When three women were gangraped and the father and brother of one murdered by a mob from Manipur’s majority Meitei, and the ordeal converted into a viral video in June 2023, it epitomised to many the breakdown of the State. Despite an August 2023 Supreme Court order for an ‘expeditious investigation and trial’, two gangrape survivors told us how justice appeared distant. The three main accused are at large, and police and extremist groups named in the first information report have not been questioned, even though the police’s own chargesheet details how their colleagues let the mob snatch the women. A year later, with over 200 killed, 70,000 displaced and new murders, the chief minister continues to make sectarian comments.
Churachandpur, Manipur: *N spends most of her days in solitude, cut off from the rest of the world. As a young woman in her late teens, she has tried to get on with her life by reconnecting with her passion for fashion design.
But N rarely steps out of her home.
Gone are the days when she would participate in community life by going for social events, church fellowships or just hanging out with friends her age, a time when all Meitei, Naga and Kuki-Zo ethnic groups in the small but diverse state of Manipur—26th by size of 28 Indian states—lived in relative harmony.
“I’m not comfortable to be around people who know me from before,” she told Article 14. “I would rather be with people who don’t.”
N said she felt alone, as she fought the triple trauma of gang rape, being paraded naked by a marauding mob of hundreds of men from the state’s Meitei community—made public two months later in a viral video—and seeing her father and brother hacked to death.
This story was originally published in article-14.com. Read the full story here.