The disaster drew renewed consideration this week after a ghastly video circulated on social media through which males from the Meitei group paraded two ladies, who had been Kukis, bare via a crowd of clothed males who assaulted them. The assault passed off on Could 4, in response to native media.
In a Could 18 grievance filed to police, the victims allege that “unknown miscreants” stormed their village with weapons. Whereas making an attempt to flee, the ladies, together with a number of different individuals who had been accompanying them, had been apprehended by police. However later, the group was intercepted by a mob, at which level, the victims allege, the assault started.
“The police had been there with the mob which was attacking our village,” one of many victims informed the Indian Categorical. “The police picked us up from close to dwelling, and took us just a little away from the village and left us on the highway with the mob. We got to them by police.”
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi responded to the assaults Thursday, calling them “shameful” and an “insult” to the nation, in his first feedback up to now in regards to the ongoing battle in Manipur.
Beforehand, although, rhetoric from members of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Celebration (BJP) has stoked ethnic tensions within the area. Earlier this yr, the chief minister of Manipur, Nongthombam Biren Singh, a BJP member who’s Meitei, blamed native issues on the inflow of refugees from Myanmar who fled to Manipur after the neighboring nation’s 2021 coup. These refugees share ties with the Kukis.
“Chin-Kuki brothers,” Singh mentioned in a March tv interview, “are encroaching in every single place and planting poppy and doing medicine enterprise.”
Many refugees from Myanmar are a part of the Chin tribes, which is intently linked to the Kukis. Some members of the Meitei majority, in the meantime, have decried the bestowal of sure authorized protections to tribal teams just like the Kukis.