Downplaying an Outrage

Anguish, anger and pain expressed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday fall far short of what was expected of the Head of the Government who, together with other leaders from his party, has often boasted of leaving no room for violence and showing no tolerance for miscreants.

It took Mr Modi 79 days to break his silence over the mayhem which has disrupted peace and normal life in Manipur, a border state, taken a toll of 160 lives, witnessed over a hundred sexual assaults, uprooting thousands from their homes and habitats and burning down of over 250 churches.

Much against the expectation of a substantial statement within the House, he spoke outside the Parliament and for just about 30 seconds.

Not this alone, he thought it appropriate to bracket it with and lend parity to the barbaric incident with solitary incidents from Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan. It needs no extraordinary wisdom to glean a deliberate attempt to downplay the severity of the crime perpetrated not by a clutch of anti-socials, but by a vast mob of radicalised people.

That a government, which felt no qualms in moving bulldozers against people accused of petty violations of municipal regulations, should wake up after 79 days is in itself an outrage the parallel of which is difficult to find in the annals of India’s history.

The fact that the two Kuki women were grabbed from the protective cordon inside a police jeep even as two of their male relatives were separated from them and killed by the blood-thirsty mob, speaks of the level of insanity that has gripped the State during the last 80 days.

That an entire mob molested and paraded them naked and allowed them to be gang-raped by some of the hoodlums in broad daylight, should be enough to register the savagery allowed to be practised by a section of the populace.

It is not without reason that civil society activists and opposition parties attribute these to the licence for impunity enjoyed by a section of the populace. And given the nature of the political initiatives made by the Biren Singh Government, there are no prizes for guessing where his government’s sympathies lie and who is sought to be targeted for victimisation.

The appearance of the video two months after the mass violence began to be the order of the day is reminder of the savagery and viciousness the State’s populace must have suffered under a government that has refused to shed its complacency.

It was left for the apex court of the land to chastise the Modi Government on Thursday following the surfacing of the vicious act in the public domain.

The apex court has also taken due note of weaponising women in an ethnic conflict and minced no words in asking the government either to book the perpetrator or to step aside for the judiciary to carry out its obligation of ensuring constitutional safeguards for the people.

Mayhem in Manipur stands out as a case of not just an ethnic riot, but a challenge to the founding principles of the state by aligning itself with the majoritarian philosophy being pursued by the dispensation at the central level.

And poignantly, much of it owes itself to the missteps by the Biren Singh Government and the highly unfortunate directive by the High court of Manipur to the state government to take up the case of assigning the Scheduled Tribe (ST) tag to the majority Meitei community.