Women bear the brunt of civil strife. Stop this

Despite the viral video, it is unclear whether justice will be served, as police complicity and a lack of protection for women are serious concerns.

Had it not been shot, had it not gone viral on social media, had all its attendant horrors not been recorded in such graphic detail, would we have even cared? In the video that went viral on Wednesday, two Kuki women, stripped and naked, are being paraded by a group of men who grope and push them on.

Students taking out candle march against Manipur violence at the campus of Chanakya National Law University (CNLU) in Patna. (Photo by Santosh Kumar / Hindustan Times)

A police complaint was filed two weeks later, on May 18. It mentions that the younger woman, 21, was gang-raped; her younger brother was killed when he protested. It also talks of a third woman in her 50s, not in the video, who was also forced to disrobe.

In a statement, the Indigenous Tribal Leader’s Forum said the women are Kuki-Zo tribals and were raped by Meitei men after their village was razed. Some reports mention there were 800 to 1,000 men surrounding the terrified women.

The video finally jolted Prime Minister Narendra Modi to break his two-and-a-half-month silence on the ethnic conflict in Manipur. The minister for women and child development Smriti Irani tweeted that she had spoken to chief minister N Biren Singh and was assured of action. Biren Singh, meanwhile, informs us that he “felt so bad after watching that video” and has asked the police to take action.

Seventy-seven days after the crime and 63 days after a police complaint was recorded, the first arrests were made on Thursday, a day after the video went viral.

There are few things that can be more horrifying than the video. But the expression of shock from not just politicians, but judges, journalists and ordinary folk seems naïve.

India’s chief justice said he was very disturbed by the video and warned the government he was giving it just “a little time” to sort out the issue before the court would step in. Yet, in June, the apex court had refused to hear a plea seeking army control of the state saying it was on vacation. Earlier that same month, the court also declined to hear a plea against the internet ban in the state.

It should not take a video to connect the dots. “There is a body of work, including a UN resolution on how rape is used as a strategy in conflict situations,” says lawyer Madhu Mehra. “India has a long history of such violence from Partition onwards. It should not take a video to tell you what is happening in Manipur. This should have been anticipated.”

Wherever patriarchy exists, whether in Rwanda, the DRC or the former Yugoslavia, the body of an ‘enemy’ woman is easy pickings to humiliate her, subjugate her community and dishonour its men.

In India, as in many parts of the world where there is civil strife, it is the bodies of women who bear the brunt. This is what our history has witnessed through communal conflagrations, the Sikh pogrom, Muzaffarnagar and, of course, the Gujarat riots.

But rape in conflict situations can also be incredibly hard to document with the reluctance to report often coming from within the community, particularly if the women are unmarried. Shabnam Hashmi, an activist with Anhad, who visited Gujarat soon after the 2002 riots heard scores of accounts of sexual assault but when she returned to document the accounts, she was not allowed to meet many of the girls and women who had spoken up earlier, she said.

In 2013, the rape law amendments added an additional category of gangrape during communal violence, under section 376, (2)(g). There has since, been a single conviction under this section. It came in May this year and took nine years, three Supreme Court interventions, a relentless legal battle and the boundless courage of one gangrape survivor in the Muzaffarnagar riots.

Later this month, the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear the plea of Bilkis Bano who survived gang-rape and witnessed the murder of 14 of her family members in the Gujarat riots. Bilkis wants to know why and how the 11 men convicted of their crime were released on early remission after serving 14 years of their life term.

In Manipur, despite the internet ban, stories of sexual assault have been swirling for some days. As far back as June 12, Greeshma Kuthar recorded a podcast for Suno India with a woman survivor in Imphal who was abducted and kept captive for 12 hours on May 15 before she managed to escape.

In another incident that took place on May 5, two Kuki women were locked in a room in Imphal and sexually assaulted by at least six men. An FIR was registered after their bodies were found in the room hours later.

On July 12, the Print carried a story on the silence around the rapes in Manipur, mentioning at least six cases of rape of Kuki women.

Biren Singh has spoken about capital punishment for the perpetrators of this crime but is silent about the larger questions. Police complicity, for instance. The women have said they were left to the mob by the police. This is a serious charge.

There are disturbing ground reports too of other videos recording sexual violence against women. How many more horror stories are locked inside relief camps? “Hundreds of similar cases abhi hua hai, isiliye internet ban kiya hai,” (Hundreds of similar cases have taken place. That's why the Internet is banned) Biren Singh told TV channels. This is alarming. The chief minister acknowledges this is not an isolated case. And yet his priority is banning the internet and not securing protection for women. He has lost the moral right to remain in office.

The central government is demanding that social media websites, including YouTube and Twitter, take down the video. Most media platforms that have carried the 26-second clip, have taken care to blur the images of the women so they cannot be identified. “If you block our videos you are blocking the reportage of Manipur,” journalist Barkha Dutt of the Mojo Story with over a million subscribers tweeted.

Unless a neutral fact-finding team is sent to the troubled state to investigate, little can change and targeted violence against women will continue with impunity.

It is India’s tragedy that it has taken the naked bodies of tribal women for the country to wake up to what is happening in Manipur. It is time to say, this stops now.

Namita Bhandare writes on gender. The views expressed are personal