Sekta

Ngangom Dingko Singh was born on 1 January 1979 in Sekta, a village in Imphal East district of Manipur, into a family with nothing. He spent part of his childhood in an orphanage. Nineteen years later he would stand on the top step of an Asian Games podium in Bangkok, and Indian boxing — which had won nothing of consequence for decades — would have a new starting point.

Manipur is a small state with an outsized record in Indian sport, and Dingko's story is the one most often told to explain why. It is not a story about facilities. It is a story about a state-run talent scheme finding a boy nobody was looking after.

Between December 1990 and January 1991 the Sports Authority of India ran a talent assessment camp at Khuman Lampak in Imphal. Dingko, then eleven, was identified there. He joined SAI on 12 February 1991 and began training under the coach Leishangthem Ibomcha Singh, himself a distinguished Manipuri boxer and one of the most consequential coaches in Indian amateur boxing.

He did not take long. In November 1991, at the seventh Sub-Junior National Boxing Championship at Ambala, he won gold in the under-twelve category. He went on winning through the junior ranks. By the mid-1990s he was a national-level bantamweight of obvious quality.

1997 and the Road to Bangkok

His international breakthrough came in 1997, when he won the King's Cup in Bangkok and was named the best boxer of the tournament. It was a significant result on a competitive circuit and it put him in the frame for the 1998 Asian Games.

What happened next has become part of Indian sporting folklore. He was left out of the Asian Games squad, for reasons that were never satisfactorily explained. He took it badly — he went on a drinking bout and collapsed after a long session. He was eventually selected, and travelled to Bangkok.

Bangkok, December 1998

In the bantamweight, 54 kilogram, division at the 1998 Asian Games, Dingko beat Thailand's Wong Prages Sontaya in the semi-final — a home boxer, in front of a home crowd. In the final he faced Timur Tulyakov of Uzbekistan, then ranked fifth in the world. Tulyakov retired after the fourth round.

Dingko Singh had won Asian Games gold. India had not won a boxing gold at the Asian Games since 1982. The result travelled far beyond boxing: it was front-page news, and it changed how Indian sports administration thought about the discipline. Investment followed, coaching structures were strengthened, and the generation that produced Vijender Singh, Mary Kom and the boxers of the 2008 and 2012 Olympic cycles came up in a system that Dingko's win had helped justify.

He was awarded the Arjuna Award in 1998.

He competed at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, though without a medal. He did not turn professional. Instead he joined the Indian Navy, where he served as a boxing coach and rose to the rank of Master Chief Petty Officer 1st Class.

The coaching mattered. Manipur's boxing pipeline in the 2000s and 2010s ran substantially through people who had either trained with Dingko or been coached by him, and his presence in the state was a standing demonstration that a boy from a village outside Imphal could reach the top of a continental sport. He was awarded the Padma Shri, India's fourth-highest civilian honour, in 2013.

Illness

In 2017 Dingko was diagnosed with liver cancer. The years that followed were difficult, and they became public in a way that reflected poorly on Indian sport. He required extended treatment, and appeals were made on his behalf for financial assistance — an uncomfortable situation for a Padma Shri and Asian Games champion, and one that prompted a good deal of comment about how India looks after its former athletes.

He continued treatment through the COVID-19 pandemic, contracted the virus, and suffered complications afterwards. He died on 10 June 2021 in Manipur, aged forty-two.

What Sekta Sent Out

The tributes at his death consistently made the same point: that his 1998 gold was the moment Indian boxing began to believe it belonged at international level. Every Indian boxing medal since sits downstream of a fight in Bangkok that a boy from Sekta was very nearly not allowed to contest.

The manner of his death also left a mark on the way Indian sport discusses its retired athletes. A boxer who had delivered the country a continental title at nineteen, and who had then spent two decades coaching for the Navy, spent his last years fundraising for his own treatment. The debate that followed about pensions and medical cover for former internationals is, in its way, part of what he left behind.

Manipur has since produced an extraordinary number of Indian internationals across boxing, weightlifting, football and archery. Dingko Singh is the figure that lineage is usually traced back to — an orphaned village boy picked out at a talent camp at eleven, who beat the fifth-ranked bantamweight in the world at nineteen, and then spent the rest of a short life coaching the next set.