The video showing Kuki women being paraded naked by a mob has brought national attention to the sexual violence that has taken place during Manipur’s ongoing civil war. Days before the video emerged, Scroll had travelled to Manipur to interview Kuki women who faced extreme violence at the hands of the mobs.
We spoke to four women, including one whose ordeal, captured on video, finally forced the prime minister to end his silence on Manipur. All of the women recounted that the men who assaulted them said they were taking revenge for violence against their community. Strikingly, in two cases, the survivors said Meitei women were part of the mob, egging the men on.
Survivor: 19-year-old
Currently at: Relief camp, Kangpokpi district
Date of incident: May 15, Imphal
When a 19-year-old Kuki resident of Imphal’s New Checkon colony stepped out on the evening of May 15 to withdraw money from an ATM, she said she could have “never imagined” what lay ahead. In the hours that followed, she said she was abducted by a gang of men, dragged into a car, brutally assaulted in three different locations across Imphal, before she escaped by a miraculous stroke of luck.
In a relief camp in Kangpokpi district, exactly two months after the incident, she said she can barely “sleep at night”. “Sometimes I wake up crying…I remember what they did to me, I keep thinking of it,” she said, her voice low.
In a classroom of a training institute, now converted into a relief camp for displaced Kukis, the survivor narrated the incident to Scroll for over an hour.
After clashes broke out between Meitei and Kuki communities on May 3, the 19-year-old’s parents and siblings, along with many others, fled the mobs in Imphal on May 4. The 19-year-old, however, could not accompany them…