Let's not miss the woods for the trees in this entire saga that is unfolding in Manipur. The state administration doesn’t wake up to a heinous crime until a video of women being disrobed and molested goes viral on social media. What does it say about governance and administration? Are we saying that till the time cameras expose a crime, law enforcement is allowed to remain in a slumber?
As it now turns out, from the highest offices down to the local level, everyone was aware of the Kangpokpi incident in Manipur where two women were publicly violated on 4 May this year.
The shame here is that such incidents had become so much of a part of this ugly fratricidal war that it was treated as another ghastly episode in a series of such cases in a raging revenge war between the two ethnicities of Manipur – the hill tribes versus the valley people.
A crime against humanity of this proportion goes unpunished, everyone goes around doing business as usual until someone decides to post the video and awaken the public. There are two or three theories of why the video did not leak earlier.