in-law of the Chief Minister helps”. Three, a state like Manipur, an electoral win has a lot to do with the person and little to do with the party, according to Chaoba. 

An MA-LLB from Delhi University, Imo is a member of the Supreme Court Bar Association, and the President of Manipur Cricket Association, which is affiliated to the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI).

Even with all of this, the election is unlikely to be easy for him. The last state elections in 2017 saw him win by a thin margin. He got a total of 9,211 votes, while BJP’s Kh. Loken got 9,192 votes. The difference was just 19 votes.