‘I have thought of taking my life’: A Meitei woman recalls how she was raped by a mob ( Scroll )

It took her three months to find the courage to file a police complaint.

On August 9, a first information report was filed at a police station in Bishnupur district in Manipur’s Imphal valley. It recorded a woman’s account of being sexually assaulted by a mob in Churachandpur district on May 3, in the midst of the ethnic clashes that had broken out between the Meitei and Kuki communities.

The FIR briefly made news – it was the first reported instance of a Meitei woman alleging sexual violence during the clashes. Until then, the only accounts of sexual violence that had surfaced in Manipur’s ongoing conflict involved Kuki women.

Since then, the investigators appear to have made no headway in the case, prompting the 37-year-old survivor to break her silence.

In a conversation at a centre run by Manipur’s social welfare department, she told Scroll: “I wanted justice and the perpetrators to be punished but there has been a lull since I reported the case.”

Clad in a pink phanek and blouse, with a dupatta covering her head, the woman hesitatingly recounted the events of May 3, when the ethnic violence sweeping the state arrived at her doorstep.

Around 5.30 pm, a Kuki mob began to circle the Meitei homes in her village, located about 35 km from the Churachandpur district headquarters, in an area dominated by Kukis.

“My sister in law asked me to gather all the children and run with her,” the survivor recalled.

Her husband, along with their landlord, attempted to pacify the young men in the mob. “We tried reasoning with them not to burn our homes, but they wouldn’t listen,” the husband, a 50-year-old man, recalled. “They torched all the houses one after the other, and we all got busy dousing the fire.”

This story was originally published in scroll.in. Read the full story here

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