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The aftermath of the playing of the Manipur video has been horrific too.
The video of the brutal sexual assault on May 4 of two women by a mob from B Phainom village in Kangpokpi district became public in the week that saw Opposition unity give itself a new name, BJP seek to counter it by flaunting a collection of old and new allies, and when Parliament reopened for the Monsoon Session.
And yet, so far, the horror of the video has been met by the whataboutery of the BJP-led establishment. For now, moreover, the Opposition seems unable to press home, within Parliament or outside it, the demand for accountability.
For, at the bottom of it, that’s what whataboutery is about — a bid to deflect accountability. It’s the practice, according to Cambridge Dictionary, of “answering a criticism or difficult question by making a similar criticism or asking a different but related question, typically starting with the words ‘what about?’”.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi flagged off the whataboutism, when he finally broke his silence on Thursday, 77 days later, on the unabating violence in Manipur that has seen more than a hundred dead and thousands displaced on the watch of BJP-led governments in Imphal and Delhi. He suffixed the “sorrow” and “anger” that filled his heart, and the shame that he said any civilised society should feel at the crime in Manipur, with a swipe at Opposition-led state governments. “Whether the incident happens in Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, or Manipur…”, the PM said.
Unsurprisingly, the prime ministerial cue was promptly taken by others in his government and party. From Union ministers Anurag Thakur and Smriti Irani to Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, they chimed in unison: Look at crimes against women in Bihar, Rajasthan and West Bengal. Look at governments, now and in the past, run by Congress and TMC.
Another video that surfaced on Saturday of two tribal women being stripped and beaten up by a group of women, on suspicion that the former had stolen money, in Malda district of West Bengal, was held up by BJP spokespersons. “Manipur ki beti” was pitted against “Bengal ki beti”.
The BJP’s whataboutery is the most dismal and dispiriting feature of the video’s aftermath. But on the other side of the political line, too, lies a problematic framing.
For instance, Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren’s equation of the crime against the two women in Manipur with the violation of tribal identity — he wrote to President Droupadi Murmu, urging her intervention, because “our tribal brothers and sisters” cannot be treated in an “appallingly barbaric way”.
CM Soren’s articulation of solidarity with the victims that gives primacy to their tribal identity is part of the ongoing “psychodrama”, as columnist Pratap Bhanu Mehta put it, in which the atrocity is lost, as is the victim. In it, the PM’s and BJP’s whataboutery is met on the other side by a failure to call the crime by its name.
Mehta identified three languages in which the horror is being mis-expressed — a language of lament about civilisational identity, thus losing sight of the “specific harm, injustice, and the fact that the victims have individuality.” A language of shame, that “directs our attention not to the specific moral harm but the fact that the moral harm has become public knowledge”. A language like the one mirrored in CM Soren’s letter to President Murmu, with an “excessive use of kinship” and “the absence of a language of citizenship”.
We’ve seen it before — this evasion of responsibility by those in power, and this inability of those in the Opposition to enforce accountability. But in the case of Manipur, the failures are more intense and more glaring because, even in the age of social media, its crisis and crime remain faraway and mostly untouched by the “heartland’s” still-narrow empathies. It is also the timing.
The calculation by the ruling establishment probably is that because this moment comes in the run-up to state elections later this year and parliamentary polls next year, the crime will be overshadowed on the ground, even leached of its horror, by the polarisation.
I remember encountering the polarisation after another crime, also captured on video, in another state, before another election, when I travelled in November 2021, to Gorakhpur from Lakhimpur Kheri. It was a month after four farmer-protesters were mowed by a car owned by a BJP minister in Lakhimpur, and four more were killed in retaliatory violence, in the run-up to the 2022 assembly polls in UP.
I found, then, that what happened at Lakhimpur Kheri was not an event that was shaping a new politics — it was quickly subsiding, instead, into an inset of the already existing political frame. It was touching cleavages and deepening divides, some active, some latent — between “sardars” or Sikh migrants and “desis”, the original inhabitants of the Terai; between majority and minority; Hindu and Muslim; BJP and non-BJP. And, given that it happened while the farmers’ stir against the Centre’s three subsequently-repealed farm laws was still on, how you looked at the video of the crime in Lakhimpur also depended on whether or not you saw the protesting farmers as “upadravi (riotous or unruly)”.
It could be that the Manipur crime video succumbs to a similar cynical calculation, that it is overtaken by a similarly pessimistic politics of polarisation. Or not.
It could also be that the moral and political dead-ends give way to something new, something hopeful. It’s possible that the crime in Manipur breaks through, and that it leads to an irrefutable articulation of, and an irresistible hearing for, the demand for accountability.
Till next week,
Vandita
Must read Opinions from the week:
-Pratap Bhanu Mehta, “Our morality after Manipur”, July 22
-Editorial, “Nation’s shame”, July 21
-Irom Chanu Sharmila, “I feel helpless when I see the news”, July 21
-Suhas Palshikar, “Politics, not arithmetic”, July 20
-Sanjay Srivastava, “Parliament is a gated community’, July 20
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