Opinion | The Manipur rape case has shaken India. Modi needs to act. -

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is once again under pressure for letting communal and ethnic violence spiral under his watch. This time, the victims are from a Christian ethnic group in the northeastern state of Manipur. At the core of the scandal is the government’s handling of a grisly rape case that has profoundly shaken Indian society.

A devastating video was published on July 19 showing two women from a Christian ethnic group in Manipur being stripped naked and paraded around by a mob. It quickly went viral. An indigenous rights group claimed the women were later gang-raped in an adjacent field. The incident occurred around May 4 but went unreported for nearly three months.

Manipur, which borders Myanmar, has been the site of ethnic strife for years, but violence has spiked recently. The predominantly Christian Kuki tribe and the majority-Hindu Meitei have engaged in violent clashes that have led to several churches being burned down, almost 60,000 people being displaced and more than 150 dead.

Details have been underreported because, once violence erupted, the Indian government suspended local access to the internet. And when the video emerged, the government’s immediate instinct was to consider suing Twitter, which has been rebranded as X, for allowing it to circulate, on the grounds that it threatened to sow chaos.

One of the two rape victims accused the police of handing them over to the mob. The woman also said that the father and the brother of the younger victim were killed trying to save them. Since the video went viral, reports of more cases of rape and murder have begun to emerge — and the details are horrifying.

Modi himself had been studiously quiet on the violence in Manipur before the video emerged. The incident “shamed India,” he said outside Parliament in New Delhi on July 20. “I assure the nation, the law will take its course with all its might,” he said. “What happened with the daughters of Manipur can never be forgiven.”

Nevertheless, Modi attempted to divert attention from the atrocity by pointing to examples of violence in provinces run by the opposition. His evasion of responsibility and brazen whataboutism have outraged India. There is a well-established record of majoritarian groups using sexual violence as a weapon in ethnic and communal conflict, and the state has almost always looked the other way.

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The police have arrested seven people in connection with the incident in Manipur thus far, but only after the video became public. Chief Justice Dhananjaya Y. Chandrachud ordered the government to keep the courts apprised of the steps being taken against the accused, vowing that “we will take action if you don’t.”

On Monday, India’s Supreme Court began hearings on the alleged gang rape. Kapil Sibal, a lawyer representing the women, alleged that “police collaborated with the perpetrators of violence.” Chandrachud asked why the police had waited so long to bring charges, and demanded the government provide details on the more than 6,000 cases registered with the police since violence erupted in Manipur.

Modi’s government has paid lip service to condemning violence against women, but its actions say something different. Last year, the 75th year of Indian independence, while Modi spoke in front of New Delhi’s Red Fort about women’s safety, his government approved the release of the 11 rapists of Bilkis Bano, one of the rape victims in the 2002 anti-Muslim pogroms in Gujarat (which took place while Modi was governor there).

Other politicians in Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have been less subtle. In 2018, two prominent officials rallied in support of six Hindu men convicted for the brutal rape and murder of an 8-year-old Muslim girl in Kashmir on the premises of a temple.

Opposition parties have filed a no-confidence vote in Modi’s government. But since the BJP is comfortably in the majority, the government is unlikely to fall. The opposition hopes to at least force the prime minister to publicly defend his handling of the violence in Manipur.

Modi is right that the incident has shamed India. But I have lost count of the times during the past few decades that the phrase has been used. The shock and anger feel empty and performative. Those in power who enabled such crimes have repeatedly been absolved. The state continues to look the other way.

During the anti-Muslim pogroms that shook Mumbai in the early 1990s, I was staying with my family among the handful of Muslims in a Hindu-majority area. My sister and I had to get away in the middle of the night as a mob made its way to our neighborhood. Our Sikh neighbor helped us escape through a bathroom window. I remember him telling my family: “They are coming for the girls.”

That horrible night will remain with me forever. We successfully escaped, however, and survived as refugees. The women in Manipur, who were brutalized in full public view, were far less fortunate.

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