A video clip, no longer than 30 seconds, has altered the national conversation in India — and has done what hundreds of news channels, with thousands of employees and budgets worth millions, could not or would not do.
In the footage that was uploaded online in July, seen possibly by tens of millions of Indians before it was taken down, two women are paraded naked, as a mob of men push and shove them around, and several others look on approvingly. The vacant, helpless look in the eyes of the women, reeling from the shock of the assault, has become the defining picture of the collapse of law, order, and human decency in the northeastern state of Manipur.
“I would rather die than be the women in this video,” Glady Vaiphei told me through inconsolable tears, when she first forwarded me the clip. Vaiphei, once the owner of a small bridal-gowns business, has emerged as a key rights activist for Manipur, which has been divided by violent ethnic clashes since May.
On the ground, the state — which shares a 400-kilometers border with Myanmar and is only a couple of thousand kilometers from the Chinese border — is today effectively partitioned into two: The majority, mostly Hindu, Meitei population that lives in the valley is locked in battle with the minority, mostly Christian, Kuki people in the hills. The women who were attacked in the video were from the Kuki tribe. There has been colossal suffering in both communities. As bodies remain stacked up in the morgues of the city — an attempt to organize a mass burial by the Kuki community led to protests, tensions, and a fresh round of violence — more than 180 have been killed, and 60,000 people have been displaced. More worryingly, thousands of weapons and ammunition, including mortars, are now in civilian hands. On a week-long reporting assignment, I met school-going students in trenches and pits in rice fields, armed with weapons as large as them.
“This is war,” paddy farmers in the village of Phayeng, dominated by the Meitei community, told me, as they stood guard behind bunkers fortified with sandbags and stone. Across the divide, in the Kuki-dominated area of Kangpokpi, the parents of the two young women raped, tortured, and killed in early May still wait to bring their dead home. Their daughters worked in the city, only an hour’s drive away. But neither community can venture any longer into the other’s strongholds. An 84-year-old woman who could not see or hear was also not spared by rampaging mobs. Her son, who managed to flee, has not been able to bury his mother. “We have lost trust,” he told me. “I can never go back.”
If it were not for the viral video, the country would most likely not be talking about any of this.
Before the clip went viral, breaking free from a prolonged internet ban in the state — one that is still partially in place as the crisis enters its fourth month — Manipur was on the periphery of public attention. For 78 days after this incident and scores of others like it (more than 6,000 police complaints have been registered after a two-day eruption of clashes in May), the government, judiciary, or media did not show urgency or empathy. But just hours after the video went online — shared at the speed of light, across WhatsApp groups and social media networks — Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed anger and the Chief Justice of India warned the government, “If you do not act, we will.”
The video has brought home both the visceral power of the image and the redundancy of mainstream Indian media. More and more Indians are moving to YouTube and WhatsApp as their source of news. Despite being funded by giant corporate houses, most networks are plagued by broken revenue models, shrill talking heads are the norm, and boots-on-the-ground reporting an increasing rarity. In a polarized country, news channels are seen as puppets for either sycophants or activists. Classic reportage is hard to find on India’s nightly news.
Only when the video led to a set of national consequences — including a no-confidence motion against the Modi government in the Parliament — did TV channels rush to catch up. By that time, the clip had been taken down from all online platforms as Indian law forbids identifying the victims and survivors of sexual assault. The circulation of the video risked compounding the indignity the women had already suffered.
But what is seen cannot be unseen.
And so, in Manipur, protesters on both sides know that only part of this fight is at the front line. The other war is for headlines, messaging, and narrative. Young volunteers from different walks of life operate small information centers, offering digital oases in a desert of blocked signals. There are macabre videos of beheadings and stirring photographs of candlelight marches being furiously shared and forwarded across the ether. The primacy of videos as a weapon in this conflict also underscores the futility — or at least the limitation — of internet bans.
For several years, India has topped the list of countries that have shut down the internet to manage conflagrations. As a reporter covering conflicts, I have often found the Western outrage over this issue overly simplistic. I have seen counter-insurgency operations hampered by operational details shared by militant sympathizers over social networks. I have witnessed the alarming impact of fake news and inflammatory images in charged situations of civil conflict. And yet, Manipur teaches you two things about internet blackouts. First, technology will always get ahead of the restriction. If you ban mobile data, there’s broadband. If you curb Wi-Fi access to social media, as Manipur hotels did, there’s always a way to send your material over email to a colleague in another city who will post it for you. If all else fails, someone will find a local cop or a bureaucrat friend whose office has unrestricted access.
The other learning should be that when internet restrictions are combined with a communication and information vacuum, the impact is lethal. It is through these gaps that fake news spreads even further. In Manipur, institutions of governance have been split down ethnic fault lines, the police have lost authority, and the state government has been either absent or heartless.
In the absence of any meaningful dialogue between the administration and the victims of the violence, people are determined to tell their own stories, in their own words, on their own phones.
