Opinion Who is accountable in Manipur? The answer can provide justice to mob assault survivors

Essentially, we’re witnessing fresh partitions and associated armed ethnic mobilisation in Northeast India with support from states-within-the-Union. Such systems of violence, themselves a by-product of India’s majoritarian turn

Houses are seen burnt following ethnic clashes and rioting in Sugnu, in Manipur, on Wednesday. (Photo: AP)

Avinash Paliwal

July 21, 2023 07:22 PM IST First published on: Jul 20, 2023 at 03:26 PM IST

“If you don’t take off your clothes, we’ll kill you”, the Meitei mob shouted at two Kuki women in Kangpokpi on May 4. Forcibly paraded, publicly molested, and allegedly gang-raped, it’s hard to fathom what the survivors of this deranged crime are going through. That women’s bodies become sites of male violence, especially during communally charged conflicts, is a long-known grim global reality. But what we witnessed in Manipur is a social and political dislocation of a deeper sort. India’s social contract is melting, and while it may seem geographically peripheral, Manipur is right at the heart of it.

To understand what this meltdown looks like, one needs to focus on two aspects. One, the systems of violence in and around Manipur, and two, the structures of silence around it. Ever since May, when the state imploded into civil strife, social cleavages between Meitei and Zo-Kuki communities have turned into a de facto partition with well over a hundred dead, thousands displaced, many churches destroyed, properties burnt, and a no-man’s land between the hills and the Valley secured by the army to boot.

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Even the state administration stands partitioned. Meitei police officers don’t operate in the hills, and Kuki-Zo officers don’t operate in the Valley. To worsen matters, 6.32-lakh bullets and around 4,537-arms, including light and medium machine-guns, are reportedly missing from the Manipur Police Training Centre, 7th India Reserve Battalion, and 8th Manipur Rifles in Imphal city. Of these weapons, about 5.31 per cent are said to be in the Kuki-dominated hills, and the rest in the Meitei-dominated Imphal Valley. The fact that Meitei women’s groups scuttled an army operation and forced the release of 12 Kanglei Yawol Kanna Lup militants — with no follow-up action against either — brings into sharp relief the complicated gender politics and inter-community balance-of-power in this conflict.

It is no secret that the hill administration in southern Manipur is now being run from New Delhi, with the N Biren Singh government’s mandate reduced to the Imphal Valley. Even such limited writ came into question with the recent murder of a Naga woman in Imphal East, which threatened to dislocate Naga-Meitei ties. It took strong condemnation by civil society members as well as radical Meitei outfits such as the Arambai Tenggol, to prevent a Meitei-Naga war in north Manipur. Such a situation risks roping Nagaland into the vortex, akin to the Meitei-Kuki rupture in the south that has already sucked Mizoram into the mix.

Hosting thousands of displaced Kuki-Zo families, the Mizoram government is openly supporting this community. Mizos feel the need to protect their ethnic kin in Manipur from Meitei majoritarianism. The last time this happened was in the 1970s and 1980s, when the Mizo National Front was an insurgent organisation seeking to unify all these communities into greater Mizoram. Political tensions between Mizoram, Assam and Manipur, including over disputed boundaries, have become highly charged. Couple this with massive infusion of drug profits and products from Myanmar, and it is anyone’s guess when and where the next fire could be lit.

Essentially, we’re witnessing fresh partitions and associated armed ethnic mobilisation in Northeast India with support from states-within-the-Union. Such systems of violence, themselves a by-product of India’s majoritarian turn, are defined by competing desires for regional hegemony and demands for access to resources and power within the Union — not territorial separation. Socially corrosive, such ecosystems are lubricated by perverse electoral logics (after all, these communities become vote-banks for whoever advocates their cause, legitimate or otherwise), and illicit, unaccounted cash-flows, both of which are abundant in the Northeast.

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Such polarised politics is driven by complex structures of silence around it. The silence that screams the loudest is that of India’s prime minister. He has finally and belatedly spoken on Manipur — as has the Chief Justice of India — but for a figure as dominant and communicative as Narendra Modi to not make a single statement on Manipur’s predicament so far, and the inability of the powerful home minister, Amit Shah, to control the situation, raises the question of where exactly the ruling party figures on the complicit-incompetent spectrum in Manipur. One of the few surreal tweets that emerged from the prime minister’s digital canon after May 3 was to celebrate connectivity projects in the Northeast. That spectres of ethnic and communal partitions of this region surpass the geo-economic drive for connectivity is left unsaid, and unaddressed.

The other side of silence, to borrow the phrase from feminist scholar Urvashi Butalia, relates to systemic violence against women in Manipur. It’s not as if the alleged gang-rape of the two Kuki women was unknown to authorities – after all, Manipur police allegedly handed the women over to the mob in the first place. But it took a leaked video and associated public shock for Manipur police to order an investigation. Till then, there was silence. Unfortunately, if one goes by the predicament of India’s wrestling champions who’ve been fighting for justice against sexual harassment by those in power, chances of a fair investigation in Manipur’s case remain thin. There may be a spectacle around arrests of certain identifiable individuals in the video. But to expect this moment to translate into a turning-point where the state asserts itself and reinstates a modicum of constitutional integrity to a strife-torn state is delusional.

There’s been an expected outcry about this incident, and its mis-handling is being seen as a blot on India’s national conscience. But let’s be clear, individuals have a conscience, imagined collectives don’t. India’s social contract appears to be eroding not because there aren’t enough people who care about it. After all, the list of those who care and have sought prime ministerial intervention in Manipur isn’t small. Neither is everyone fooled by social-media driven poison. India’s social contract seems to be weakening because wrongdoers in power aren’t being held accountable. The only way to deliver justice to the two survivors of this mob assault, and perhaps to stabilise the situation in Manipur, is to ensure accountability. That’s what India needs to fight for.

Avinash Paliwal teaches at SOAS University of London and is the author of ‘My Enemy’s Enemy: India in Afghanistan from the Soviet Invasion to the US Withdrawal’ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017)