Elections 2023: It’s once again crowded in Meghalaya, and no one’s complaining

Small constituencies, local interests, tribal rivalries encourage sprouting of regional parties, which come up as quickly as they disappear – never kings, only kingmakers

As Meghalaya heads for Assembly elections on February 27, almost all political parties are candid about being open to post-poll possibilities. It is only natural – given that coalition governments are somewhat of a norm in the hill state.

At the heart of it, observers say, is the sheer number of regional parties that dot the electoral landscape in the state. Mostly known by their acronyms, many disintegrate as quickly as they are formed, often months before an election.

In 2018, for instance, as many as seven-state based parties – apart from the ruling National People’s Party (NPP), which now has footprints in several other states of the region, too – contested the election. Together, they accounted for a formidable 13 seats and nearly 30 per cent vote share in the 60-seater Assembly.

 

These parties included the United Democratic Party (UDP), which won 6 seats, the People’s Democratic Front (PDF), which got 4 constituencies, the Hill State People’s Democratic Party (HSPDP), which won 2 seats, and the Khun Hynniewtrep National Awakening Movement (KHNAM), that cornered 1 seat.

In 2013, six regional parties were in the fray, in a more one-sided election by the state’s standards. However, they still accounted for nearly 25 per cent share of votes, and 14 seats.

Ditto in 2008: five Meghalaya-based parties snared 30 per cent of the vote share and 17 seats. That year, they also formed a short-lived government.

What explains this wide proliferation of small parties in the state, particularly when compared to the other tribal states in the region where fewer regional electoral forces exist?

This article was originally published in The Indian Express in February 2022 in the run up to the Meghalaya Assembly Elections. Full article here.

Assam’s little-known feminist collective which pushed for fixed meal times, women’s leisure

Northeast Lightbox shines the light on Assam’s little-known feminist history by documenting the story of the Tezpur Mahila Samiti 

One morning in July 1948, a group of women convened somewhere in the quaint riverside town of Tezpur in central Assam. They met often but the outcome of this meeting was unlike any other: a stream of angry letters to the editor, a fair amount of name-calling, and fodder for a long-running joke among the townsfolk. An idea this crazy could come only from Tezpur, someone had said, alluding to the town being home to one of the country’s oldest mental asylums. The cause of this flutter?

The ladies had proposed that families in Assam adopt “fixed mealtimes” in order to enable “women’s leisure”. “Women have to keep themselves busy with kitchen work all day long and as such are not free to join any activities outside the domestic sphere…in order to…take their part in cultural activities they must have sufficient leisure”, the resolution [in Assamese] stated. Making a case for lunch by 12 PM and dinner by 10 PM for towns across Assam, it asked for “public cooperation”, and added: “No meal should be served after one hour of the proposed time.”

The resolution was reproduced in several Assamese dailies, as well as The Assam Tribune, the state’s oldest circulating English language newspaper. Public outrage followed. “What is the duty of a wife towards such a husband who toiled the whole day in scorching sun… Is it her duty to stop his meals when his belly is burning of hunger? Is it her duty to go for social work when he needs someone dearer and nearer to share his exhaustion… and invigorate his losing spirit and energy?” wrote a particularly angry gentleman from Guwahati in his letter to the editor.

Another dismissed it as “occasional entertainment”. He added: “No amount of participation in cultural activities would be able to compensate a woman for the loss of happiness at home.”

It is unlikely that the Tezpur resolution was implemented, but 75 years later it stands out as among the many examples of quiet rebellion that make up the storied history of the Tezpur Mahila Samiti, one among the few pre-independence ‘women’s collectives’ that had sprung up in towns across Assam. 

This article was originally published in The Indian Express in March 2023. Full article here.

The Biren Singh 2.0 factor in one of Manipur’s worst ethnic clashes

Armed with an absolute majority, the BJP CM has been more aggressive; seen as more partial to Naga tribes, he has let resentments brew in Kuki-dominant areas

Nearly 60 dead, thousands displaced, homes razed to the ground, places of worship torched, a legislator brutally assaulted by a mob. These have been in the images of Manipur over the last few days.

The “tribal solidarity march” on May 3 — to protest against the inclusion of the numerically dominant Meitei Community in the Scheduled Tribe (ST) category — was just the tipping point. Political commentators say that the flare-up was long coming, especially in the backdrop of the actions of the Biren Singh-led BJP government in Manipur, particularly in its second term. From the crackdown on poppy plantations and eviction drives, to frequent allegations that the Kukis of Churachandpur were sheltering “foreigners” from Myanmar, the state’s southern hill — home to the community — had been on the simmer.

Strikingly, the present tensions follow a period of relative peace under Biren’s BJP government. In fact, the BJP went into the 2022 Assembly elections citing Biren’s governance record in the last five years. Manipur under Biren, the party claimed, had been “peaceful”, devoid of bandhs, blockades, and large-scale ethnic violence.

Indeed, Biren, in his first term as CM, stood out for his outreach to the state’s hill tribes. His flagship “Go To Hills” programme – an outreach initiative to ensure that people in remote places avail benefits of various welfare schemes – had its skeptics, but even critics acknowledged its symbolic significance.

So, what explains this sudden turnaround? Commentators attribute it to a mix of Meitei majoritarian politics, ethnic Kuki aspirations and the CM’s unwillingness to engage with them.

This article was originally published in The Indian Express in May 2023. Full article here.

Once out-of-print, now preserved forever: How rare 19th century Assamese journals are going online

A digitising project led by two Assam-based non-profits has given hundreds of rare, out-of-print Assamese journals a second life

There are not many copies of Cartoon — north-east India’s “first monthly cartoon journal”— around. So rare is the 1970s Assamese language political satire magazine that even its founder-editor, the late Pulak Gogoi, was once said to have been hard-pressed for a copy.

Gogoi, who passed away last year, would have been pleasantly surprised then to find that the journal — published between 1967 and 1973, and sold at 50 paisa apiece — now has a new virtual home.

Digitising Axom, a digital archiving and preservation project, led by two Assam-based trusts, has given Cartoon — and at least 125 other out-of-print Assamese journals — a second life online.

The range is immense: from love poems to political affairs, social commentary to children’s literature, humanitarian crises to tips on homemaking — all captured in an ambitious project to cover “every possible rare book and journal published in Assam”.

If a slim 16-page booklet, Gogona, provides an insight into the workings of a Bihu committee of Dibrugarh in the late 1950s, the 20 issues of the historic Orunodoi(1846), Assam’s first magazine, is a window into the social and political life of the time. There’s Jonaki (1889) that introduced romanticism in Assamese literature, Abahon (1929) that was considered to have pioneered photojournalism in the region and Ramdhenu that birthed a new crop of writers, many of whom went on to become the state’s leading literary luminaries.

This article was originally published in The Indian Express in June 2023. Full article here.

A village, a girl and the road to Oscars

Dohgaon Kalardiya is just another village in Assam, with a cast of dreamers and doers. Now, one filmmaker and a band of children are telling its story to the world.

When they first saw the boys from the neighbouring village “make music” with a guitar made of thermocol at a school function, Manabendra Das and Rinku Das thought it was the most “chaliya” (coolest) thing they had ever seen. The two young residents of Dohgaon Kalardiya village in Assam’s Chhaygaon wanted one too for their own performance at their local Bihu toli function. Manabendra, then 13, imagined how impressed their entire village would be. And 14-year-old Rinku thought to himself that this is how Zubeen da (his favourite singer) must feel when he sang on stage.

But becoming “rock stars” wasn’t that simple. They didn’t have money to buy thermocol to “make” their guitars. They didn’t even have band members. “If you want to become a rock star, you need to be at least four,” says Manabendra, matter-of-factly. That month — sometime in March 2013 — the two went around their village looking to recruit potential band members. And money to buy theromocol for their instruments. “Many were dismissive. They said ‘Ei maaxa baad de’. ‘Don’t waste your time on frivolities’,” says Manabendra.

The duo managed to collect some money, and soon they had instruments and a five-membered band: Rinku on the vocals, Bhaskar on the (thermocol) keys, Bishnu on the (thermocol) drums and Boloram and Manabendra on the (thermocol) guitar. They recorded bits of their favourite songs to make a 30-minute long medley: it had Assamese, Hindi and even Telugu tracks. “The organisers told us that we could perform for ten minutes,” recalls Rinku.

But the boys and their theatrics turned out to be such a hit that they were on stage for the full 30 minutes that evening. At the end of the show, as is the norm in many local Bihu functions, people gave them money. “We collected Rs 1,300!” says Manabendra. In the crowd, his little sister, Bhanita watched, proud of her big brother on stage.

Soon, the “band” was called for several performances around the different villages in Chhaygaon. “We called ourselves the ‘Rockstars’,” says Rinku. And on some important occasions, they would use the longer version: the Rockstar Dance Group.

In the hamlet of Dohgaon Kalardiya in Chhaygaon live 70 families. Three weeks ago, courtesy one house, they all learnt a new word: Oscar. “We now know it’s something that’s given our village a name,” says Purobi Thakuria, a 33-year-old-housewife. She admits that when she first saw Rima Das and her band of children going around the village with a camera, she wondered what they were up to. They were “shooting”, she had heard. But don’t films require bigger cameras, a crew, and glamorous actors and actresses?

This article was originally published in The Indian Express in October 2018. Full article here.

‘Everyone should know what happened to us’

This article recounts testimonies of sexual assault survivors of the 2023 ethnic conflict in Manipur. It was originally published on Scroll.in in July 2023, and won the Laadli Media Award 2024 for gender sensitive reporting as well as a special jury appreciation by the International Press Institute India Award for Excellence in Journalism 2024.
[*Trigger Warning — contains graphic descriptions*]
The video showing Kuki women being paraded naked by a mob has brought national attention to the sexual violence that has taken place during Manipur’s ongoing civil war. Days before the video emerged, Scroll had travelled to Manipur to interview Kuki women who faced extreme violence at the hands of the mobs.
We spoke to four women, including one whose ordeal, captured on video, finally forced the prime minister to end his silence on Manipur. All of the women recounted that the men who assaulted them said they were taking revenge for violence against their community. Strikingly, in two cases, the survivors said Meitei women were part of the mob, egging the men on.

Survivor: 19-year-old
Currently at: Relief camp, Kangpokpi district
Date of incident: May 15, Imphal

When a 19-year-old Kuki resident of Imphal’s New Checkon colony stepped out on the evening of May 15 to withdraw money from an ATM, she said she could have “never imagined” what lay ahead. In the hours that followed, she said she was abducted by a gang of men, dragged into a car, brutally assaulted in three different locations across Imphal, before she escaped by a miraculous stroke of luck.

In a relief camp in Kangpokpi district, exactly two months after the incident, she said she can barely “sleep at night”. “Sometimes I wake up crying…I remember what they did to me, I keep thinking of it,” she said, her voice low.

In a classroom of a training institute, now converted into a relief camp for displaced Kukis, the survivor narrated the incident to Scroll for over an hour.

After clashes broke out between Meitei and Kuki communities on May 3, the 19-year-old’s parents and siblings, along with many others, fled the mobs in Imphal on May 4. The 19-year-old, however, could not accompany them.

When the violence had broken out, she was with a friend: a Kuki, too, who was married to a Muslim.

“Since it was so tense, I could not join my family and took refuge in the Pangal neighbourhood,” she said. The Meitei Pangals, residents of the Imphal Valley who follow Islam, are not involved in the conflict in Manipur, and hence, relatively shielded from violence from both sides.

For days, the 19-year-old hid in the Muslim household, careful not to step out or be seen.

When the first round of violence abated about 10 days later, things were still tense in Imphal. Her parents – then at a relief camp in Kangpokpi district – told her it was better she left Imphal. Some money was wired to her account, and the plan was for a Muslim driver to drop her to Kangpokpi.

On May 15, around 4 pm, the 19-year-old, along with the friend in whose home she had taken shelter, stepped out to withdraw money for the journey. Before they could even get to an ATM, two cars – a white Bolero and a purple Swift – appeared on the road. A few men got out, asking the two girls to produce their Aadhaar cards.

When they said they did not have it on them, the men began assaulting them – first, her friend, and then the 19-year-old. The men accused the friend of sheltering the Kuki girl, before they left her by the side of the road.

They proceeded to drag the 19-year-old into the white Bolero, she said. Inside, they beat her up, ignoring her protests, and drove her to Wangkhei Ayangpali, a Meitei locality.

There, her captors rounded up men and women from the neighbourhood. By the side of the road, the survivor said, it was the women who “first started beating me up”. “They were dressed in their traditional phanek… some old, some young,” she said, about the group of women assaulters.

As sticks and bare hands beat her up, she recalled seeing a pair of scissors in the mix. “Someone pulled my hair… with the scissors, they tried to chop my hair too,” she said.

All the while, the survivor pleaded with her assaulters in Meitei: “I told them: ‘Why are you beating me? Why are you slapping a girl like this? Am I not your sister?’”

But the mob was out of control. The survivor alleged that the women handed her over to the men, asking them to “kill her”. “The men asked me how I dared to still be here [in Imphal],” she said. “I told them that I was doing my best to leave, and to please let me go.” One of them then said to her: “Your tribal boys have killed us Meiteis and so we will not save you.”

Some men, the survivor recollected, started making calls to whom she believes were the members of the Arambai Tenggol, a radical Meitei group that has been accused of leading several attacks against the Kukis since the ethnic clashes broke out on May 3. “We have captured one tribal,” the men said on the phone.

Sometime later, another car, a Bolero, arrived, its occupants a group of men in black T-shirts, and armed with guns. The survivor was dragged inside the vehicle and taken to another location, which she recognised as Langol Hills, a range in the northern part of the Imphal Valley.

There, she was blindfolded, her hands tied. “I kept crying throughout… they threatened to shoot me if I did not quieten down,” she said. The mob again decided to move her to another location – this time further away from Imphal, to Bishnupur district. “They felt if they did it in Imphal, the police may catch them,” she said.

By that time, night had fallen. The survivor said she was taken to a hill. “They told me that if I wanted to live, I would have to do ‘as they said’,” she said, adding that they used “very bad words”, and told her they wanted to rape her. “They told me: ‘If you let us do it, we will save you.’ I told them I am not that kind of girl.”

When she resisted, they tried to “pull her shirt” and “grab her.” All the while, she said she could hear the men load their rifles, feel the weapons prodding her. At some point, she passed out, she later confided in a woman taking care of her in the relief camp.

She next remembers wanting to relieve herself. It was almost dawn by then. “When I asked them for permission, they laughed and said that if my wish was to urinate before I died, they would let me,” she said.

They untied her hands, and turned around, warning her not to go “too far away”.

The survivor pulled off her blindfold, walking a short distance away. “When I saw that their backs were towards me, I somehow…I don’t know how…managed to roll off the hill,” she said.

At the base of the hill, on the main road, an autorickshaw – belonging to a Muslim man – was passing by. The driver saw her, stopped his auto, and helped her into the vehicle. “I was in no condition to even stand,” she said.

By then, she said, the men could see her escaping and they ran down the hill shooting. “The auto managed to speed away,” she said.

She was first taken to a police station, where officers asked her to wait for the officer in-charge. But feeling uncomfortable since all the men in the police station were Meitei, she decided to leave with the auto driver, who dropped her to New Checkon, where some members of the Kuki community who were still in Imphal managed to receive her.

For the next two days, she took refuge in the home of a former Kuki legislator from the Bharatiya Janata Party, TT Haokip, a fact confirmed by his wife, Mary Haokip.

Worrying for her life, the 19-year-old said she did not go to a hospital, instead choosing to be treated with first aid at the Haokips’ house. She remembers her ears were bleeding, her eyes bloodshot, her body covered in bruises, her face swollen. “I could not even chew or swallow food,” she said.

Mary Haokip, now in Churachandpur, said she “fed and nursed” the girl. “I have no words to describe the condition,” said Haokip. “She could not even walk up the stairs, she could not eat for two days. We were wondering how to send her to her parents, then finally we managed to arrange it.”

On May 20, the survivor was able to make it to the relief camp in Kangpokpi district, where her family had taken shelter.

She was then taken to a hospital in Kangpokpi district, which referred her to another hospital in the neighbouring state of Nagaland, after preliminary medical care.

A report signed by the medical officer of the Naga Hospital Authority, Kohima, dated May 24, which Scroll independently verified, describes her diagnosis as “alleged case of assault and rape”. Under the case summary, it reads: “Assault and rape on 15/05/23 during the Manipur tribal clash.”

Two months later, the survivor said she still remembers the faces of her assaulters. The family considered filing a police complaint, but then got scared and decided against it. She said she was not sure if the complaint was ultimately filed.

Scroll visited two police stations, Kangpokpi and Sapormeina, but no record of this case was found.

The survivor said she has lost touch with all her Meitei friends. “Some of them found my mother’s number and even asked to talk to me but I cannot bring myself to take their calls – I simply can’t forget what they [Meiteis] did to me – I cannot ever go back home to Imphal,” she said.

These days, her mother tells her to be strong. “She tells me that she has heard that there are other girls who suffered similar experiences. I should be strong for them,” she said.

A day after Scroll published this account, the young woman submitted a police complaint, alleging rape. A first information report has been filed.

Survivors: 19-year-old and 20-year-old
Currently in: Churachandpur district with their families
Date of incident: May 4, a nursing institute in Imphal

On the afternoon of May 4, panic spread among the residents of a girls’ hostel of a nursing institute in Imphal’s Porompat, when a mob started clanging the gates of their hostel.

As the students watched from the windows, the mob – comprising both men and women – managed to enter.

Two Kuki women – one, a first-year student aged 19 and the other, a second year-student aged 20 –were caught by the mob, thrashed and “left to die” by the side of the road outside their hostel, till a police car picked them up and took them to a hospital.

Both have filed separate police complaints: the 19-year-old in Uttam Nagar police station in Delhi, and the 20-year-old in Churachandpur police station in Manipur. The latter has been registered as an FIR under charges of attempt to murder and outraging the modesty of a woman, among others – and forwarded to Porompat police station in Imphal. Uttam Nagar police station officials said they had forwarded the complaint to the office of the director-general of police, Manipur, on May 30. But the Porampat police station in Imphal said they had not received the complaint.

“Some radical mobs belonging to the Meitei community armed with sophisticated weapons…chanting anti-tribal slogans…barged into my hostel room and dragged me onto the road,” the 20-year-old wrote in her complaint, adding: “I was harassed, abused, tortured and beaten.”

The 19-year-old wrote that the mob accused her of being an “illegal immigrant from another country” and started beating her “brutally”. “They left me to die on the street,” she wrote in her complaint.

More than two months later, in their homes in Churachandpur, the women are still trying to come to terms with the assault. The two meet sometimes, but they never talk about the incident.

Scroll met them in their homes, where they, separately, recounted the incident in detail.

According to the 20-year-old, the mobs arrived a little after 4 pm – a fact confirmed to Scroll by a member of the hostel staff, a Meitei woman who lives in Imphal.

Two women, who were part of the mob, entered the hostel demanding identification cards of all students.

The hostel had a mix of women from the Meitei, Naga and Kuki communities. “There were eight Kukis – six of them had managed to hide in one part of the hostel, but my senior and I were not able to,” said the 19-year-old.

The 20-year-old said she tried telling the woman checking identity cards that she was Naga, to which the woman responded: “That’s okay – we are looking only for Kuki girls.”

However, when they were forced to reveal their identity cards, the mob realised that both were Kuki.

The 19-year-old said that a senior member of the institute’s staff, a Meitei woman, tried to reason with the mob, but to no avail.

The mob downstairs was getting even more agitated and shouting for the two women to be brought down. “What are you still doing there? Bring them out, bring them out,” the mob shouted, the 19-year-old recalled. Following which, the two were forced down outside the hostel onto the main road.

Downstairs, the two girls were trashed side-by-side. The senior member of the institute’s staff witnessed this in a state of helplessness, the 19-year-old recalled.

“I really tried to plead with the mob – but I just could not help them. I was so helpless,” the senior member of the institute’s staff told Scroll.

The 19-year-old remembers crying helplessly, as the mob kicked and punched her. Both the survivors said that the women themselves did not beat them, but incited the mob: “Why are you still keeping them alive? Rape them, cut their bodies into pieces and burn them alive,” a woman allegedly shouted.

“They beat me so much with their bare hands that I fell to the ground. They were beating my senior by my side. I don’t know what exactly happened to her but I was aware that she was being beaten badly,” the 19-year-old said.

The 20-year-old was punched “so hard” that three of her front teeth fell out. At her home in Churachandpur, touching her dental implants with the tip of a finger, she said her injuries are somewhat better. But her lips are still visibly swollen, even two months later.

“I still remember the face of the woman who shouted ‘Rape them, cut their bodies into pieces and burn them alive’,” she said. The 19-year-old said that it was especially “painful” to hear women utter such words. “‘I’m sure she [the woman who said those words] also has a daughter,” she said.

The two women were then asked by the mob to walk a little distance away. “By that time, there was blood flowing down, from my shirt to my chappals,” said the 19-year-old.

According to her, the mob was armed with stones, knives and even guns. “As we were walking, one guy pointed his gun at us. But another man told him that it was not the right time, and he put it down,” she said.

Then, the two were beaten again – and both fell unconscious thereafter. The next time they woke up they were in a hospital. Later, the 19-year-old was flown to Delhi and admitted to the intensive care unit of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences’s trauma centre. The 20-year-old was evacuated to an army hospital in Imphal, and later the district hospital in Churachandpur. The 19-year-old came back to her home in Churachandpur at the end of May. “I am better, but for days, I felt dizzy and nauseous,” she said.

Scroll spoke to a Meitei member of the hostel staff, who confirmed the incident. “These girls were not just students, they were like my children. I feel so bad that I could not do anything to save them,” she said.

Survivors: 44-year-old and 21-year-old
Currently at: A relief camp in Churachandpur district, and in Tengnoupal district, respectively.
Date of incident: May 4, near B Phainom in Kangpokpi district

When they heard that the Meitei mobs were “burning homes” in a nearby village on May 4, the residents of B Phainom began to pack their bags. Among them was a 44-year-old woman, the wife of the village chief. While most families had left, she and her neighbours were slightly delayed.

But they managed to escape. In the nick of time, both families hid in a forested path just a short distance from their home. As they hid, they could hear the rioters beat the gong of their village church. From a distance, they saw their homes being burnt. “But there was enough foliage to conceal us,” said the woman.

However, the mobs discovered them: their group split into two, and before her eyes, her neighbours, a 56-year-old man and his 19-year-old son, were lynched. The mob then turned their attention to their daughter, 21, and the woman herself. They were subsequently paraded naked by the mob, and groped – the graphic visuals of which have gone viral on the internet.

The 21-year-old got married soon after the incident, and now lives in Tengnoupal. The older woman, now a resident of a crowded relief camp in Churachandpur, narrated her story to Scroll on a July evening.

After being discovered, the men began to assault them, even as some [Meitei] men expressed their discomfort with hitting the women. “They were the nicer ones… some actually said, ‘Let’s not hit the women.’ But most in the mob did not care – they punched us, pulled our hair and beat us up badly,” she said.

In the vicinity, she said, there was a police vehicle. While three of them (she, the 21-year-old girl and her 19-year-old brother) got into it, the father was pulled away and lynched.

“We did not see how exactly they did it but we knew they had killed him,” she said, adding that they asked the policeman to start the vehicle to help them escape.

“In the beginning, the policeman did not move the vehicle,” she said. But just as he started the engine, the mob gathered around them. The three of them were pulled out and separated: the young boy was dragged away to the area in the paddy field where his father was killed. At a distance, she saw him being hit with a big stick, and he collapsed – on the body of his dead father.

In the meanwhile, the mob surrounded the two women, ordering them to strip. “When we resisted, they punched us and forcefully tried to pull off our clothes,” she said. The men warned the women: “If you don’t take off your clothes, we will kill you”.

The woman said she had no choice but to take off every item of clothing only in order to “protect herself”.

All the while, the men allegedly slapped and punched her. She could sense her neighbour in the vicinity, but she did not know what exactly was happening to her.

The woman was then dragged to a paddy field near the road, as the mob accompanied her. There, she was asked to lie down. “Three men surrounded me… two on the side, one right in front of me. One of them told the other, ‘Let’s rape her’, but ultimately they did not,” she said. “But they did grab my breasts – twice,” she said.

The woman recalled her assaulters telling her that “Kukis had raped Meitei women in Churachandpur, that they had killed a Meitei child” and that they were taking “revenge”.

The men subsequently left her in the field, and soon after another group of Meitei men came and gave her their clothes.

She headed to the spot near the police vehicle, when she was waylaid by another mob, who made her strip again. Later, she said, another group of men came, some of those who had expressed discomfort about attacking women, and gave her her clothes back.

Her neighbour – the 21-year-old – appeared by her side again. Both of them collected their clothes, and escaped to a village nearby.

She said she did not file a complaint herself.

But a relative did. Based on the complaint, the police said a zero FIR was registered in the Saikul police station of Kangpokpi district on May 18. The first information report mentions her age as 42. It also says that the 21-year-old woman was “brutally gang-raped in broad daylight”. A third woman, who was with the two women, was also forced to strip. An official at the Saikul police station said charges of rape and murder, among others, have been pressed against “unknown miscreants” numbering “800-1,000”.

More than two months after the incident, the 44-year-old said she did what they told her to only to keep herself alive. “I am anyway a married woman…I was helpless in front of a mob,” she said in a quiet voice.

Close to the relief camp, living with her relatives, the mother of the 21-year-old is beside herself with grief. She tried to narrate the incident, as told to her by the daughter, but broke down.

After the incident, her daughter’s boyfriend offered to marry her, she said. “She is now with him in another district… she is away from all this,” she said.

As for the 44-year-old wife of the village chief, she said it was important to recount her ordeal in front of the media, even if she was exhausted.

“Everyone should know what happened to us,” the 44-year-old said, adding: “But despite what happened, I want to say all Meiteis are not bad…There were actually some men who tried to help me.”

Two years of Assam NRC: Lakhs make it to list, but struggle for Aadhaar

State government officials reckon it is a “unique problem” and attribute it to red tape and a lack of clarity on the NRC exercise itself.

For 18 months now, Bhanu Upadhyay, a postdoctoral fellow at IIT Bombay, has been running around for an Aadhaar card. After many calls to toll-free numbers, e-mails, and visits to application centres, the Aadhaar application of the 33-year-old Nepali-origin resident of Assam is “still under process”.

Upadhyay, who hails from Abhongpathar, a remote village in Golaghat district, managed to work around the need for the unique identification number. “But it’s giving me sleepless nights now since I will be applying for jobs at central institutions which won’t accept my application without Aadhaar,” he says.

Upadhyay is not alone. Around eight lakh people who provided their biometrics, and also made it to the National Register of Citizens (NRC) published on August 31, 2019, are struggling to get Aadhaar, and worry about benefits linked to it. In all, 27 lakh people had registered their biometrics, but 19 lakh of these did not find their names in the NRC.

State government officials reckon it is a “unique problem” and attribute it to red tape and a lack of clarity on the NRC exercise itself. The state has highlighted the issue by writing to the Registrar General of India, but no action has been forthcoming so far.

At the heart of the problem is a November 2018 Supreme Court-approved Standard Operating Procedure (SOP). Under the SOP, those left out of the draft NRC list published on July 31, 2018, had to mandatorily submit their biometrics during the hearings of ‘claims’ (to include themselves in the NRC) and ‘objections’ (to object to someone else’s inclusion) process. These hearings were conducted in the run-up to the publication of the complete list on August 31, 2019.

This article was originally published in The Indian Express in August 2021. Full article here.

The rebel who chose peace

His years as an armed insurgent are two decades in the past. Since then, Zoramthanga has helped Mizoram emerge as NE’s most peaceful state. When it comes to land though, the 77-yr-old Chief Minister won’t back down.

In the year 2000, weighed down by liabilities, and with few avenues for revenue, Mizoram had managed to extract Rs 182.45 crore as “bonus” from the Centre. First of its kind, the package, extended by the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government, came to be known as a “peace bonus” — awarded to Mizoram for being “the most peaceful state in the Northeast”.

Back then, if one were to ask the man who made it happen and who was just two years into his chief ministership, Zoramthanga would possibly have smiled and said, “Peace pays”, a catchphrase the rebel-turned-politician is fond of using.

Because, ever since it emerged from a two-decade-long insurgency in the mid-1980s, peace is what the hill state has prided itself on — even its tourism pitch is based on that. Since the militant outfits laid down arms in 1986, few if any insurgents are recorded as having gone underground. The Mizo Accord of June 30, 1986, between the Mizo National Front (MNF) and the Government of India is perhaps the most successful of its kind in the country. Security experts often call it the “only insurgency in the world that ended with the stroke of a pen”.

The last fortnight though has been far from peaceful for Mizoram. First, in what was possibly the bloodiest standoff in its old border dispute with Assam, six policemen from Assam were killed. Assam issued an unusual travel advisory against travelling to Mizoram; Mizoram instituted an FIR against Assam CM Himanta Biswa Sarma, among others; Assam responded with counter-FIRs — with the diminutive Zoramthanga going toe-to-toe with Sarma, arguably Northeast’s most influential political leader.

Those who know him saw shades of Zoramthanga of old — the college graduate-turned-MNF rebel, who joined the armed insurgency, rose to second only in stature to the legendary Laldenga, and survived in the bush for 20 years. He penned down an autobiography in Mizo recording all this, and is currently writing his memoirs in English.

The insurgency was the result of the Mizos feeling neglected at the hands of the larger Assam state it was a part of then, and New Delhi. In a culmination of the anger, on February 28, 1966, the bank clerk-turned-rebel Laldenga led Operation Jericho to capture Aizawl. For the first and only time in the history of independent India, the government, led by Indira Gandhi, ordered air raids on its own territory. The violence raged on for two decades, before the MNF declared peace and joined electoral politics. Power has since largely remained with the party, first under Laldenga and then his personal secretary and closest aide, Zoramthanga.

Now into his third term, Zoramthanga is known as frank and outspoken, but also soft and pacifist — a carefully cultivated image. “His politics has never been combative. He barely attacks his opponents even during poll campaigns. And if there is a scandal, he probably won’t even make a statement — at best, issue a press release,” says a senior Aizawl journalist, who asked to remain anonymous.

“Zoramthanga does not betray that side of him which pushed him to take up guns. Rebel leaders need not fit the stereotype of being tough and uncompromising,” says Patricia Mukhim, Editor, Shillong Times.

Robert Romawia Royte, a Cabinet minister in the MNF government who is close to Zoramthanga, says the CM never “scolds anyone”, not even a “peon”, but can “be tough when the situation demands it”.

Given this record, over the years, the Central government — from the Vajpayee-led one to Narendra Modi’s — has sought Zoramthanga’s help to reach out to other rebel groups in the Northeast. In an interview, he once said, “It is my life’s mission to bring peace here.”

Since the 1990s, the MNF has been an ally of the BJP, before it even registered a presence in the Northeast, and is now a part of its Northeast Democratic Alliance. In local, state-level politics though, the MNF and BJP often fight each other.

To dissect the events of the past week then, it is important to not just look at Zoramthanga alone, but Mizo society as a whole, for whom land is the most important asset. “It’s not just Zoramthanga. Any other Mizoram CM would have taken a similar stand,” says an observer in Mizoram. “When it comes to issues of ethnicity, whether it’s against the Brus or for the Chins (from Myanmar), or land, they will rally together across political lines, no matter what.”

This article was originally published in The Indian Express in August 2021. Full article here.

Elections 2022: Tiny hill town captures Manipur’s unusual poll scene

Nestled in the Sadar Hills and home to the Kuki tribe, Saikul in Kangpokpi district, is a nondescript place. However, ever since the Assembly elections were announced, the town, situated 30 km from state capital Imphal, has emerged as the scene of the quintessential ‘Manipur election’.

“So how do you like our dusty, old Saikul?” asks Goupu Chongloi, the block president of the Kuki Students’ Organisation (KSO), as he talks about his town. “It has nothing, right?…totally backward.”

Nestled in the Sadar Hills and home to the Kuki tribe, Saikul in Kangpokpi district, is a nondescript place. However, ever since the Assembly elections were announced, the town, situated 30 km from state capital Imphal, has emerged as the scene of the quintessential ‘Manipur election’.

Polls in Manipur are rarely shaped by political parties. Instead, what influences them is allegiances to clans and tribes, civil society organisations and, as many believe, even the ‘underground’, a euphemism for the state’s several militant groups. Then there’s the perennial hill-valley divide and, of course, the abundance of defecting candidates. Tiny Saikul captures it all.

In the first phase of polls on February 28, besides Yamthong Haokip, a two-time MLA on NIA radar, in the fray are his feisty daughter, the father of the state’s police chief and the wife of the self-styled chief of the outlawed Kuki Revolutionary Army (KRA).

This article was originally published in The Indian Express in February 2022. Full article here.

Meghalaya Elections 2022: To challenge status quo, former domestic help, pastor, activist in poll fight

The three are part of KAM Meghalaya, a new political platform of activists and social workers who have come together to contest the elections this year under a common umbrella.

On a crisp February morning, in a working class pocket of Shillong’s Keating Road, Wanpynhun Kharsyntiew sat in deep conversation with Kiran Mandal. “It’s tough raising them (my children) on my own,” said Mandal, a single mother of two who runs a tea stall for a living.

Kharsyntiew said she understood. “My husband used to drink and fight – I have gone through some bad times,” she responded. “It doesn’t matter if I win or lose, I will still help you.”

Kharsyntiew, once a domestic help, is part of KAM Meghalaya, a new political platform of activists and social workers who have come together to contest the elections this year under a common umbrella. Since it is not a registered political party, the three candidates under its banner are contesting as Independents in three key urban constituencies of Shillong.

Always dressed in a Khasi jainsem (traditional garment worn by women), never without her kwai (betel nut) and endearingly referred to as “Kong Wanpynhun”, Kharsyntiew is contesting from East Shillong constituency where Keating Road falls.

Kharsyntiew’s campaign, which began as early as June 2022, is entirely run on a door-to-door model. She starts her day in the morning, going from one Shillong neighbourhood to another, along the way stopping by many homes like Mandal’s for a quick chat and an appeal: to vote for her on February 27.

This article was originally published in The Indian Express in the run up to the Meghalaya assembly elections in February 2023. Full article here.