(UCAN): India’s Supreme Court sought stringent action against members of a mob that paraded two women naked along a public road in Manipur state before raping them. It expressed outrage at the extreme violence visited on the women. The court intervened after a video of the incident emerged and went viral on social media some two-and-a-half months after it occurred on May 4. There has been an Internet shutdown in Manipur since May 3.
“We are very deeply disturbed by the videos which emerged yesterday,” chief justice, D Y Chandrachud, said on July 20.
The chief justice said that using “women as instruments in an area of communal strife to inflict gender violence is deeply disturbing. This is the grossest of human rights violations.”
Chandrachud said, “We are expressing our deep concern. It is time that the government really steps in and takes action. This is simply unacceptable.”
Manipur has seen unprecedented violence since May 3 with Kukis tribals and majority Meitei Hindus fighting over a court proposal to grant special tribal status to the latter. AsiaNews reported in early May that the heart of the conflict is the request by the Meitei for “Scheduled Tribe” status, which provides benefits such as quotas in public employment, political representation, and land rights [Sunday Examiner, May 14].
The abused women are Kuki according to a police complaint. The BBC reported that a complaint filed by a relative stated that the women were taken from the police by the mob. According to the complaint, the mob forced the women to remove their clothes after killing two men with them. One of the women, a 21-year-old, was “brutally gang-raped in broad daylight” it was alleged that police were present but did nothing.
The BBC reported that a complaint filed by a relative stated that the women were taken from the police by the mob. According to the complaint, the mob forced the women to remove their clothes after killing two men with them
Chief Justice Chandrachud asked the state government of Manipur to inform his court of the steps taken to bring the perpetrators before the law.
Manipur’s chief minister, N Biren Singh, took to social media on July 20 to announce the arrest of one person.
“It is shameful and shocking news and the entire world has condemned this act. We have no words to express,” Archbishop Anil Joseph Thomas Couto of Delhi told an inter-denomination prayer meeting in the national capital on July 20.
Archbishop Couto said, “We have gathered here to show our solidarity with our fellow brethren who have been suffering. We are here to pray for them. Let’s all join together to pray so that peace will soon prevail in the state.”
India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, who has been muted so far on the violence and broke his silence for the first time on July 20, after the video went viral.
“The guilty will not be spared. What has happened to the daughters of Manipur can never be forgiven,” Modi told the media ahead of a parliamentary session adding he was “distressed and angered” by the video.
“It is a shame on us Indians that our prime minister was hopping countries while a state in our country was burning,” A C Michael, a Christian leader in New Delhi and a former member of the Delhi minority commission, said on July 20.
He lamented that Indians had to be told by the European Parliamentarians “about our responsibility to provide safety to our own people.”
Modi had been on state visits to the US, Egypt, and France while Manipur burned in sectarian violence, which has claimed more than 150 lives and left some 40,000 people displaced.
Christian leaders have accused the state and federal government, run by pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP], of tacitly supporting hardline Hindu activists in attacking Christians in Manipur.
