"Mob came at them like animals": Husband of woman paraded naked in Manipur

Mangalore Today News Network / NDTV

New Delhi, July 21, 2023: The women paraded naked by a mob in Manipur were "left to the mob by the police", one of the victims has alleged in an interview to the Indian Express.

 

The women were stripped and forced to walk naked, surrounded by a mob that dragged them to a field and allegedly gang-raped one of them. More than two months after the incident, the video emerged on Wednesday.

Some of the men can be seen in the video dragging the two women and groping them.

The incident took place on May 4, a day after violence erupted in Manipur between the valley-majority Meitei and the hill-majority Kuki tribe over the Meiteis’ demand for Scheduled Tribes (ST) status.

The FIR was filed 15 days later, but the first arrests were made only yesterday, after the video of the horrific incident went viral on social media, triggering massive nationwide outrage.

In a police complaint on May 18, the victims alleged that the younger of the two women was "brutally gang-raped in the broad daylight", the newspaper said.

According to the complaint, the women were in a group that was escaping from the mob when their village was attacked. The group was rescued by the police, said the complaint, and was being taken to the police station when the mob stopped them and seized them from police custody.

Three women - another woman in her 50s was allegedly also stripped - and the father and brother of the youngest woman were taken by the mob. According to the complaint, her brother was killed. The younger man, 19, was trying to save his sister from the mob.

The younger woman spoke to the Indian Express newspaper on Thursday, describing a most harrowing ordeal in which the police offered little protection.

"The police were there with the mob which was attacking our village. The police picked us up from near home, and took us a little away from the village and left us on the road with the mob. We were given to them by police," the woman told The Indian Express on the phone from her husband’s home.

"After the mob did what they did, we were just left there and we escaped," she said.

The woman said she was not aware of any video of the incident until it emerged on Wednesday.

"There is no internet here in Manipur, we wouldn’t know," she said.

The woman’s husband, who has been in the army and reportedly fought in the Kargil war, spoke to India TV about what he called the most painful hour of his life.

The mob came at them "like animals", he said, with weapons and an intent to kill.

"They (mob) took the women separately with them, forced them to strip," he said, fearing more such attacks.

Four people have been arrested so far, after the viral video forced the state machinery to launch action.