This story first appeared in India Today
That the horrific act of destroying not just the body but the very soul of two utterly helpless women should be recorded, reeks of sadism and the lowest levels of depravity which one tends to believe is no longer present in a civilised society.
The video of two women paraded naked and later mercilessly gang-raped and left to the elements is a pogrom well planned and executed. As a woman, to say that the video sends shudders down one’s spine is a gross understatement. This is an act executed meticulously by people high on something, which has succeeded in numbing their conscience, if they have any.
These are foul-mouthed misanthropic misogynists that can be hired to carry out a task. And what’s that task? It is, in simple language, the task of creating so much terror among the Kuki-Zo people that they will voluntarily move out of Manipur and after which, there will be a capture of the abandoned spaces by Meiteis from the Imphal valley. This has been the modus operandi.
And the fact that young men, who are fed on the ideology of hatred and revenge, have been under training under the watch of Chief Minister N Biren Singh himself and have sworn undying loyalty to him, is clear enough that they were given a task and they have carried it out to the tee.
That the horrific act of destroying not just the body but the very soul of two utterly helpless women should be recorded, reeks of sadism and the lowest levels of depravity which one tended to believe is no longer present in a civilised society. But sorry, in Manipur, sadism exists and is cheer-led by the so-called women guardians of Meitei society — the Meira Paibis — who have prevented the arrest of such blood-thirsty villains in the past, on the plea that they are defending Meitei pride. And now the Meira Paibis are silent!
Don’t they have anything to say when women of another community are subjected to the most villainous form of abuse? Can women be so bound by tribal and ethnic loyalties that they can sit and watch their sons and brothers violating and defiling the sacredness of womanhood? Manipur has a plethora of academics too, some of whom have been waxing eloquent on the present issue and have taken stances that are overtly partisan. Will they now speak up against this barbaric act which is a crime not just against the Kuki-Zo women but a crime against humanity? Someone has rightly said that when a philosopher tries to be a politician, he ceases to be a philosopher.
So much has been written on the present crisis in Manipur and the deafening silence of the Indian state on the atrocities happening there on a daily basis for 77 days. Prime Minister Narendra Modi deigned to open his mouth only this morning before the beginning of Parliament session. The attack not just on the two women whose spiritual disfigurement was recorded but on many other Kuki-Zo women, men and children, calls the bluff on the much-touted ‘Beti Padhao, Beti Bachao’ slogan that has in recent times gone silent. Indeed, we in India, and particularly the BJP-led NDA government, has been able to coin a slogan a day but the implementation remains a challenge.
Rape as an instrument of war is well understood but is there a war on in Manipur where rape has been used as an instrument to subjugate and terrorise the Kuki-Zo people? The genesis of these atrocities is in the narrative that the Kuki-Zo people are not indigenous to Manipur but are migrants from the Chin Hills of Burma.
History tells us that the Kuki-Zo-Paite people inhabited the Chin Hills of Burma when the idea of territoriality was yet unknown and they moved into Manipur when they found it less rugged and more productive. The fact is that they were accepted by the Meitei kings and became their warriors in their fight against the Burmese in the 1820s. There are Meiteis in Burma too, so to say that the Kuki-Chins are interlopers that now need to be hounded out of their hearths and homes is not just untenable but a rewriting of history which is fraught.
The cruelties embedded in the conversations on social media; the song composed by the popular Meitei singer Tapta which openly calls for a genocide of Kukis and against whom an FIR was filed on July 13 for promoting enmity, defamation and incitement to violence all point to one thing – an inherent hatred for the Kuki-Zo people.
Mind you, Tapta is a hero for the Meiteis. It is this congenital hatred for the Kuki’s which has been lying dormant all this while and which has now been manifested in different ways and by different extremist outfits who don’t seem to have a dearth of arms. It is important to ask where the arms are coming from!
The latest video, which has shaken the souls of women and a large section of men too across India and the world and who now stand in solidarity with the Kuki-Zo community, should not end in condemnations alone. These voices of sanity should work at dismantling the triggers of structural violence embedded in the ethno-centric conflicts in the region and the fight for scarce resources, particularly land.
What Manipur needs at the helm today is an enlightened pragmatist, not a Chief Minister who is an overtly partisan politician and who watches as Manipur regresses into a failed state where the rule of law is now so compromised that it only protects one community against another. The Kuki-Zo people are inhabitants of the hills of Manipur and no amount of persecution against them can change the facts.
They may not have been able to fight back now because of the suddenness of the conflict. But victims today can be victimizers and oppressors tomorrow. This is what psychologists and psychiatrists tell us. The tribals across India’s North East are in a state of suspended animation; too stunned to react but react they will at some point and that is something that the Indian state might have to contend with and regurgitate about.
Remember this has been a conflict zone and region. There are many groups under suspension of operations agreement with Government of India. It would be against the interests of the country if these groups go underground and fight the state yet again.