Silence Over Manipur Lays Bare the Crisis of Indian Identity

It took a chilling video of women – stripped naked, paraded, groped and raped – for the horrifying saga of brutal violence and toxic re-territorialisation in Manipur to receive some nation-wide attention.

Why was there a prolonged silence?

One reason is the partisan role of the government that tried to suppress the truth about Manipur under military suppression and internet shutdown. Second is its own criminal silence and complicity in stoking the fires, and patronising of violent mobs of one ethnicity against the other. 

But a third factor is equally significant. States and regions like Manipur that are territorially peripheral, have a different and contested history and have endured long drawn militarised conflict, exist as peripheries in the imagination of Indian nationhood. They are simply seen as territorial spatial units that need to be surveilled and securitised under military repression while its people can be treated as disposables for a misplaced national cause. Horrifying incidents in such spaces are thus viewed as normal, ignored or even legitimised. 

For Manipur, like many other conflict zones in the north-east and Kashmir, which lie on the extreme borders of the physical boundaries and memory of the nation, dehumanising violence is not a novelty. Their landscapes are littered with stories of egregious human rights violations including sexual violence perpetrated both by the state and the non-state actors. Nation-wide outrage is selectively evoked, if at all, only when the crimes are perpetrated by the non-state actors. Those committed by the state are wished away, defended and sometimes even celebrated. A large section of India’s dominant media has allowed itself to be used as a tool of perpetuating the imagination of the nation in which the people from these areas remain invisible, even deemed ‘the other’ because they do not share the same sense of history. Attempts to mainstream them are not based on principles of diversity and accommodation but are rather treated as battles between the conquerors and the vanquished. 

The video that went viral is merely a tip of the iceberg. More reports and allegations of sexual violence, killings, displacements and the shocking territorialisation of Manipur along ethnic lines have now begun to tumble out. The scale of it would be much more horrifying, far more than what we have witnessed in Delhi 1984, Gujarat 2002 and Muzaffarnagar 2013. 

In all these previous cases, the rioters were given a free hand for a few days till the government began to act. In Manipur, the mobs had a free for all situation for two and a half months because Manipur is imagined to be an appendage and not a part of the whole. The Meitei majority had been weaponised against the Kuki tribals – considered the ‘other’ and ‘alien’ even within this restive state – revealing that there exist more layers of exclusion. 

Clashes have now abated but tensions persist – everything kept well under the garb with an imposed internet shutdown, lack of mobile phone connectivity in many areas and a disinterested media. 

The attention that this grave situation has received so far is too little and too disproportionate to the magnitude of what Manipur has witnessed. At the centre of this outrage is the chilling story of sexual assault. 

How the sexual assault cases merit little or no attention in India is also crucial to understanding the deliberate silence of the nation and its media. It took digital images of sexually assaulted tribal Kuki women after the police literally fed them to the mob for the nation to sit up and take notice. It goes without saying that even after the horrifying video went viral, the nation appears to be divided between a sense of shame and whataboutery. More importantly, knowledge of such rapes and sexual violence in Manipur were not unknown before the video suddenly surfaced.

Allegations of women being violently assaulted were already in circulation after the Manipur ethnic violence broke out on May 4. Presumably, the government of Manipur and the Union government too knew about it since complaints and FIRs had been lodged in the police stations at least as early as May 18. It is also common knowledge that women’s bodies are used as weapons of aggression in the kind of crisis that was unfolding in Manipur. It thus calls to question the silence of the nation’s collective conscience which requires disgusting images for incidents like these to wake us up. 

Also read: A Complaint on the May 4 Assault in Manipur Was Sent to NCW in June. But It Never Got a Reply

Rapes fall in the category of crimes that have been ignored and swept under the carpet through deliberate intent across India. For decades after independence and constitutional guarantees of equality and intolerance to injustices, women’s bodies have become markers of male machismo and collective triumph of communities, often with the tacit approval and encouragement by women. Equally, women’s bodies are wrongly deemed as repositories of the honour of the family or the community they belong to. 

This obsession with ‘purity’ of women’s bodies has forbid a collective response against ‘defilement’ of the bodies as part of male privilege or for revenge and humiliating the other. After the Delhi Nirbhaya rape and murder case which sparked immediate nationwide outrage rape finally found some place in the mainstream conversations and national discourse. However, the empathy for the victim and outrage against such crimes continues to be coloured by prejudices of race, caste, class. It is rare for similar spontaneity and outrage to be evoked if the woman is a Dalit, a tribal or a Muslim. If at all, they make it to the news pages, it is left to the few feminists and liberals to speak for them. Unnao, Hathras and Kathua rapes and murders are cases in point. Sexual violence in conflict zones figures at the bottom of this hierarchical pyramid.

Sexual violence and conflict zones with disputed histories thus make a deadly combination engendering in the national conscience a wilful ignorance and forgetfulness of the troubles, strife, traumas and hopes of the people of the most complex and fragile regions of the country. Throw in the Narendra Modi led government’s promotion of majoritarian politics of exclusion across the country and you have a virulent cocktail that can only result in a graver disaster.

Modi’s protégé in Manipur, Biren Singh’s Meitei majoritarian push and his partisan role before and after the Manipur crisis has brought alive the existing ethnic and religious faultlines in Manipur with domino effect in other parts of north-east. 

The Manipur crisis lays bare a national crisis of identity. There is, thus, a need to go beyond ordering independent probes and holding the government accountable for its calculated indifference to Manipur’s blood-soaked battleground, dead bodies, brutalised people, sexually assaulted women, burnt and destroyed homes, displacements and rigid internal borders. 

There is a dire need for redefining the idea of India and re-envisioning it as a nation where the conflict zones that lie on the margins of physical boundaries do not simply exist as territories to be controlled under military jackboots. An inclusive India cannot be built when the people living in these territories continue to be seen as mere expendable appendages in the national imagination. Till that reimagining of Indian nationhood happens, we will continue to witness many Manipur like crisis – in varying degrees of magnitude – and blissfully continue to keep them under the wraps till some ugly image compels us to speak. 

Anuradha Bhasin is executive editor of the Kashmir Times, author of A Dismantled State: The Untold Story of Kashmir After 370 and at present, Senior JSK Journalism Fellow at Stanford University.