Ranjan Solomon
MANIPURI women continue to suffer from the consequences of ongoing ethnic violence that began in May 2023, facing severe, systemic violence and a lack of justice as of early 2026. The situation, which pits Meitei and Kuki-Zo communities against each other, has resulted in at least 260 deaths and widespread displacement. Victims include young women, elderly women.
The survivor, gang-raped during the initial phase of the Manipur ethnic conflict in May 2023, died on January 10, 2026, while undergoing treatment in Guwahati, without seeing her perpetrators brought to justice. A Times of India reports stated: “A large number of women staged a demonstration in Manipur’s Churachandpur district on Thursday, seeking the intervention of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to provide justice for Kuki-Zo victims of sexual violence and murder. The sit-in at Tuibong came days after the Kuki woman breathed her last due to illness allegedly linked to the trauma she suffered after being gang-raped over two years ago, during the early phase of the ethnic violence in the state in May 2023. Kuki Women Organisation for Human Rights (KWOHR) and the women’s wing of the Indigenous Tribal Leaders Forum.
Reports indicate a “disturbing pattern” of sexual violence, including gang rape, used as a weapon of war and intimidation against women. Between May 2023 and November 2024, at least 29 Kuki-Zo women, ranging from young to elderly, were killed, with reports of cases involving mutilation, burning, and brutal violence. Survivors face prolonged physical and psychological trauma with little to no legal redress, as evidenced by a 20-year-old survivor who died in January 2026, nearly three years after being gang-raped, without the perpetrators being held to account. Thousands of women are living in relief camps with limited access to adequate food, medical care, and mental healthcare.
While women, such as the Meira Paibis (torchbearers), have historically been at the forefront of social justice, they are now under intense scrutiny and face “moral policing” amidst the conflict, with some groups reporting that their efforts to protest are met with resistance.
Women’s organizations, such as the Kuki-Zo Women’s Forum and the Kuki Women Organisation for Human Rights (KWOHR), are demanding immediate intervention from the central government, adequate rehabilitation, and that the violence against them be recognized as crimes against humanity. The ongoing instability has led to a deep sense of insecurity and, according to reports, has made normal, peaceful co-existence difficult.
“Where is the state?” Kuki women’s group slams the justice machinery. The Kuki Women Organisation for Human Rights (KWOHR) in Manipur’s Kangpokpi district has condemned the justice system for failing a young Kuki-Zo woman who died in January 2026 after suffering brutal sexual violence for over two years. The group’s statement, titled “Where is the state?”, highlighted stark facts and raised pertinent questions:
KWOHR accused the state of treating the woman’s life as “expendable” and, by allowing her case to remain unresolved, highlighted a “profound social and institutional betrayal”. This is Institutional Abandonment. The organization urged that her death not become another statistic but serve as a rallying point for “sustained resistance against violence and impunity” – a call to action.
Following this incident, Kuki organizations, including the Indigenous Tribal Leaders Forum (ITLF), reiterated that coexistence with the Meitei community is no longer possible and have demanded a separate administration (Union Territory) for their safety. Hundreds of Kuki-Zo women staged sit-in protests in Kangpokpi on January 22, 2026, demanding justice for this and other survivors of sexual violence.
The Kuki Women Organisation for Human Rights has condemned what it termed a grave miscarriage of justice in the death of a young Kuki woman who survived brutal sexual violence for over two years without legal redress. Holding both perpetrators and institutions accountable, the organisation said the case reflects a deep social and systemic failure, urging that the victim’s life become a rallying point against violence, impunity and institutional neglect.
What happened to the women of Manipur is not an aberration. It is a revelation.
The parading, stripping, sexual assault, and public humiliation of Kuki women in May 2023 captured on video and circulated months later did not expose a breakdown of law and order alone. It exposed the moral collapse of the Indian state. When women’s bodies become battlefields, when mobs act with impunity, and when the state responds with silence, delay, and evasion, what we are witnessing is not failure. It is abdication.
The assault on Manipur’s women must be named accurately: sexual violence as a tool of ethnic terror. History teaches us this pattern – from Bosnia to Rwanda to Kashmir. When a community is targeted, its women are violated to humiliate, dominate, and erase collective dignity.
The Manipur case fits this grim template. The women were not assaulted in secrecy; they were dragged, stripped, paraded, mocked, filmed. The perpetrators knew they would not be stopped. They were right.
Where were the police? Where was the state machinery? Where was the so-called “double-engine” government? In any functioning democracy, the moment such violence is reported, the state collapses inward with accountability. Silence, in such moments, is not neutrality. It is complicity. There was no naming of ideology, no recognition of state failure, no acceptance of command responsibility.
Contrast this with the speed at which the state responds to protests, dissent, student movements, or minority assertion elsewhere. The message is unmistakable: some lives are governable, others are expendable.
Another uncomfortable truth must be confronted: the selective outrage of mainstream feminist and liberal spaces. Manipur did not trend for weeks. It did not dominate primetime debates. It did not evoke sustained protest, until the video made denial impossible. The bodies of Adivasi, tribal, and Northeastern women are still treated as peripheral to the idea of “Indian womanhood.” Their suffering is acknowledged episodically, not structurally.
Solidarity delayed is solidarity denied. The question must be relentless: What does justice require?
- Prosecution under appropriate sexual violence and atrocity laws
- Accountability of police and administrative officials who failed to act
- Removal of political executives who presided over the collapse
- Dismantling the culture of impunity sustained by militarisation
- Long-term rehabilitation led by women-centred, community-based processes
Anything less is theatre. And even now it is not too late. While the BJP emerges in election after election, one asks: At the cost of persecution of the weakest- women, especially the minorities?
Manipur’s women are not asking for sympathy. They are demanding citizenship. They are asking:
“Can a republic that cannot protect its women, especially those on its margins, still call itself a democracy?
Manipur is the mirror held up to the nation. And what it reflects is unsettling: a state willing to sacrifice women’s bodies at the altar of political convenience and ideological silence. Until justice is delivered—not managed, not delayed—Manipur’s women will remain the republic’s open wound. And wounds unattended do not heal. They fester.
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Ranjan Solomon is a writer, researcher and activist based in Goa. He has worked in social movements since he was 19 years of age. The views expressed here are the author’s own and Clarion India does not necessarily share or subscribe to them. He can be contacted at ranjan.solomon@gmail.com
