Fed by political indifference, historical grievances, and a growing distrust between the Meitei and Zomi-Kuki communities, the violence in Manipur did not erupt overnight. When the conflict broke out in May 2023, it quickly became more than a fight over land or constitutional rights. It evidently tore through homes, villages, and relationships.
This is not just a story of two communities in conflict. It is also a story of who gets heard and who gets ignored. And in the middle of this silence are women—picking up the pieces, carrying the weight of loss, and facing the kind of violence that rarely makes it into official reports or political speeches.
In most mainstream conversations, war is spoken of in terms of guns, borders, and governments. But often missing from these narratives are the stories of the ordinary, unarmed civilians caught in the crossfire. And among them, women, in particular, do not just suffer the consequences of war; their lives and bodies often become the battleground itself.
As war tears through homes and communities, the female body often becomes a site of humiliation, power projection, and symbolic conquest.
Conflict Beyond Battlefield
The conflict that broke out in Manipur in 2023 is still far from over. The violence left behind more than burnt homes and broken communities. It also left scars on people’s lives, especially women.
In many cases, they were not just caught in the crossfire, they were directly targeted. Stories of displacement, sexual violence, and fear became all too common.
The conflict did not just divide communities, but also laid bare how fragile safety becomes for women when institutions fail. In the aftermath, there is not only a need to rebuild trust between communities, but also to listen to the women whose voices are too often lost in the telling of war.
The violence against women was not incidental, nor it arose in the margins of the conflict but it is rather a structural and symbolic one. The most harrowing example came with the viral video dated 4 May but circulated in July 2023, involving the naked parade and sexual assault of two women by Meitei mob.
This was not a mere act of spontaneous brutality; it was a message and an attempt to dishonor the collective identity of an ethnic group by violating its women.
The horror of that footage shocked the conscience of the nation. However, to see it merely as a singular atrocity is to miss the deeper wound. Because in times of ethnic conflict, a woman’s body becomes both a battlefield and a message. The infamous incident told us that, in this conflict, womanhood itself had become a site of war.
Research on sexual violence in conflict zones, from Bosnia to Congo has consistently shown that sexual violence in conflict is not just a byproduct of war but a deliberate weapon intended to fracture communities, disrupt social order, and assert dominance. In the Manipur context, these attacks, mostly against Zomi-Kuki women, revealed the extent to which gendered violence became an extension of ethnic hostility. Gendered violence became the language through which ethnic hatred spoke its loudest.
Displaced and Forgotten
When the violence erupted, over 60,000 people were displaced in the Manipur conflict, of which, most of them women and children. Uprooted from their homes, many were forced into overcrowded relief camps, bearing the weight of a crisis they never created.
Stripped of stability and safety, women subsequently have to take up roles they never asked for—from managing households in cramped up relief camps, to caring for the elderly and children, holding communities together with little resources, survival was not just their reality; it became their unchosen responsibility.
Displacement, however, is not gender-neutral. Relief camps in Kangpokpi and Churachandpur were reported to lack basic facilities for menstruation, sanitation, privacy, or mental health support. Women recounted how bathing became a matter of shame, menstruation a public ordeal, and privacy a fantasy.
Even in displacement and desperation, it was the women who quietly held things together, cooking in shifts for dozens using whatever little they had. They cared for the sick, comforted the children, and kept life going inside overcrowded makeshift camps. Their roles were not recognised as leadership, but it was nothing short of that. Their unpaid labor held communities together in the absence of the state.
The fact that their efforts remain invisible is not just an oversight. It reflects a system that has always depended on women’s strength, but is rarely seen.
Law, Justice, and the Gendered State
The delay in justice for women in the Manipur conflict lays bare a deeper, more unsettling truth and that is, when it comes to gender and conflict, the system is not just unprepared, it is indifferent.
In the wake of the Nirbhaya case, the Justice Verma Committee’s 2013 recommendations called for urgent, conflict-sensitive mechanisms to address sexual violence. Some of these were meant precisely for situations like Manipur. Yet more than a decade later, those words lie buried in reports, not reflected in action. There were no special protocols, no trained personnel, no sign of urgency. Once again, the Northeast was pushed to the margins.
Furthermore, India is a signatory to the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security – a global pledge to protect women in conflict, prevent gender-based violence, and ensure their role in peace-building. Yet, India still has no National Action Plan to turn that commitment into action.
In the case of Manipur, this gap meant that gendered crimes were not recognised for what they truly were - deliberate, targeted acts meant to humiliate and destroy communities from within. Instead, these assaults were flattened into the larger narrative of ethnic violence, robbing them of their specific legal and moral weight.
Women’s bodies bore the imprint of conflict, but the violations were treated as collateral damage and not central crimes. By ignoring the gendered dimensions of the violence, the state not only failed survivors, it also erased the truth. And in doing so, it proved once again how justice in conflict zones too often stops short at the doorstep of women.
What we need is not just reactive justice that kicks in only after a video goes viral or public outrage boils over. What we need is a system that does not wait for women to be broken before it responds. This means building preventive frameworks, be it legal, political, and social, that put gender at the heart of how we understand, prevent, and respond to conflict. Until then, justice will remain selective, delayed, and deeply inadequate.
Manipur has not only been silenced by the sounds of gunfire, but by the far more enduring quiet of state apathy. Even within that void, the Zomi-Kuki women have refused to be mute. They have cooked and consoled in overcrowded relief camps, marched with placards and dignity, and carried their grief into places of worship.
In the end, wars may be started by men, but the long and uneasy work of rebuilding, of mourning and mending are often written by women.
(Deborah M Tungnung is a digital marketer and published author from Lamka (Churachandpur), Manipur. She is currently based in Bangalore. This is an opinion piece. All views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)