UN on Manipur violence

UN experts have slammed New Delhi’s failure to appropriately respond to deadly ethnic clashes in the state of Manipur

UN experts have slammed New Delhi’s failure to appropriately respond to the deadly ethnic clashes in the state of Manipur, despite growing reports of other human rights abuses, including sexual violence. A joint statement from almost 20 of the UN’s rights experts, including the special rapporteurs on violence against women and on torture, states that the violence has already claimed at least 160 lives, while 300 people have been injured, and tens of thousands displaced. Damage to property includes thousands of homes and hundreds of churches set ablaze, and huge masses of farmland wasted. Although both sides have been involved in violence, the minority Kuki people, who are also predominantly Christian, have mostly been on the receiving end, with only a few incidents reported against the Hindu Meitei majority, who have also allegedly had the support of out-of-state Hindutva groups, including Modi and the BJP.

Also notable is the state government’s astounding decision to register a criminal case against four members of the Editors Guild of India, including its president, after the guild sent a fact-finding team to assess how the state and central government, the police and others have been suppressing information. Astoundingly, they have been booked under a section of law that the Indian Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional in 2015 — although reporting since then suggests the Modi regime has regularly filed criminal cases under the voided law to harass regime opponents. If the BJP-led state government has any consistency, it should also book UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the UN rights experts, since their findings were largely in line with the journalists.

The alternative would be to accept the UN findings, but those include a call to “hold perpetrators to account, including public officials who may have aided and abetted the incitement of racial and religious hatred and violence”. But it is unlikely that Manipur Chief Minister N Biren Singh would file a case against Modi or himself.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 6^th, 2023.

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