I did not want to write about Manipur because my heart lodges in my throat whenever I write against authorities, even though I do it – because I cannot not do it, because pretending not to feel the heat and smell the smoke while inside a burning building of a nation is foolish. I did not want to write about Manipur because I don’t know enough – because information is expurgated, because I was not plugged in already and cannot adequately research, and because our human lack of omni-awareness is something we should more freely admit, especially the more opinionated among us.

            But my not wanting to write about Manipur is a kind of complicity. It really is my looking away, entrusting that people with more knowledge, more resources, more skills will do the needful. Many are now, after a certain video emerged.

I haven’t watched, but I know that Kuki women were forced to parade naked after being sexually assaulted. The video in question that has circulated widely was taken on May 4^th, and took over two months to reach the mainland. The Internet is in shutdown in Manipur, as it frequently is in Kashmir, to quell dissent, rumours and the spread of both information and misinformation. The video is a rare record that has not been suppressed either through direct or indirect censorship. Which means more has definitely happened.

            The reality is that India is a country in which terrible things happen on a daily basis – not because our population is large, but because our faultlines are deep. These terrible things would shock us, if we knew. Or would they? To be direct: it is not about whether we know about them, but about whether something about an incident disquiets us, most likely because it strikes close to home, or because the media pays it a disproportionate amount of attention because it serves certain moral or political agendas.

I don’t compare chilling crimes and tragedies here, only differences in responses to them. In 2012, there was mass mourning over the case that was nicknamed “Nirbhaya”. More recently, gruesome incidents involving women in inter-religious live-in relationships whose remains were found in refrigerators dominated the headlines. But always, I think of D. M., the victim of a 2016 institutional rape-murder in Bikaner and how her remains were handled (her body was put in a garbage truck by the college). I wish I didn’t have to almost name her, that she too had a valorous moniker, but what happened to her was roundly ignored. There was no real public acknowledgment, let alone horror, because the atrocity was casteist in nature – and so is Indian society, including many in its more liberal sections. I wrote about all these events; in the last instance, I felt like I was shouting into the void.

Many in Manipur have been shouting into the void for a long time. We haven’t been allowed to, or wanted to, hear them. We cannot isolate gender violence there from other kinds of violence, including those of the state. We must all speak up, but unless the discourse is led from there, it will inevitably be reductionist.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express in July 2023. “The Venus Flytrap” appears in Chennai’s City Express supplement.