Since Wednesday in India, a video has begun to circulate on social networks in which hundreds of men are seen violently dragging two women who had been stripped down the street, and then pushing them into a field. The video, which also shows some men groping women, was shot in a small town in the province of Kangpokpi, in Manipur, a northeastern state of India that borders Myanmar, and dates back to May 4, one day after the start of large and violent ethnic clashes between the Meitei majority and the Kuki community.
The women in the video belong to the Kuki community: one is in her 20s and the other in her 40s. According to a complaint filed on May 18 and obtained by several Indian newspapers, the youngest was allegedly raped by the group of men. There was also a third woman with them, but she does not appear in the video. The police have announced that they are investigating the case and that one person has already been arrested for the violence committed on the two women.
What exactly happened before the events shown in the video is unclear. According to the women in the complaint, a group of about 900-1,000 men of the Meitei ethnic group had attacked the city of Phainom. Five locals, including three women, had fled and found shelter in a nearby forest. They had been rescued by the police, but later the crowd managed to take them back.
At that point one of the two Kuki men had been killed by the mob, and the three women had been forced to undress and parade naked down the street. One of them, the youngest, had also been gang-raped. The other man Kuki, the raped woman’s brother, had tried to defend her sister, and was killed by the mob. In the end, according to the complaint, with the help of some local people, the three women managed to escape and save themselves.
The younger woman told the Indian newspaper Indian Express that the police would have played an active role in the violence perpetrated by the mob: after rescuing the three women and two men, the police would have deliberately handed them over to the men of the Meitei ethnic group. She also said that neither she nor the other two women were aware of the existence of a video of the violence, until it was posted on social media on Wednesday.
The video and more generally the ongoing violence in the state of Manipur is being discussed a lot in India. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi also spoke about it on Thursday, who so far had not publicly commented on the ethnic clashes between Kuki and Meitei. “Any civil society should be ashamed of what happened. My heart is filled with pain and anger,” Modi said during a speech in parliament. However, Modi has also been heavily criticized by the opposition for not having done enough to stop the violence in Manipur, which has so far caused more than 130 deaths, more than 400 injured and almost 60 thousand displaced.
Just over 50 percent of Manipur’s 3.3 million population are Meitei. Almost all of them live in the valley of Imphal, the capital, they are Hindus and in recent decades they have controlled the local parliament and therefore power. The Naga and Kuki together represent just over 43 percent of the population: they are the so-called “tribal communities”, they live on the hills, in more rural areas, they are predominantly Christian and poorer.
The clashes began precisely because of the status of “tribal community”: it is provided for by Indian law and guarantees those who belong to it some preferential lanes in the assignment of public jobs, in universities, in elected offices. The Meitei majority requests to be included among these protected categories, as is already the case for Naga and Kuki: if that were to happen, practically the entire population of Manipur would have this status, effectively canceling the current privileges of the inhabitants of the hillseconomically disadvantaged.
After an initial positive opinion on the request by the High Court of Manipur on May 3, the Kukis had organized a protest demonstration. At the end there had been clashes with the Meitei, which were followed by assaults on police stations and weapons depots. The mob had set fire to entire neighborhoods and the street clashes had turned into armed clashes and lynchings.