In Manipur, justice remains elusive even after death

In 2023, during the peak of the ethnic conflict in Manipur, I visited a government school in Kangpokpi, where classrooms had been turned into a shelter for displaced people. An 18-year-old woman sat on the floor. Her hands were marked with bruises from the IV drips, as well as from injuries she had sustained when members of Arambai Tenggol — a radical Meitei group — allegedly abducted her from Imphal and drove her to Wangkhei Ayangpeli. In that Meitei-dominated area, she was assaulted and raped for hours.

When I sat down to speak with her, I carried the same questions in my notepad as every other reporter who had come to interview her. When she spoke to me, her voice was not louder than a whisper. I could not muster the courage to look into her eyes. While the job of a reporter in such a situation is to write about the human costs of the conflict, the guilt of asking people to relive their ordeal weighed heavily on me.

That evening, when I returned to my hotel in Churachandpur, I barely had an appetite. Over the next couple of days, though I spoke to many women who had gone through similar ordeals, I struggled to get past the trauma of the 18-year-old woman. I left Manipur after a couple of weeks, the image of her frail body against the blazing sun imprinted in my mind.

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Over the next two years, though I would call her family intermittently to check on her health, I barely got the chance to talk to the woman again. Her younger sister would occasionally answer my calls to say she was doing better, but most months, the woman struggled even to get out of bed. Despite knowing that both her physical and mental health had not improved, her family always sounded hopeful. With time, I moved on to other stories.

In January this year, when I was sitting with friends in Delhi, I saw a news flash that said one of the women who had been raped and assaulted during the first 2023 ethnic clash in Manipur had succumbed to her injuries. I tried to identify her. Over the next few hours, the Internet was full of articles about this tragedy. I kept hoping that my unanswered calls to her family did not necessarily mean that the news was right.

A day later, her father picked up my call to convey the message. Sitting in front of my laptop that day, I felt numb. Did our reports even matter, I wondered. What came of them? A young woman had succumbed to her injuries while endlessly awaiting justice, even as more and more stories of violence and clashes kept coming in from the State.

In the past, whenever her father had asked me when the woman would receive justice, I never had an answer. Sometimes, I would tell him that the authorities would identify the rapists soon; at others, I would just listen to his angry outbursts. Despite several promises of fast-tracking all the cases of rape that took place in Manipur in 2023, the Central Bureau of Investigation is yet to arrest a single person or file a charge sheet in her matter. Meanwhile, the Home Ministry continues to paint a picture of normalcy in the State.

Days after I learned that she had died, I stood outside the Kartavya Path in Delhi, speaking to groups from various States who had performed at the Republic Day parade. I met a young woman from Manipur. She was also 18 and had just started college. As she gushed about the opportunity she had received to perform in front of the Prime Minister and foreign dignitaries, she reminisced about the past, when her days were not marred by violence. When she spoke about her hope for a peaceful future in her town, I struggled not to think about the 18-year-old woman I had met in 2023, who had been deprived of a future. Facing the college-going Manipuri dancer, I wished fervently that her dreams would come true.