Political opponents of Narendra Modi are using the bloody, three-month battle in the Indian state of Manipur to criticise the prime minister for what they claim is a failure of his administration to control a security situation of significant national import.
Some observers agree that the violence is a threat to national security and warn that it might spread to neighbouring states in a volatile region. Opposition parties, which are honing their strategies ahead of the general election next year, agree.
It took a disturbing video of women being paraded, groped, and raped while they were completely naked before the horrific Manipur narrative of violent violence and poisonous re-territorialization gained some national attention. Why was there stillness for so long?
One cause is the government’s biased behaviour in trying to censor the truth about Manipur through military repression and internet blackouts. The second is its own criminal inaction, cooperation in fanning the flames and encouragement of racial gangs that use violence against other ethnic groups.
But a third element plays an equally important role. In the conception of Indian nationhood, states and territories like Manipur that are geographically remote, have a distinct and contentious past and have undergone protracted militarised warfare exist as peripheries. They are only considered territorial spatial units that require military repression, surveillance, and securitization, while their citizens may be used as resources for an unjustified national goal. Thus, horrifying events that occur in these settings are accepted as usual, disregarded, or even justified.
Dehumanising violence is nothing new for Manipur, like many other war zones in the northeast and Kashmir, which are on the outside edges of the country’s actual borders and memories. Stories of horrific sexual assault and other human rights violations committed by both state and non-state actors plague their landscapes. If at all, selective national anger is only elicited when crimes are committed by non-state actors. The state’s crimes are wished away, justified, and occasionally even applauded. Due to the fact that they do not share the same sense of history, a sizable portion of India’s dominant media has allowed itself to be exploited to maintain the idea that people from these regions are invisible or even ‘the other’. The attempts to mainstream them are depicted as conflicts between the conquerors and the defeated, not as efforts grounded on variety and accommodation.
The viral video is just the tip of the iceberg. More accounts and accusations of sexual assault, murder, forced relocation, and the horrifying ethnically-based territorialization of Manipur are now coming to light. It will be worse in scope than what we saw in Delhi in 1984, Gujarat in 2002, or Muzaffarnagar in 2013.
In each of these prior instances, the rioters were granted carte blanche for a few days before the authorities started taking action. Because Manipur is perceived as an appendage and not an integral part of the whole, the rioters there had free reign for two and a half months. The Kuki tribals, who are still viewed as the ‘other’ and ‘foreign’ inside this restive state, were weaponized by the Meitei majority, indicating that there are more levels of exclusion.
Although there have been fewer clashes recently, tensions still exist. Everything has been kept under wraps thanks to an enforced internet ban, poor cell phone coverage in many places, and an uninterested media.
The attention that this serious issue has so far gotten is both insufficient and disproportional to what Manipur has witnessed. The horrifying tale of sexual assault is at the heart of this indignation.
Understanding India’s willful silence and how sexual assault cases there garner little or no attention is also essential. The public didn’t start to pay attention until digital photographs of sexually raped tribal Kuki women were released after the cops essentially fed the crowd. Without a doubt, the country still seems to be torn between shame and whataboutery, even after the horrible video went viral. More crucially, prior to the unexpected appearance of the film, awareness of similar rapes and sexual assaults in Manipur was not unknown.
After the ethnic unrest in Manipur began on May 4, there were already claims of women being physically attacked. Since complaints and FIRs had been filed at the police stations at least as early as May 18, it is presumed that the Manipur government and the Union government were also aware of them. The use of women’s bodies as weapons of aggression in the type of conflict that was raging in Manipur is also well-known. Thus, it raises the question of why the collective consciousness of the country is so silent and why situations like this need to be accompanied by repulsive pictures in order to awaken us.
Rapes are among the crimes that, through purposeful action, have been disregarded and covered up in India. Women’s bodies have evolved into symbols of masculine machismo and communal success for decades after independence and constitutional assurances of equality and intolerance for injustices, sometimes with the implicit assistance and support of women. The honour of the family or group a woman belongs to is falsely believed to be stored in her body.
A communal reaction to the “defiling” of bodies as a component of male privilege or for vengeance and degrading the other has been prohibited by this concern with the “purity” of women’s bodies. Rape has finally found a place in the national debate and mainstream dialogue in the wake of the Delhi Nirbhaya rape and murder case, which immediately caused indignation across the country. However, racial, caste, and class stereotypes continue to taint compassion for the victim and anger at such acts. If the lady is a Dalit, a tribal person, or a Muslim, it is uncommon for comparable spontaneity and fury to be elicited. It is left to the few feminists and liberals to speak for them, if at all they appear in the news pages. Examples of these include the rapes and killings at Unnao, Hathras, and Kathua. The base of this hierarchical pyramid represents sexual assault in conflict areas.
This fatal mix of sexual assault and conflict areas with contested histories causes the nation’s conscience to be willfully ignorant of and to forget the struggles, conflicts, traumas, and dreams of the people who live in the most complicated and vulnerable areas of the nation. You have a poisonous concoction that can only lead to a worsening of the crisis when you add in the promotion of majoritarian politics of exclusion by the Narendra Modi-led administration across the nation.
A domino effect has occurred in other regions of the north-east as a result of Biren Singh, Modi’s protégé in Manipur, pushing for Meitei majoritarianism and playing a partisan role both before and after the Manipur crisis.
The Manipur situation exposes a broader identity dilemma facing the country. In order to hold the government responsible for its calculated indifference to Manipur’s bloody battlefield, dead bodies, brutalised citizens, sexually assaulted women, burned and destroyed homes, displaced people, and rigid internal borders, more needs to be done than just ordering independent investigations.
Redefining India and reimagining it as a country where conflict zones that are on the outside of physical boundaries do not merely exist as regions to be controlled by military jackboots is urgently needed. When the inhabitants of these areas are still viewed as nothing more than disposable appendages in the national imagination, an inclusive India cannot be created. We will continue to have several Manipur-like crises, in varied degrees of size, and happily keep them under wraps until some unsightly image drives us to speak or until that reinvention of Indian nationhood takes place.
