The Silence in the Data, How Manipur’s Conflict Exposes the Crisis of Underreported Violence Against Women

The Silence in the Data, How Manipur’s Conflict Exposes the Crisis of Underreported Violence Against Women

In the grim accounting of conflict, data often serves as the cold, hard evidence of a society’s fracture. The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) annual report, “Crime in India,” is typically regarded as one such authoritative ledger, a statistical mirror reflecting the state of law and order across the nation. However, the recently released 2023 edition, detailing the blood-soaked year in Manipur, presents a paradox so stark it threatens to shatter the mirror altogether. The data reveals a state in the throes of a catastrophic breakdown: arson skyrocketed by an unimaginable 22,874%, dacoity by 121,200%, and rioting by 6,333.5%. Murders nearly tripled, and communities were torn asunder.

Yet, in the midst of this inferno of violence, the NCRB data tells a bizarrely contradictory story about crimes against women. It reports a 30% overall decline in such crimes. Cases of rape fell from 42 to 27; sexual harassment plummeted from 5 to 1; and assault with intent to outrage a woman’s modesty saw a marginal drop. This statistical anomaly is not a sign of peace; it is a screaming testament to a deeper, more insidious crisis. The numbers do not reflect a reality where women were spared; they reveal a catastrophic failure of reporting, a collapse of institutional trust, and the silencing of victims in a landscape of pervasive fear and impunity. The data does not hide the truth—it illuminates a terrifying void where justice and accountability should be.

The Context of the Conflict: A Breeding Ground for Gendered Violence

To understand the absurdity of the NCRB’s figures, one must first comprehend the nature of the conflict that erupted in May 2023. The violence between the Imphal Valley-based Meitei community and the hill-dwelling Kuki-Zo tribes was not a series of isolated skirmishes but a full-blown ethnic conflagration. It has claimed hundreds of lives and displaced nearly 70,000 people, creating a humanitarian crisis of immense proportions.

In such conflicts, women’s bodies often become the battlegrounds upon which communal hatred and the desire for domination are enacted. Sexual violence is wielded as a weapon of war, intended to terrorize populations, destroy social fabric, and humiliate the “enemy” community. This was not merely theoretical in Manipur. The Supreme Court itself took cognizance of the situation, observing in July 2023 that a “systemic” and “unprecedented magnitude” of sexual violence had been committed against women. This was not an offhand remark but a judicial acknowledgment of a pattern of horrific, targeted abuse.

Numerous documented accounts contradict the NCRB’s serene statistics. In July 2023, ten Manipur legislators from the Kuki-Zo community released a statement detailing at least four specific incidents where women from their community were either raped or murdered since the conflict began on May 3. A First Information Report (FIR), accessed by The Hindu, described a harrowing incident on May 4, 2023, where a mob of 100-200 people tortured women working at a car wash centre in Imphal East. Furthermore, the National Commission for Women was apprised of multiple other incidents, including harassment at Manipur University, violence against women at the Nightingale Nurse Institute, and the alleged rape and murder of four women in Imphal.

Against this backdrop of credible, multiple-source testimony and even judicial recognition, the NCRB’s reported decline in crimes against women is not just a statistical error; it is an implausible fiction.

Deconstructing the Data Void: The Anatomy of Underreporting

The chasm between the ground reality and the official data can be explained by several interconnected factors that create a perfect storm for underreporting.

1. The Complete Collapse of Law and Order: The NCRB data is predicated on a functioning law enforcement and judicial system. In Manipur in 2023, that system had effectively disintegrated. Police stations were themselves targeted, lines of command were fractured along ethnic lines, and officers were often unable or unwilling to operate in contested areas. When the state’s protective apparatus vanishes, the very machinery for registering crime—the First Information Report (FIR)—ceases to function. A victim cannot report a rape if the road to the police station is controlled by hostile armed groups or if the station itself has been burned down.

2. Pervasive Climate of Fear and Intimidation: In an active conflict zone, survival is the paramount concern. Reporting a crime, especially a sexually violent one, can invite retaliatory attacks against the victim, her family, or her entire community. The social stigma associated with sexual violence is magnified exponentially in a climate of terror. Victims and their families often choose silence as a strategy for survival, fearing that seeking justice could lead to further violence or social ostracization.

3. Loss of Faith in State Institutions: For a crime to be reported, the victim must have a fundamental belief that the state will deliver justice. In Manipur, this trust evaporated. Many communities, particularly the Kuki-Zo, perceived the state government and its police force as partisan actors in the conflict. When the institutions meant to protect you are seen as complicit in the violence, the incentive to report crimes to them drops to zero. Why would a woman risk her safety to report a rape to a police force she believes is aligned with her perpetrators?

4. Logistical and Physical Barriers: The ethnic cleansing and forced displacement created immense physical barriers. Victims who had fled their homes and were living in crowded relief camps had no access to their local police stations, which may have been in now-inaccessible territories. The sheer logistical challenge of traveling through a warzone to file a report was often insurmountable.

5. The Weaponization of Data and Denial: In ethnic conflicts, data becomes a political tool. Admitting to widespread sexual violence within one’s own community can be seen as a political loss, a stain on the community’s honor. This can lead to institutional and social pressure to suppress reports, further contributing to the silence.

The National Implications: A Symptom of a Larger Disease

While the situation in Manipur is an extreme case, it starkly highlights a chronic, nationwide problem: the systemic underreporting of crimes against women. The NCRB itself has consistently acknowledged this gap. Social stigma, victim-blaming, patriarchal attitudes, and a often-traumatic experience with the legal process prevent a vast number of crimes from ever entering the official record.

Manipur serves as a catastrophic case study of what happens when these pre-existing conditions are supercharged by a total breakdown of order. It demonstrates that official crime data is not just a record of incidents, but also a barometer of institutional integrity, social trust, and state capacity. When those elements collapse, the data becomes a lie of omission, obscuring the true scale of suffering.

This has dire consequences. It allows perpetrators to operate with impunity, knowing their crimes will never be counted. It denies victims any semblance of justice or acknowledgment. For policymakers, it creates a dangerously distorted picture, leading to inadequate resource allocation and misguided interventions. How can a crisis be solved if its true scale is officially denied?

The Path Forward: Beyond the Broken Statistics

Addressing this crisis requires moving beyond a reliance on traditional crime reporting mechanisms, especially in conflict and post-conflict scenarios.

1. Alternative Documentation Mechanisms: Independent investigations by human rights organizations, journalists, and national bodies like the National Commission for Women are crucial. Their reports, while not official “data,” provide vital evidence and counter-narratives that can challenge the state’s statistical silence. The Supreme Court’s monitoring of the situation in Manipur is a step in this direction.

2. Creating Safe and Neutral Reporting Channels: In conflict zones, establishing safe, confidential, and ethnically neutral channels for reporting crimes is essential. This could involve setting up special cells supervised by the central government or high courts, or empowering civil society organizations to act as intermediaries.

3. Strengthening Victim and Witness Protection: A robust witness protection program is non-negotiable. Without guarantees of safety, victims will not come forward. This is a monumental challenge in a place like Manipur but is fundamental to any hope of future justice.

4. Judicial Intervention and Accountability: The Supreme Court must continue to play a proactive role, using its powers to order independent probes, monitor investigations, and ensure that the process of justice is not held hostage by local political and ethnic divisions.

5. Acknowledging the Limitation of Data: Policymakers, media, and the public must learn to read crime data critically, understanding that a decline in reported numbers can sometimes signal a deeper social malady rather than an improvement in safety.

Conclusion: The Stories Behind the Silence

The NCRB’s 2023 data for Manipur is a document of national shame. Its columns of declining numbers for crimes against women do not represent a success story; they represent a void filled with untold stories of agony, humiliation, and resilience. Each missing data point is a woman who suffered in silence, a cry for help that went unrecorded, a justice system that failed catastrophically.

The true scale of the horror in Manipur may never be fully known. But to accept the official data at face value is to become complicit in the erasure of that horror. The challenge for India is to listen to the silence, to hear the deafening testimony of the missing numbers, and to build a justice system robust and trustworthy enough to ensure that such a statistical black hole never swallows the truth again. The legacy of the Manipur conflict will be determined not just by the violence that was recorded, but by the nation’s commitment to uncovering and addressing the violence that was not.

Q&A: Unpacking the Data Crisis in Manipur

Q1: The NCRB is a respected national agency. How can its data be so wrong in the case of Manipur?

A1: The inaccuracy is not necessarily a failure of the NCRB’s data collection methodology, but a reflection of its fundamental limitation: it can only record crimes that are reported to and registered by the police. The NCRB aggregates data provided by state police forces. In Manipur’s case, the collapse of law and order meant the entire process of crime registration broke down. Police stations were non-functional, victims were too terrified or unable to report crimes, and trust in the police was shattered. Therefore, the NCRB data for Manipur in 2023 is an accurate record of the crimes that made it into a severely compromised system, not an accurate record of the crimes that actually occurred. It’s a measure of institutional failure, not a measure of crime.

Q2: Besides the general breakdown, what are the specific barriers that prevent women from reporting sexual violence in a conflict like Manipur’s?

A2: The barriers are immense and multi-layered:

• Immediate Physical Danger: Reporting a crime could identify the victim to the perpetrators, leading to retaliation or murder.

• Social Stigma and Shame: In many communities, the stigma of sexual violence falls heavily on the victim, leading to ostracization. This fear is amplified in a tense ethnic conflict where a woman might be seen as “defiled” or a source of shame for her community.

• Lack of Trust in Authorities: If the police are perceived as belonging to or supporting the “other side” of the conflict, a victim has zero faith that her report will lead to justice. She may even fear being re-victimized by the police themselves.

• Displacement and Logistical Nightmares: A woman who has fled her home and is living in a relief camp has no access to her local police station, which may be in a hostile area. Her survival needs—food, shelter, safety—take absolute precedence over the arduous process of filing a report.

Q3: The Supreme Court mentioned “systemic” sexual violence. What does this imply?

A3: The term “systemic” or “systematic” in the context of conflict-related sexual violence is highly significant. It moves beyond the idea of random, isolated acts of brutality. It implies that the sexual violence was:

• Organized or Coordinated: It may have been planned, encouraged, or used as a deliberate tactic by one or more groups involved in the conflict.

• A Weapon of War: It is used to achieve strategic objectives, such as terrorizing a population into fleeing, destroying the social fabric of the “enemy” community, or asserting ethnic dominance and humiliation.

• Widespread and Patterned: It is not a few rogue actors, but a repeated, patterned behavior that occurs across different locations and times, indicating it is a central part of the conflict strategy. This label elevates the crimes from individual criminal acts to potential war crimes or crimes against humanity.

Q4: What are the long-term consequences of this massive underreporting?

A4: The consequences are devastating and far-reaching:

• Impunity for Perpetrators: When crimes are not reported, investigated, or prosecuted, perpetrators face no consequences, emboldening them and others to commit further atrocities.

• Denial of Justice for Victims: Victims are denied legal redress, closure, and any form of official acknowledgment of their suffering, leading to profound and lasting psychological trauma.

• Distorted Policy and Aid: The government and aid agencies rely on data to allocate resources. Underreporting creates a false picture, leading to inadequate funding for essential services like trauma counseling, medical care, and legal aid for survivors.

• Historical Erasure: It creates a false historical record, allowing future generations to downplay or deny the scale of the atrocities committed, preventing societal reconciliation and healing.

Q5: What can be done to get a more accurate picture of the violence and help victims?

A5: While restoring the official system is the long-term goal, immediate steps include:

• Supporting Independent Investigations: Empowering national human rights commissions, women’s commissions, and credible non-governmental organizations to document cases through confidential interviews and field research.

• Establishing Safe Reporting Mechanisms: Creating special cell, potentially under the supervision of the High Court or Supreme Court, that are seen as neutral and can guarantee confidentiality and safety for those who come forward.

• Victim-Centric Approach: Ensuring that any process prioritizes the safety, dignity, and well-being of the victim above all else, including providing secure shelter, medical care, and psychosocial support regardless of whether they file a formal police report.

• Strengthening Witness Protection: Implementing a credible and robust witness protection program is essential to break the cycle of fear and impunity.