The reason why political leaders are called leaders is because they are supposed to lead. Their leadership becomes vital in times of violence and uncertainty. If Manipur has continued to burn for nearly three months, it is because we have seen a disturbing absence of leadership. Both in Delhi and Imphal. The Prime Minister finally spoke last week. He said his heart was filled with ‘pain and rage’. And, that all of India was shamed by the video of two naked women being molested by a mob of armed men who then went on to allegedly gangrape the younger woman. They had already killed her father and went on to kill her brother when he tried to save his sister. The story is now well known and too awful to repeat.
For this columnist what has been more disturbing than the video of two naked women being molested is the lack of leadership that has brought Manipur to this pass. I say this because the ugly truth is that women are routinely stripped and paraded in our villages. This is such routine barbarism across India that it rarely makes news. If you glance through the angry tweets by the BJP’s troll army on Twitter last week you will see that many tweets point out exactly this. When I tweeted that the first thing that must happen is for the Chief Minister of Manipur to be sacked, my timeline was flooded with tweets from BJP supporters posting pictures of naked women being paraded publicly in Rajasthan and West Bengal. They demanded to know why I was not asking for the chief ministers of these states to resign.
This distressing reaction to what happened in Manipur nullified the importance of what the Prime Minister said. It is time he realised that his worst enemies are the two-rupee trolls that the BJP’s IT cell recruits. You only need to read one of their tweets to know that they are recruits without sensitivity, compassion, or basic humanity. The BJP would also do well to sack its spokeswomen. They usually sound like crazed harridans, but they outdid themselves last week.
They did womankind no service by shrieking about how what happened in Manipur happens in other states. If they thought they were defending their party, they ended up doing the opposite. More than the BJP they harmed the Prime Minister by negating his rare show of leadership in a time of trouble. Narendra Modi’s words of pain and rage were negated even more because the day after he spoke senior BJP leaders came forward to demand belligerently why states ruled by opposition chief ministers were not coming in for more scrutiny. These comments showed that it is not just BJP trolls that need to show compassion and sensitivity but senior BJP leaders as well. But this will only happen when leadership comes from the very top as it always must in difficult situations.
From a personal conversation I had with Narendra Modi in 2016 I discovered that it was his considered policy not to speak out against acts of violence and hatred. I happened to see him days after Mohammad Akhlaq became the first Muslim to be lynched by cow vigilantes and although the meeting was arranged for me to present him with a copy of my new book, we ended up talking of many things. During this conversation I asked him why he had said not one word of condemnation about this horrific lynching. His answer was that something bad happened every other day somewhere or other in India and if he started condemning every horrifying act, he would have little time to do anything else.
Perhaps. But real leaders are those whose leadership is seen in the worst of times. There are good reasons why American presidents make it a point to show up personally to comfort parents whose children have been killed in a school shooting and to comfort the families of those who have been wrongly killed by law enforcement officers. It is in times like those when the leadership of a leader comes into question and leaders who do not know this will rightly be questioned about the quality of their leadership.
If the Prime Minister had spoken up earlier about the monstrous, relentless violence that has gone on in Manipur for nearly three months, it is possible that peace would have returned sooner. Did he not do this because it is a ‘double-engine’ BJP government that currently governs Manipur? If this was the reason, then with all humility I would like to point out that it may have been a serious mistake. What makes this mistake more unforgivable is that Kuki women came to Delhi soon after the violence began to protest outside the Home Minister’s residence. They told reporters that the violence against the Kuki community was so barbaric that a mob had set fire to an ambulance in which a mother was taking her little boy to the hospital. Why did alarm bells not start ringing then?
If Rahul Gandhi could travel to Manipur to share the pain of those whose broken lives and destroyed homes have forced them into refugee camps in their own state, then why has the Prime Minister not found time to go? When leaders fail to lead when leadership is truly needed, they cannot escape being asked questions exactly like this.
