Barefaced: Editorial on the atrocities being faced by the women of Manipur

Reiterated understanding that women suffer most in middle of strife has not helped in reducing the horrors in any way, and the late revelation of events indicate practised methods of evasion

TT Editorial Board, 26.07.23 : The horrors inflicted on women in Manipur are becoming public. These may be only a fraction of the full scale of terror and cruelty that they are facing. Thrashings by mobs, torture, gang rape, murder, even burning of women from the less powerful group in the conflict have occurred since May, although accounts and videos are surfacing much later. The reiterated understanding that women suffer most in the middle of strife has obviously not helped in reducing the horrors in any way, and the late revelation of events indicate practised methods of evasion by the authorities. Neither the knowledge that women suffer most nor the practice of suppression is relevant to the indescribable terror women experience with incidents of merciless violence all around them, threatening their bodies with sexual assault and lives with torture and murder. The video circulating on social media showing two women being paraded naked while the surrounding mob keeps physically harassing them exposes the intense humiliation of the survivors of violence — one of them was allegedly gang-raped. The humiliation is certainly physical, and is equally connected to their identity as persons, because the only protection against the last — anonymity of survivors by law — cannot be preserved when a video is released on social media. Their names may remain unpublicised, but that becomes irrelevant in these situations.

Such situations, whether in Manipur or in West Bengal’s Malda, raise questions about institutional perceptions of women’s dignity and selfhood. Laws can be, and are being, ignored on every level, from violence against women to the — perhaps involuntary — exposure of their identities in cases where they should remain anonymous. And how far can laws go anyway? Misogyny runs deep in society and its institutions; law enforcers in the field are often passive spectators of, or even complicit in, violence against women. Allegations of this kind have been made in the Manipur incident as in Malda, where women were paraded naked as well. This is a form of humiliation, together with rape, which has always been popular with vengeful mobs. In 2004, women in Manipur had used disrobing to shame the authorities as protest against the rape and murder of a girl, but there is no shame. Is the destruction of women’s self-esteem, the total devastation of their personhood, or their unspeakable traumas, India’s intended goal?