Burning Manipur, silence in media: Northeast bias or self-censorship?

Another election cycle is behind us, almost. As I write this, the election results for the assembly polls in Maharashtra and Jharkhand are awaited.

But even as the results in one of the most confusing elections for voters in Maharashtra – with fractured regional parties and rebels and independents adding to the craziness – will dominate the news, I want to focus in this column on news that ought to dominate but does not.

More specifically, Manipur, which is burning – a fire that barely subsided for the last 18 months. Yet you wouldn’t know that if you were a reader of India’s mainstream newspapers.

Sporadic coverage. That’s the most generous phrase that can be used to define the coverage of the relentless ethnic conflict in Manipur since May last year. Predictably, when the security forces are involved, the story makes it to the front page and gains some prominence. When ordinary people are being killed in the internecine warfare between different armed groups in the state, the story, if reported at all, will be buried on an inside page.

As a result, people who still rely on newspapers as their main source of information would not be able to explain what lies behind the violence, despite the occasional “explainers”.  Manipur is relegated to the spot of the “troubled” northeast, where India must send “security forces” to sort things out. That decades of this strategy have achieved precisely nothing is, of course, not understood to a readership fed on morsels from that region.

There are exceptions to this rule, and every now and then one is surprised by a detailed report in one of our national newspapers where the reporter has visited the state. But these are too few and far in between, given the extent and the extended period over which Manipur has been literally on fire. 

As always, the independent digital platforms do much better.

There are challenges, of course, for all journalists covering a conflict zone. Which version of an incident do you report? Do you try to get all sides, or do you take the easier path of relying on “official” sources? This is virtually the norm. As a result, in a state so divided, the “mainland” media is viewed as being one-sided by the minorities, the hill tribes like the Kuki, and sometimes also by the Meitei.  

Journalists based in Manipur also get divided on ethnic lines. Those of us based outside the state might find this difficult to understand, but in small, ethnically divided societies, it is a challenge for journalists based there to do the balancing act. The ethnic filter is applied to all news and information. Its credibility is always questioned depending on the source and the antecedents of that source.

An example is two recent incidents that occurred in Jiribam district that borders Assam. 

Since November 7, Manipur has drawn some attention, at least in the print media.  On that day, in one of the more peaceful parts of the state, a 31-year-old Hmar tribal woman, a school teacher, was tortured and burned to death allegedly by members of the Meitei militant group, Arambai Tenggol. She is survived by her husband, a farmer, and three small children.

The retaliation was swift from the other side as a Meitei relief camp was attacked by suspected Hmar “extremists”, the term often used by the media. Six women and children were abducted. Their bodies were later found in a river nearby. According to the Hmar, these men were armed “village volunteers”.  

Ten of the Hmar attackers were killed by the CRPF stationed near the camp. 

This story is but one of many examples of the complex and layered reality of Manipur today. Whose version do you believe and report? Even giving both sides of the story does not necessarily provide a clear picture of what happened and why, but it is better than giving just one side.

For instance, Sukrita Baruah of Indian Express did attempt this in her front page follow-up story after November 11. It is heartbreaking to listen to the husband of the woman who was killed on November 7 and the loss of hope of a peaceful future.

However, it is Rokibuz Zaman of Scroll who provides us with the granular details and the context behind the killing. An obvious question is: why did the Meitei group Arambai Tenggol target the Hmar woman? A senior police official tells Zaman that the group wanted to send a message and “disrupt the peace” through what he called an “unprovoked” killing. You will not find this kind of detail in the few newspaper reports that have appeared on both incidents. 

A related question we must ask is whether mainstream or “mainland” media’s indifference to Manipur has played some part in the centre and the state government not feeling any pressure to act. In fact, it is only after these recent incidents in November that at least one newspaper, Indian Express, made a strong case for Manipur chief minister N Biren Singh’s dismissal. In its concluding paragraph, the editorial states:

“It is urgent that the trust deficit that has widened over the last one and a half years or so is addressed. But first of all, the Centre must remove the chief minister who has presided over the spreading and deepening conflict in his state. The Centre must ask Biren Singh to go — a decision it should have taken long ago. The time for excuses is running out.”

In fact, the time for excuses ran out a long time ago. And of course, given a tone-deaf government at the centre, which rarely heeds any opinion contrary to the dominant narrative in the media, such editorials, even if they come late in the day, are unlikely to be heeded. 

However, we must still question why the media has been so quiet and not stated the obvious, as the Indian Express has done now. If another state, not ruled by the BJP, had faced this kind of violence over an extended period, would the media have remained quiet? Would there not have been demands for dismissing the government and for central intervention? 

The absence of outrage underlines a couple of realities. One, that even the few newspapers that are occasionally critical of the Modi government continue to tread carefully on issues like Manipur. And second, that the very location of Manipur in India’s northeastern corner brings home the reality that people in the region have complained about for decades: that the tragedies that play out there do not arouse the “mainland”, including its media.  

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