By -Shubhendra Singh Rajawat
The Manipur guilty will face the full force of the law, according to Home Minister Amit Shah.
New Delhi : According to home minister Amit Shah on Thursday, the Union home ministry has requested that the Supreme Court move seven cases involving ethnic violence in Manipur from the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) outside of the conflict-torn state. These cases include the May 4 mob assault on two women, which went viral after it was captured on camera.
Home Minister Amit Shah briefed the media on the genesis of the Kuki-Meitei conflict since the 1990s to the current situation in Manipur, saying that the videographer of the viral video involving hapless Kuki women has been arrested and the mobile phone from which he took the shots has been seized to unearth what appears to be a conspiracy to embarrass the Modi government on the eve of the Monsoon session of Parliament. The police have filed a FIR in relation to two more viral films that have been discovered to be from incidents in Myanmar in 2022 and are being shared on social media in order to escalate the situation in Manipur.
“The CBI has already received six cases, and the seventh is on the way. “We want the trials in these cases to take place outside the state of Manipur for the sake of impartiality,” Shah stated. The home minister reported that the National Investigation Agency (NIA) has been given three additional cases.
The Union administration requested that the Supreme Court move the trial in the viral video case out of the state in an affidavit that was submitted to the high court earlier in the day. Only the Supreme Court has the power to move trials from one state to another.
Since May 3, ethnic conflict in Manipur has resulted in at least 147 fatalities and 40,000 displaced residents. As a result, the state has essentially been divided between the Meitei community, which dominates the plains and makes up 53% of the state’s population, and the Kuki tribe, which inhabits the state’s hill districts and accounts for 16%.
A first information report (FIR) later identified the males in the video as members of Meitei groups. In the tape from May 4, two Kuki women were stripped of their clothing and made to parade naked, according to Shah. The minister stated that it appeared from the cell phone used to capture the pictures that there had been a plot to discredit the government ahead of the monsoon session of Parliament.
The opposition demanded that Prime Minister Narendra Modi address the violence in Manipur inside of Parliament, and the administration insisted that it was prepared for a debate and that Shah would react on the floor of the House. As a result, the monsoon session has come to a standstill over the sexual assault. The opposition has also demanded the ouster of chief minister N Biren Singh, claiming that the state administration has failed to restore law and order.
According to those experts of the situations, the PM spoke to Shah three times a day at times and maintained constant contact with the home ministry.
Shah made it clear that neither he nor the intelligence community knew anything about the May 4 video and promised to take the toughest possible action against those responsible and others named in the 6,065 FIRs that the state police had filed. He claimed that when the May 4 video was being recorded, neither the army nor the police were present.
In two more cases using viral movies that are spreading on social media to exacerbate the situation in Manipur but where the actual incidents occurred in Myanmar in 2022, police have filed formal complaints.
Shah claimed that Indian security personnel established a buffer zone between the Meitei and Kuki villages using a unified command run by security adviser Kuldiep Singh, who oversees the day-to-day maintenance of law and order.
He stated that at least a dozen successive rounds of negotiations between the two communities used reliable interlocutors.
Shah stated that 82% of kids were back in school and 72% of state government employees have returned to their jobs thanks in part to direct intervention by the Center. Shah added that the law-and-order situation was substantially under control and he anticipated that calm would soon return to the state. The Union and state civil services exams were also recently held in the state.
The home minister said that despite ethnic tensions prompted by the Manipur high court’s decision to grant the Meiteis scheduled tribal (ST) status, there had been no reports of communal violence in the state. A move to reinstate the Armed Forces Special Powers Act in newly created territories of Manipur will not be made, he added, nor will the government petition the Supreme Court on ST status to Meiteis.
All Kukis who entered the state from Myanmar had their biometric data collected, he claimed, and after the survey was finished by December 2023, all names would be added to a “negative list” to prevent them from receiving Indian identity cards.
The minister emphasized that during the 1990s, when the Congress was in power at the Center and in the State, there had been four significant ethnic clashes involving Kukis: the Naga-Kuki conflict in 1993, the Kuki-Paite conflict in 1997–1998, the Meitei-Pangal conflict in May 1993, and the Kuki-Tamil conflict in 1995.
Shah visited with 41 organizations during his three days in the violent Manipur state, while junior minister Nityanand Rai traveled there from May 25 to June 17 to keep an eye on the unrest in Imphal, Churachandpur, Moreh, and Kangpokpi.
Only Minister of State for Home Rajesh Pilot responded to Parliament during the turbulent 1990s in Manipur under the control of the Congress party, and he was only there for three and a half hours. When an MP once requested that the government hold a debate on the riots in Manipur in 2011, the then-prime minister Manmohan Singh left the chamber, according to Shah.
As the Congress had taken 14 days to send paramilitary soldiers to quell violence in the state in 1993, he said that the government was solely responsible to the general public and Parliament.
Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the Congress, was only prevented from traveling by road because the security services were unclear about the situation, according to Shah, who also claimed that there was no restriction on who may travel to Manipur. Gandhi, according to him, was transported by helicopter because he refused to promise to travel by road against the recommendation of the security personnel.
As the Opposition was not interested in any debate in Parliament, the minister claimed he was left with no choice except to communicate with the public through the media. He claimed that since the trains had already reached Manipur months before it was anticipated that they would, the cost of food, gasoline, and other necessities had decreased and was now on level with Delhi.
“Under the Congress rule, Manipur had blockades for 149 straight days during which gasoline cost 240 rupees per gallon and LPG cost 1,900. We won’t permit the conflict to extend to Manipur’s neighboring states, and we’ll deal with any insurrection or extremism with a heavy hand, according to Shah.