Manipur: When Monsters Take Over
Linus tackles things head-on. He takes sides in his analysis and it fits excellently with our editorial policy. No 'maybe's' and 'allegedly' for him, only things in black and white.
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By Linus Garg
First publised on 2023-07-21 00:02:55
About the Author
Linus tackles things head-on. He takes sides in his analysis and it fits excellently with our editorial policy. No 'maybe's' and 'allegedly' for him, only things in black and white.
View all posts by this Author
Victimizing women, whether parading them naked or raping (or gang-raping) them, often before their families, has sadly and disturbingly been a recurring and heinous crime in the patriarchal society in India. The beasts and monsters that do this try to stamp their authority as a class on another class they feel is inferior to them or punish an entire class of people in this way to terrorize them. Hence, be it the upper castes in UP who gang-raped Phoolan Devi and paraded her naked or the members of a tribe who paraded two women naked (leading to sexual molestation by others) in Manipur in May (the video of the incident surfaced just a couple of days ago), they fall in the same category. They are misogynistic and mentally unstable miscreants who think women are easy prey and putting women through such ordeal will 'teach a lesson' to others of their class and they will not confront them.
The worst part is that these monsters know that the law will not do anything. This is proved by the fact that in the Manipur incident, the FIR was filed in May after the incident happened but the administration did not act. It was only after the video of the shocking incident went viral on social media in July, a full two months after the incident, and there rightly was nationwide outrage, with even the Supreme Court coming down hard on both the state and the Centre, that the administration swung into action and started making arrests. Why did the administration not act when the FIR was filed? Did it consider the crime not 'worthy' of investigation or were the criminals 'influential' persons? Or were they paid off to hush the matter? Or worst still, did they seek to hush the matter on their own lest it gave a bad name to the state?
Acting on the FIR now is good but not enough. The matter needs to be probed and all those who chose to sit on the FIR for two months need to be punished for dereliction of duty. All the culprits must be arrested fast, the trial must be held before a fast-track court and the guilty must be punished as per law to deter others from victimizing women in their political battles.
