By Sukalpa Bhattacharjee
One is aware that this is not the time to merely write an academic or popular article on ethnically motivated sexual violence but to register one’s sharp criticism of ethno-sexual crimes of any kind experienced by any community. The video of the incident of the two Kuki women who suffered unfathomable violence, indignity and humiliation in B Phainom village in Kangpokpi district on May 4 2023 has been termed by The Supreme Court as “deeply disturbing” and Chief Justice DY Chandrachud has mentioned that the court would take up the case on 28 July. For all sensible people and particularly for a women, how does one absorb the shock of such a visual display of a fellow woman being robbed of her modesty, her helpless dispossession of her birth right to live with dignity and her bodily integrity on the face of a beastly frenzied mob whose only aim was to justify its hyper masculinity by making a public display of its power?
Ironically by groping and objectifying the genitals of the women, what they had actually intended to display as male valour, enacted on the ethnic gendered other as a symbol of political victory, came across as barbaric and insane. Months have passed since the incident has occurred and it is now going to be a week since the video of the two Kuki women paraded naked has gone viral but so many questions pertaining to investigation and justice remain unanswered, particularly from the gender perspective. Therefore, it is also the time to once again reflect as to why women’s bodies have always become the crucial site on which histories and victories of nations and communities have been inscribed.
Meanwhile cases of ethno-centric violence, rape and molestation elsewhere in Manipur are being reported in the media and several videos of such atrocities on Meitei women are also being circulated. While the whole world has united in shame and shock over the barbaric act and the conspiracy of silence of government, institutions and political stakeholders, protestors of both the ethnic groups staging protest in Manipur, the national capital or elsewhere are caught in the battle of optics. The question is can or should a set of videos contest the truth claims of another set of videos in the case of organized and politically motivated cases such as gendered violence? Or can two wrongs make a right?
Ethnically motivated sexual violence, particularly on women is a unique phenomenon of patriarchal societies and is a repetitive act, almost a stereotype in all conflict situations and the present incident in Manipur is no exception. Such acts of crime constitute a nexus in circulating the patriarchal ideology of subjugation of women. Ritu Menon, ( co-founder of Kali for Women, India’s first and oldest feminist press), in accounting for the experiences of women from diverse religious and ethnic backgrounds during the Partition of the subcontinent, has asked ”Do women have a country?”She says that there will be no archive for the destitute, widowed, abandoned, abducted, raped, mutilated women of Partition in any of the two countries because violated women are often erased from history and yet they are the ones who have experienced the event most acutely and intimately through their bodies used as “weapon of war”.
In this context one recalls the sixtieth annual session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women on the 15th of March 2016, where Caroline Dinenage, Minister for Women, Equalities and Family Justice of the United Kingdom had stated “[Women] are at the eye of the storm of conflict and repression, their bodies the focus of social and cultural battles and the object of aggression and contempt”. The stigma, taboos and the value ridden burden of purity, chastity, virginity associated with the female body has reduced the female body into a stereotypical custodian of national and ethnic honour.
Therefore in conflict situations between warring groups or communities women’s bodies become the site for justifying power and claims. In her book The Scandal of State (2003) Rajeswari Sunder Rajan also shows the complicity that the nation-state has with female violence and so ethno-national identity claims and movements in postcolonial countries have to be seen as a complex intersection of class, caste and gender in its various constructions of otherness.
For average viewers/readers, heated discussions in popular TV channels and newspapers after such incidents of gruesome brutalities provide for temporary cathartic release of their anger and as days pass by this anger evaporates till another such incident is reported.
Our response to such unforgivable acts of gendered violence never acquires a constructive shape in the form of an ‘agency’. (Agency describes our capacity to resist, defy recreate and act against the grain) primarily because we neither analyze deeply the sociology of a single incident such as the one of the two Kuki women on the May 4, nor do we succeed in finding a common link between the contextual realities involved in every such incident of inflicting violence on women’s bodies, for making a political statement. Experts and analysts often throw light on social, political and legal implications of robbing a woman of her modesty ; in this case not only stripping but making a public display of how a helpless woman’s dignity can be crushed and gangraped.
One cannot understand such a situation without addressing foundational questions such as why does the perpetrator of rape and sexual violence consider such an act as the ultimate offence he can commit against the victim (women)? One cannot get over what happened to pregnant Kausar Bano during Godhra riots – her womb slit apart, the foetus taken out with a sword, cut into pieces and burnt alive. How can one reconcile with what happened to Thangjam Manorama on July 11, 2004 under AFSPA ? The female body bears the markers of her own community as well as the fears and suspicions against her community. The horrifying image of the heinous sexual crime committed against the two Kuki women also brings back the memory of the Adivasi woman in a political rally in Assam, who was stripped naked in broad daylight in the streets of Guwahati on 24th November 2007. Such is the degradation of human values that even violated women become the object of sadistic pleasure. The gendered nature of these acts against women distinguishes them from the violence men suffer in conflict situations. In a context of a volatile ethnocentric contestation, sexual violence becomes the signature of ultimate violence that can be committed against the community to which the woman belongs.
The need of the hour is reconciliation, dialogue and reflection on the claims and counter claims of the valley and the hills and not retaliation. The crucial point here is who will facilitate dialogue and negotiation? Whither gender justice? Where are interlocutors, civic bodies? Most importantly, where is the state? The incident happened on the 4th of May 2023.The media reports that A ‘Zero FIR’ was filed by the Saikul police, in Kangpokpi district, on May 18 and it was forwarded to the Nongpok Sekmai police station. After this for several months the incident is suppressed until the video goes viral and then some other videos also started reporting incidents of sexual violence in the state.
What is most frustrating is the role of the National Commission for Women which held on to its justification that it was impossible to send a team for investigation in the disturbed state of Manipur. It is in such situations that one is haunted by the strategic absence of avenues of justice. It is an eerie conspiracy of silence. In the case of Northeast India it has mostly been women’s groups as non-political actors who have acted as mediators between groups in conflicts, between state, civil societies and insurgents, as protesters and as vigilant gendered collectives constituting ‘multitudes’, enacting their roles in the public space. Non-state actors like women’s groups in the various socio-political contexts of NE-India have in the past interrogated institutional bankruptcy and non-deliverance of justice.
One of the ways of overcoming the present crisis and impasse is the coming together of women’s groups who can enlarge the civic space for dialogue and negotiation between the oppositional groups in Manipur in the total absence of a statist initiative to address the conflictual issues. Social change that would ‘prevent renewed hostilities’ can also be affected through the articulation of alternative narratives of physical and spiritual sufferings of human beings in a conflict situation as against the male-centred universalist narratives of revenge and retaliation.
*The author can be contacted at [email protected]