A dishonourable honour

Illustration/Uday Mohite

On Friday, Biren Singh, "Honourable" Chief Minister of Manipur announced a statewide condemnation campaign following a viral video showing the gang-rape and assault of Kuki-Zo women in Manipur, and "tarnishing the image of the state". The bodies of women are useful for the powerful: to brutalise for power if you want, display for outrage when it's convenient - and invoke honour when you need some.

With the video's emergence, a hundred questions emerged, months too late. The incident took place on May 4. A zero FIR (culprits unknown) was filed on May 18. But anyway, police had abetted the majoritarian mob, as police allegedly have during Mumbai's 1992-93 riots and Gujarat in 2002. A complaint was sent to the National Commission for Women. On June 1, the website Newsclick published Honeilhing Sitlhou's account of several related incidents including interviews with the survivors of this one. But layers of silence persisted - the Prime Minister never spoke about the violence in Manipur.

Television news investigated nothing. The National Commission for Women did not respond. An internet ban was a fortress to facilitate this silence, within which majoritarian violence continued, uncurbed by the authorities.

A viral video may seem to pierce this silence; seem to serve a purpose of "exposing" wrongdoing thus propelling justice. But the images, looped continuously, even if blurred, parade the women in public once more, and along with it the brutality. Both are consumed and absorbed. Television uses this to send out double messages: a parade of power, masked by a hypocrisy of concern.

Silence is broken only to diffuse the specificity of a situation and create a generic narrative, rather than deepen political understanding or empathy. Within a day of the video's emergence, one person was arrested and photographs swiftly disseminated. A character-driven story so to speak, as media of all kinds constantly pushes the right-wing loudly, in the name of engagement, training the public to never engage with complexity and detail. Using this sensational visuality, the incident is exceptionalised and prised out of its context.

Suddenly the Kuki-Zo women become ‘our daughters', not citizens. Their gender, which was attacked as a symbol of their community, is now used to erase their identity. The death of all rapists is demanded, ethnic violence left behind. A soundscape of meaninglessness gathers momentum, as people echo leaders and newscasters. An example of a typical tweet emphasises how virality keeps reality in the realm of video, leaving reality untouched: "He should be tortured till his death and that torture should be recorded and posted so that any man who tries to do this sh't with any woman can think a thousand time before commiting such sin... Giving him a painful death will be the justice." "Any" man, "any" woman - the political nature of this atrocity is simply dissipated, by violating the bodies of women again. The crime is appropriated. It becomes not about assaulting women and minorities, but daring to bring shame to the rulers. Everything becomes about their "pain" and so-called honour. Thus, they absolve themselves of responsibility. The shame that belongs to the system, is displaced onto a perpetrator. Honour is taken for themselves from the women.

Viral cycles are a sickness that allow citizens to remain conveniently uninformed, complicit in political violence while performing an idea of themselves as concerned "honourable" people. Can justice emerge from this without a healing discourse?

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com