THE chief minister of Manipur says the rape and abuse of two Kuki women as they were marched naked by a mob was the work of “a few miscreants that we find in every state”.

Reminded me of the perplexed look on a female diplomat’s face at the US embassy in Delhi years ago as she scoured a local daily. “Sixty people killed as their bus plunged into a gorge, and this headline says they died in a mishap!” What’s mishap for Indian sensibility would perhaps be called a tragedy in countries where human lives matter more.

The men hanged for raping and killing ‘Nirbhaya’ in a bus in Delhi were ‘miscreants’, going by the chief minister’s casual vocabulary. The politically connected high-profile Hindu priest locked up for rape was a ‘miscreant’.

Hindutva partisans cheered the alleged ‘miscreants’ in the rape of eight-year-old Asifa Bano in a temple in Kathua. To top it all, 11 convicted rapists from Gujarat were released benevolently from prison on Independence Day last year as Prime Minister Narendra Modi held forth at the Red Fort about his commitment to protect Indian women.

These freed men were no ‘miscreants’, however, for their Hindutva admirers worshipped the gentlemen as people of high culture, Brahmins with ‘sanskar’. They greeted them with ladoos. Manipur’s BJP Chief Minister Biren Singh should perhaps coin a new benign word for the men who raped Bilkis Bano and murdered her family.

This wasn’t the end of Singh’s intervention. He joined a women’s rally and spoke of his anger at the horrific video. It had brought shame to the state, he declared. Had the act not been so perversely filmed, there would perhaps be no reason to feel ashamed then.

As it happened, however, the abused women narrated their ordeal to a few sympathetic reporters. They said the police had been mute spectators. And if the police were there it becomes that much more difficult to believe that the chief minister was not briefed, particularly since the crime allegedly involved his party’s supporters from the majority Meiti community. And because he must have known, was Modi’s home minister not told of the incident when he visited Manipur during the mayhem?

How then could he not have not shared the horror with his boss? Or was the prime minister kept in the dark so that he could finish his foreign visits without bearing the guilt of ignoring the national shame?

Mr Modi broke his silence on Thursday only after the video surfaced, not unaware that parliament’s monsoon session was just starting. But he pointedly did not refer to the strange new communal fires engulfing Manipur since May 3.

The assault on the women took place on May 4 after a fake video was circulated about a Meiti woman’s gang rape by Kuki men. Modi said the culprits in the mob would be punished. And promptly some six men were arrested.

Not a word about the gory violence that has burnt far too many religious places, killed more than 150 people, uprooted homes, targeted women, and introduced a religious polarisation that Manipur had never experienced on this scale.

“Every state, be it Rajasthan or Chhattisgarh, must protect women,” Modi counselled. Why did only these states get named? A good guess: both Congress-ruled provinces are heading for state polls this winter, their outcome critical to Modi’s election next year.

Was Modi kept in the dark so that he could finish his foreign visits without bearing the guilt of ignoring the national shame?

There has been a history of ethnic tensions in Manipur between the hill-dwelling, and relatively impoverished tribespeople, the Christian Kuki, and the relatively prosperous, valley-dwelling Hindu majority Meitis.

The tension is mainly about land, and seldom was there a religious stand-off. Corporate interest in Manipur’s mineral-rich terrain and virgin forests has galvanised a strategy to penetrate the state anyhow.

Otherwise, the better-educated Meiti community have been allergic to communally driven Hindutva politics. The Meitis had a bone to pick with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh at last year’s independence day.

The RSS unit in the state was censured by various civil society and student groups of the state, including the titular Meitei king Leishemba Sanajaoba, for violating the tradition of commemorating the annual Patriots’ Day.

At an RSS event in Imphal, the Hindutva outfit placed a portrait of ‘Bharat Mata’ (Mother India) between two local heroes that are remembered on the annual day. That hurt Manipuri pride, as they see their history as distinct from India’s.

The Meitis are proud of their ancient culture and flaunt a glorious legacy of fighting British colonialism. There are one per cent Muslim Meitis too, called Pangals. But that is precisely the method of Hindutva. It uses polarising politics to shepherd the majority Hindus into its fold by targeting the minorities as satanic, the imagined religious rivals. The RSS has been active in the northeastern states for over 75 years, its self-stated goal being “national integration”.

The gravitational force is self-evident. The 2011 census found Assam had a whopping 34pc Muslim population, while in five other northeast states more than half of its population are Christians — Nagaland (87.93pc), Mizoram (87.16pc), Meghalaya (74.59pc), Manipur (41.29pc) and Arunachal Pradesh (30.26pc).

The RSS talks of early attempts to strike roots in the region after two senior pracharaks arrived in Assam on Oct 27, 1946, and went on to establish RSS shakhas in Guwahati, Shillong and Dibrugarh.

It says in the 1980s and 1990s, the RSS established many welfare programmes, especially in education, in the tribal-dominant states of Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Meghalaya and Mizoram.

Missing from the mix was Manipur. The state is a new test lab for the ideology that catapulted Mr Modi to power in Gujarat and then in New Delhi. The current flare-up has a clear purpose to polarise and pit Hindus against Manipur’s minorities, a familiar script.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, July 25th, 2023