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01-07-2023
Bureau Report + BBC
NEW DELHI/ MANIPUR: A recently shared video by the Indian army from the violence-wracked north-eastern state of Manipur captured a dramatic sequence of scenes.
The two-minute 14-second footage shows unarmed women confronting soldiers on a busy street. Aerial shots show women gathering around an excavator on a disrupted road, a bustling mix of SUVs, cars, an ambulance speeding along a scenic valley route and glimpses of agitated women.
Ethnic violence continues to roil Manipur, nearly two months after clashes between the majority Meitei and tribal Kuki communities left more than 100 dead and displaced some 60,000. This despite the presence of tens of thousands of security forces in the valley, inhabited primarily by the Meitei community, as well as in the hills, home to the Kukis but, as the video shows restoring peace is a slow and difficult journey in a climate of deep divisions and distrust. Titled ‘Demystifying myth of peaceful blockade led by Manipur women’, the video makes some pretty incriminating allegations.
For one, it alleged that women protesters were “helping rioters flee” and accompanying them in vehicles and ambulances. They were also “coming in the way” of security operations and movement of logistics, and digging up a 
route to a paramilitary base to “cause delay”, it added. The video ended with an appeal to residents to cooperate with security forces who were “working day and night to bring peace and stability”.
A second video shows a tense encounter between a group of agitated women and a patient soldier. “It doesn’t matter. You go away,” a woman tells the soldier, while other women gather around her. The army also tweeted last week that they had freed 12 local insurgents during a combing operation after they were “surrounded” by a 1,500-strong “mob” of women in the state capital Imphal’s East district, where 16% of Manipur’s estimated 3.3 million people live.
Many of the women challenging the security forces in the turbulent valley are believed to be Meira Paibis ‘women torchbearers’ also known as Imas or ‘mothers of Manipur’. In 2004, they stunned the world by stripping naked outside a military camp in the capital, Imphal, while waving a banner that read ‘Indian Army Rape Us’, in a startling protest against the alleged gang-rape and murder of a 32-year-old local woman by paramilitary soldiers.
