Pramot Singh

Mayengbam Pramot Singh, commonly known as M. Pramot Singh or Pramot Singh, is a Meitei hindu nationalist from Manipur, India . He is the founder and chief of Meitei Leepun, an organisation that he describes as a socio-cultural movement but that has been characterised by Human Rights Watch, the United Nations Human Rights Office, the Jamestown Foundation and a broad range of Indian and international journalists as an armed Meitei vigilante outfit operating with political patronage from the former state government of Manipur.

Together with Arambai Tenggol, Meitei Leepun is identified in human rights reporting on the 2023–2025 Manipur violence as one of two principal Meitei non-state armed formations involved in mob attacks on Kuki-Zo civilians . The two organisations are alleged to have led or participated in killings, the burning of villages and churches, the looting of state armouries, threats against human rights defenders, and acts of sexual violence against Kuki-Zo women. In October 2023, after he had repeatedly failed to appear before the court, the Chief Judicial Magistrate at Churachandpur issued a non-bailable arrest warrant. As of mid-2026, the warrant has not been publicly reported to have been executed, and Singh has continued to give interviews and issue statements from his office in Imphal.

Singh has denied that Meitei Leepun bears organisational responsibility for any specific killings or sexual assaults, and has framed the criminal case against him as politically motivated and a response to his public defence of Meitei interests. No public reporting indicates that he has been charged under India's Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act or other dedicated anti-terrorism legislation, although Human Rights Watch and other monitors have argued that Meitei Leepun's documented conduct meets the description of organised political violence and that the failure of the Indian authorities to investigate it reflects an environment of impunity. The most substantial profile published in the mainstream Indian press, in The Hindu in July 2023, records that he studied clinical psychology at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda in Vadodara from 1989 to 1991 and then obtained a master's degree in clinical psychology from Gujarat University in Ahmedabad. He married Radha Wangkheirakpam in 2000. Independent verification of these accounts is limited, and The Hindu has noted that the public record between his graduation and the founding of Meitei Leepun in 2015 is essentially blank. Journalists from The Quint, Scroll and other outlets who have visited his home and his office have noted that the walls display portraits of figures including the RSS ideologue M. S. Golwalkar, the then Chief Minister of Manipur N. Biren Singh, Mother Teresa and Mahatma Gandhi, a juxtaposition that Singh himself appears to curate.

Hate speech and incitement

Singh's public statements in the months immediately before the outbreak of violence on 3 May 2023, and in the early weeks of the conflict itself, are the central evidentiary basis for the criminal case against him and have been quoted extensively in human rights reporting and in mainstream Indian media.

In an interview with the journalist Karan Thapar for The Wire, recorded on 6 June 2023, Singh described the Kuki community as outsiders and tenants, denied that they were indigenous to Manipur, and predicted that the entire Kuki population would be wiped out from a contested fifteen-kilometre stretch of territory where, he claimed, they had set up roadblocks and encroachments . He also stated that civil war was imminent and that the Kukis would be unable to defend themselves if the central government did not intervene.

Mobilisation before the outbreak

On the evening of 2 May 2023, Meitei Leepun called for a counter-blockade of the Imphal valley in response to the planned tribal solidarity march. According to a security official quoted by Scroll, this counter-blockade represented the first direct confrontation between Meitei and Kuki communities and marked the transition of the conflict from a dispute between Kuki groups and the state to a full inter-communal mobilisation. Although Singh has not been individually charged in relation to the looting, the mobs which carried out the attacks for which Meitei Leepun has been named are reported to have been armed with weapons from these armouries.

Allegations of sexual violence

The most widely reported case of sexual violence during the conflict, and the case that brought Meitei Leepun by name to international attention, concerned two Kuki-Zo women, aged twenty-one and forty-two, who were paraded naked through a Meitei mob and sexually assaulted at B. Phainom village in Kangpokpi district on 4 May 2023. The 21-year-old was gang-raped, according to the survivors' FIR . A 26-second video of the incident surfaced on social media in late July 2023, prompting national and international condemnation and the transfer of the case from the Manipur Police to the Central Bureau of Investigation on the direction of the Supreme Court of India.

The First Information Report filed by the survivors named approximately nine hundred to one thousand persons, identified as suspected members of several Meitei youth organisations, with Meitei Leepun explicitly listed alongside Kangleipak Kanba Lup, Arambai Tenggol, the World Meitei Council and the Schedule Tribe Demand Committee.

Political patronage and impunity

A persistent theme in human rights reporting on Meitei Leepun has been the question of state patronage. Human Rights Watch has written that the BJP-led Manipur state government under Chief Minister N. Biren Singh, which remained in power until his resignation and the imposition of President's Rule on 13 February 2025, demonstrated a pro-Meitei bias in its response to the violence, and that the state administration, including the police, allegedly protected vigilante groups such as Meitei Leepun and Arambai Tenggol.

The Manipur Police registered an FIR against him on 8 July 2023 . He was booked under sections 120B (criminal conspiracy), 153A (promoting enmity between groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence or language and acts prejudicial to the maintenance of harmony), 504 (intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of the peace), 505 (statements conducing to public mischief), 506 (criminal intimidation) and 34 (acts done by several persons in furtherance of a common intention) of the Indian Penal Code. . Neither Singh, then aged fifty-six, nor his driver was injured. A team from Lamphel police station and the Manipur Forensic Science Laboratory examined the scene, and a case was registered. The identity and affiliation of the attackers were not publicly established.

Reception and assessment

The Indian-language and English-language press coverage of Singh has been sharply polarised . Profiles in mainstream outlets such as The Hindu, Frontline, Scroll, The Quint and The Wire have been broadly critical, treating him as an architect of an ethnonationalist mobilisation whose rhetoric directly preceded and arguably enabled the violence of May 2023. Reporting in The Week has acknowledged that within sections of Meitei society he is regarded as a hero and a public intellectual, with a personal following organised around his hilltop compound.

The independent human rights record on Meitei Leepun, drawn together in Human Rights Watch's March 2025 report and in the Jamestown Foundation's 2025 analysis, has placed Singh's organisation in the company of armed civil society formations associated with mass violence and state patronage, while specifically condemning the threats to human rights defenders and the impunity of the perpetrators of sexual violence during the conflict. The OHCHR has joined this critical record through its statement on the threats to Babloo Loitongbam. Kuki-Zo civil society has gone further and has called for Meitei Leepun to be proscribed.