Adisturbing video clip of two Kuki-Zomi women being paraded naked by a group of men in Manipur compelled Prime Minister Narendra Modi to break his deafening silence on ethnic violence in the state. The clip, which was recorded on May 4, went viral on July 19.
The source of this structural violence needs to be addressed. The malicious campaign against the Kuki-Zomi group must be stopped.
The incident shows how the weaponisation of rape in a conflict has not only outraged and brutalised the modesty of the women, and, by extension, of the targeted Kuki-Zomi community, but also shaken the collective conscience of Indian citizens.
It also demonstrates that howsoever hard state-controlled media or oppressive regimes may attempt to conceal or downplay acts of brutality, including the weaponisation of rape, to oppress any targeted group, there are inherent limitations to their efforts to suppress the truth.
What then becomes apparent is the universal truth that any act of violation of women’s bodies, regardless of the pretext or context, is unacceptable. This universal truth has a strange way of revealing itself even as the pain and anger that this incident has unleashed transcend ethnicity and territorial borders.
The pathos, pain and collective shame unleashed by this atrocious crime was aptly depicted in an illustration, which shows a woman, who was sexually assaulted, being rescued by two men. She is wrapped in a bloodstained Tricolour, and leaves behind a trail of bloodstains on the footpath they traverse.
The incident also exhibits the power of ‘conversion specialists’ during communal riots; they effectively use fake news and disinformation to systematically mobilise mobs to perpetrate violence against a community under a favourable institutional ecosystem. Fake news, such as the alleged rape of a Meitei nursing student by a Kuki-Zomi mob in Churachandpur Medical College and the bodies of 37 Meitei rape victims being kept in the mortuary of Shija Hospital, was widely circulated on the intervening night of May 3 and 4. Although both instances of the alleged rape had been debunked by the nurse’s father and the Shija Hospital authorities in Imphal, respectively, such fake news and disinformation were accepted at face value by militant Meitei ragtag mobs, who used these as pretexts to indulge in ‘gangrapes’, justifying them as acts of retribution against Kuki-Zomi women.
This became evident from the story of a survivor that was posted on social media by the Zomi Students’ Federation. One of the survivors who barely escaped rape after being paraded naked recounted how the mobs used fake news to justify their atrocious act of raping a 21-year-old woman from B Phainom village on May 4. The same pretext was used when two young female nursing students of Nightingale Nursing Institute at Porompat in Imphal were molested and left unconscious on the same day. The next day, two women from Khopibung village of Kangpokpi district, who worked in a car wash shop at Konung Mamang, Imphal, were handed over by women’s groups to miscreants, who gagged and dragged them inside a room. They were molested and raped for over two hours on the same pretext; later, they succumbed to their injuries.
A common thread that runs through these atrocities is the alleged involvement of Meitei women’s groups and the state police in perpetuating this violence. The zero FIR filed on May 18 by the village chief alleged that a Meitei mob, nearly a thousand strong, was mobilised on May 4 not only to attack, vandalise and loot villagers under the cover of the state police commandos, but also indulge in the savage act of gangrape. That the state police allegedly remained a bystander either out of their inability to control the mob or out of sheer complicity was brought into sharp relief during this incident.
Interestingly, the unusually swift action of the state police to apprehend overnight the main accused, who, along with the mob, accosted and eventually raped the 21-year-old woman, after the video went viral (76 days after the crime happened) is in stark contrast to their laidback approach in addressing the FIR for over two months. This belated action of the police also exposes the problematic jurisdictional command of the police; although the village under question lies within Kangpokpi administrative revenue district, it falls in the police jurisdiction of Thoubal district. Physical access to the Thoubal police station, located within a Meitei-dominated district, became impossible for the Kuki-Zomi group after the outbreak of violence. The cross-cutting and overlapping of disparate district administrative and police jurisdictions had an important bearing on the ability or will — forget for a moment the widespread complaint of complicity — of the state police. It became apparent as they failed to contain the rampaging mobs, who attacked and burnt down many Kuki-Zomi villages located in the foothills of Churachandpur and Kangpokpi districts.
This outrageous incident, however, should not restrict our attention to the heinous crime committed against tribal women. It should also alert us to the damaging effect that fake news and disinformation campaigns entail in ways which vilify and frame the Kuki-Zomi group as the antagonistic tribal ‘others’, who in the words of Tapta, songwriter-singer, need to be ‘killed’ to maintain ‘peace’ in Manipur.
Unless the source of this structural violence is holistically addressed and the malicious campaign against the Kuki-Zomi community is stopped, the breaking of PM Modi’s stoic silence and CM Biren Singh’s swift action to arrest the accused may not be sufficient to forestall future heinous crimes against tribal women. Meanwhile, the stained Indian flag used to wrap the gangraped Kuki-Zomi woman in the illustration will remain a powerful image and a reminder of the deep wound that prolonged violence could inflict not only on tribal women’s bodies, but also on the collective conscience of the nation.