Cpt. Rishwat
Test Star
- Joined
- May 8, 2010
- Runs
- 39,969
How Manipur mob violence and gang rapes ‘shamed’ India
When the mob began to tear off the two women’s clothes, Sasang struggled to free himself from the armed men’s hold. “I wanted to kill them for what they were doing,” he said. “But they held me back, saying they would kill me instead.”
The women were stripped, paraded naked, mocked and sexual assaulted before they were dragged into a field and gang raped. Two male relatives who tried to save them were beaten to death by the mob of up to a thousand men.
The assailants were ethnic Meiteis, the majority group in the northeastern Indian state of Manipur, on the border with Myanmar, where ethnic bloodletting against the minority Kuki hill tribes since May has claimed more than 200 lives and forced an estimated 50,000 to flee their homes.
Sasang, not his real name, is the husband of one female rape victim and the older cousin of the other. After the assaults the Meitei mob set fire to houses and ordered him and everyone else in the village to leave.
“They told us to leave and not to look at the dead bodies, saying, ‘Get out if you don’t want to be slaughtered’,” he said. “I cannot forget that horror show. I saw it all with my own eyes.”
It would take another two months for the rest of India to see that horror show, in grainy video footage that would shock the nation and force Narendra Modi, the prime minister, to speak about what was happening in Manipur for the first time.
“The entire country has been shamed,” Modi said. “What happened to the daughters of Manipur can never be forgiven.” But he had nothing to say of the ethnic character of the violence, nor how it began, let alone to address mounting questions about the involvement of his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the apparent collusion of police in allowing Meitei militias armed with looted paramilitary police weaponry from attacking Kuki villages.
What has happened in Manipur has distinct echoes of the pogroms in 2002 in Gujarat when Modi was the state’s chief minister, and of the Hindu majoritarianism he has long championed, to the detriment of India’s many minorities from Muslims to Christians.
The violence began on May 3 when Kukis took to the streets to protest against a court’s recommendation that the Meitei be given the same tribal status as the Kukis, allowing them to buy land in the underdeveloped hills of Manipur. Such status is a constitutional safeguard to protect the land, culture and identity of India’s most historically disadvantaged groups, the majority of whom are now Christians.
But inflammatory rhetoric from Manipur leaders, such as Biren Singh, the BJP chief minister, helped create “a narrative where the Meiteis have come to believe that they are the original inhabitants of the land and the Kukis are essentially interlopers,” according to Barkha Dutt, India’s best known war correspondent. Singh labelled the Kukis as “foreign immigrants, drug smugglers and terrorists,” responsible for all this remote border region’s problems.
Meenakshi Ganguly, the deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch said: “The BJP tendency to stir up majoritarian sentiments to win votes has long had tragic consequences on communal harmony. In Manipur, members of a violent group from the majority Hindu Meitei community have been identified as leading attacks by victims from the Christian Kuki tribal community. These violent vigilante groups, including in Manipur, apparently believe that they enjoy the patronage and protection of the BJP administration.”
The night of the protest, Meitei militias fanned out and attacked Kuki villages across the Imphal river valley. In the village of Phainom, Sasang gathered community leaders to broker an agreement which would promote peace. “It was after they heard about the meeting that they attacked,” he said. The mob arrived in Phainom accompanied by the police. “The police were there when the women were raped,” Sasang said. “They did nothing, they just stood by.”
Across the Imphal valley, similar events were unfolding. Two young Kuki women, Olivia Chongloi and Florence Hangsing, were dragged from the car wash where they worked and gang-raped before their throats were slit. In two days thousands of Kuki homes and businesses were torched and tens of thousands displaced, hiding in the hills or seeking refuge in relief camps hastily erected by the Indian army sent to quell the violence.
Manipur now resembles a war zone, its verdant hills and valleys Balkanised into heavily guarded ethnic zones, with bunkers and sandbags marking out frontlines. For either group to stray into the other’s zone is considered a death sentence. Four months after the women’s slaughter, their bodies still lie in a morgue in Imphal city, their relatives unable to travel even the half-hour journey into Meitei territory to collect them.
Almost 300 churches have been burned, including those of the minority of Meitei who follow Christianity, derided by Hindu nationalists as the religion of colonisation, despite the Kukis’ prominent role in fighting the British Raj.
Thousands of stranded Kukis have been flown out, first by military helicopter then by plane in what Kuki leaders have labelled an act of state sponsored ethnic cleansing. Among them was Kit Vaiphei, 17, who was rescued from a Meitei mob that included his own classmates and later flown to Delhi. “I tried to speak with them, plead with them but they said, ‘Get out of here or we will kill you,’” he said. “None of them are in college any more. They are all on the frontline.”
While Kuki “village defence forces” are mostly armed with hunting rifles and some improvised weapons, Meitei militias carry automatic rifles, grenade launchers and even mortars looted from paramilitary police stores. The authorities say 5,000 looted weapons remain in circulation. “This is the first time in independent India’s history that mortars [and] machine guns are being used,” Sushant Singh, an Indian defence analyst, said. “Unless you bring those weapons back, there’s no way you can bring the walls down.”
That may be impossible as long as one side in the conflict is seen to have the support of the state. “Who gave them these weapons?” asked Nick Zou, a Kuki journalist who took part in the May 3 protest march. “Who gave them the authority to roam around freely with these guns?”
Hejang Misao, a Kuki activist, said that simultaneous armed attacks on Kuki communities spread across such a wide area could not have taken place without planning: “They already had the guns, they were just waiting for the day.”
Vaiphai agrees. “There’s no way of attacking every Kuki community in one night. It’s impossible.”
Efforts to get the news out about what was happening in Manipur were stymied when the authorities shut down mobile internet, ostensibly to stop the spread of misinformation. “Instead, Manipur burned in the dark,” Zou said.
The state’s Meitei-majority police forces, under Singh’s command, went to extraordinary lengths to prevent unauthorised versions of events from leaving the state. After three senior Indian journalists from the Editors Guild of India came to Manipur at the invitation of the army, the police opened criminal charges against them for spreading enmity between communities.
The guild’s report noted “clear indications that the leadership of the state became partisan during the conflict.” It “should have avoided taking sides in the ethnic conflict but failed to do its duty as a democratic government which should have represented the entire state.” Singh accused the guild of “trying to create more clashes in the state of Manipur” saying they had “come to pour venom” on the communities’ wounds.
More horrific videos have since surfaced, showing brutal violence continuing long after May — on both sides of the conflict — belying Modi’s claim in his Independence Day speech on August 15 that “peace [was] slowly returning to Manipur.”
One video, from July 2, shows the severed head of David Thiek, a Kuki defence force fighter who was beaten and dismembered and burned in his home. Other footage from July 7 shows a Meitei man, Ngaleiba Sagolsem, being beaten by a group of men and his execution-style shooting.
If Vaiphai ever returns, he says, it will be to a Kuki-only enclave, not Imphal, where the police recently evicted the last five Kuki families for their own safety. “I miss home, I really miss it but I can’t go back there,” he said. “Even our classmates were hunting us. “
“If the state want to end this they could,” said Misao, the Kuki activist. “India is a rising superpower but it cannot even control the violence in one small state after four months?”
How Manipur mob violence and gang rapes ‘shamed’ India
When the mob began to tear off the two women’s clothes, Sasang struggled to free himself from the armed men’s hold. “I wanted to kill them for what they were dowww.thetimes.co.uk
300 churches burned, and police standing by watching. It's a familiar story, and once again fingers are being pointed at the government which is made up of politiicans who fan the flames of ethnic division.
