After sexual assault video, more details of rapes and murder come to front

Amidst a worldwide outrage over the video of two women being paraded naked emerged from Manipur, details of more cases of sexual assault, rape and murder between May 4 and 15 have emerged. These details had been sent to the National Commission for Women on the 12^th of June.

According to this complaint, on the 4^th of May two women from the Kuki tribe were raped. These two women who were from the village of Kangpokpi district were also robbed, beaten and paraded naked by a mob of people belonging to the Meitei tribe. In another incident on May 4, a 22-year-old Kuki woman and her friend, both students at a nursing institute, were harassed and assaulted by a Meitei mob of 40 people. The complaint also mentioned details of May 5, when two women, both in their 20s, hailing from a village in Kangpokpi district, were raped and murdered. The incident happened in the Konung Mamang area of Imphal. As per the details of the complaint, miscreants belonging to the Meitei community had dragged and confined the women inside a closed room for nearly two hours. The women were found dead, lying in a pool of blood probably from the result of the sexual assault inflicted upon them. Their bodies were sent and have been kept at the hospital mortuary.

On May 15, another complaint came forward which talked about an 18 year old was abducted by a Meitei mob, who threatened to kill and chop her into pieces and also sexually assaulted her.

On the 19^th of July, a bone-chilling video was released that shows two girls being paraded naked by a group of Meitei people available information suggests that the horrific incident happened in the Kangpokpi district of the state on May 4 after the clashes between the Kuki and the Meitei tribe began. The victims in the video belong to the Kuki-Zo tribe while the mob, which sexually assaulted them, was made of Meiteis, claims the Indigenous Tribal Leaders’ Forum, an umbrella organisation of various tribes living in Manipur.

Sources close to the Chief Minister N Biren Singh raised their suspicion about the timing of the release of the video which was released just a day before the start of the monsoon session of the parliament and particularly over the fact that this incident took place in the constituency of a BJP leader and that most of the crimes reported in the mainstream media are only about the injustices against the Kuki tribe and not the Meitei tribe. This has given the opposition the chance to blame and attack the central government over the incident and the Manipur ethnic clashes in general in a session of parliament which is being deemed as a very important session, especially for the central government.

The release of the video has also raised another question as to how such a video could be kept under wraps. While, it is known that there was an internet ban in Manipur, it is still surprising how this video didn’t come up sooner even though some other videos came up in spite of the internet ban. This does not however mean that the crime was unknown as Thangboi Vaiphei, the 65-year-old headman of B. Phainom village, a settlement of around 40 families, filed a complaint about the incident at Saikul police station on May 18. A local news portal, the Hills Journal, had also published a story on June 4 about the incident and the subsequent complaint by the village headman.

However, there was a long delay as action was not taken till the 19^th of July when the Manipur CM announced that the state would take strict action against the mob and then the first suspect was arrested within 24 hours of the release of the video. A top Manipur police official commented on the delay saying, “Earlier, there was no video to identify. Community people protect each other and don’t identify the perpetrators. We could not possibly organise any identification parade given the tense situation in the state. So, the probe moved at a slow pace”.