The 18-year-old* was a vivacious, fun-loving teenager who had given up studies to work at a beauty salon to support her family.
Ethnic conflict between the majority Meiteis and the minority Kuki Zos in Manipur had broken out early in May 2023. On May 15, she was withdrawing cash from an ATM near her home in Imphal when four men in a Maruti Swift, abducted her and took her to a group of meira paibis, the legendary Manipuri torch-bearers. Dressed in traditional phanek, the women first beat her up and then handed her over to men from the armed militia group, Arambai Tenggol with instructions to kill her, her police complaint states.
As with most ethnic conflicts from Sudan to Bosnia; the Partition of India to Gujarat, women pay the heaviest price with rape and sexual assault. There were rumours, unfounded it later turned out, that Kuki Zo men were raping Meitei women. The men who abducted the girl wanted revenge.
Four armed men dressed in black t-shirts took her away in a white bolero car. Three of them raped her and all of them tortured her through the night, she later told the police. Miraculously, she escaped after falling off a cliff. An auto rickshaw driver took her back home bloodied and grievously injured and she was eventually able to get medical help and reunite with her family.
On July 21, 2023, she registered an FIR at Kangpokpi police station. Her complaint has granular details of the crimes against her; the many perpetrators, including the meira paibis and their approximate ages, the chronicle of movements and even the weapons and vehicles used. The case was later transferred to the CBI.
For two years and eight months, nothing happened. The case was transferred to a special CBI court in Guwahati. Two men were arrested but released on bail on January 2 this year.
On January 10, 2026, the now 20-year-old died of medical complications she never recovered from. “My daughter was always smiling and full of life, but after the incident, she lost her smile,” her mother told Prateek Goyal of Newslaundry.
Cannot look away
The sexual violence in Manipur became impossible to ignore when a video of two Kuki Zo women, stripped naked and paraded amid a crowd of jeering men went viral in July 2023.
The assault had taken place on May 4 but the video brought home its visceral violence. Not words in a newspaper or slogans at a protest but two real women, their faces and naked bodies blurred yet their fear palpable.
The younger of the two, it was later reported, was gang-raped. Her father and 19-year-old brother were beaten to death.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi broke his two-and-a-half-month silence on the ongoing violence. And then chief justice DY Chandrachud warned the government that the Supreme Court would step in if it didn’t respond.
In August, the Manipur government told the court 6,523 FIRs had been registered, including 11 cases of violence against women and children. Only seven arrests had been made in connection with these cases. The court was not happy. Why wasn’t there disaggregation of the 6,523 FIRs, it asked. How many of these were cases of rape? Or murder? It was anybody’s guess. Why was there so much delay in recording police complaints and witness statements?
The court handed over the investigation of the 11 cases of sexual assault to the CBI to be monitored by a senior police officer. It also set up a three-member committee of former women high court judges to ensure the rehabilitation of victims.
Details of other horrific incidents of sexual assault had emerged. These included an attack on May 5 by a group of drunk Meitei men and boys, some as young as 15, who dragged and raped a woman and teenage girl.
A day earlier, on May 4, two Kuki women working in a car wash in Imphal were hunted down and attacked at their place of work by a mob. They were locked in a room, gang-raped and tortured for hours before being killed. Their families recorded their statements in October and November 2023. But, leave alone trial, the families have received no information or update about the progress into the investigation, senior advocate Vrinda Grover who is representing the families said.
In July 2024, a petition was filed jointly by a collective, Women in Governance questioning the delay and the fact that the families were being kept in the dark. A year-and-a-half later, that petition has not been heard or even listed by the court.
“The Supreme Court orders [in August 2023] raised a legitimate expectation of some semblance of justice and accountability,” said Grover. “However, two-and-a-half years later, the victims and their families wait endlessly. They don’t know what is the progress or status of the investigation and trials.”
The situation in Manipur remains fraught, even after the imposition of President’s Rule in February 2025. Days after news of the woman’s death broke, a 29-year-old man was shot dead by unidentified assailants. Mayanglambam Rishikant Singh, a Meitei, was visiting his Kuki Zo wife in Churachandpur district when he was killed.
When justice fails
How is it that despite national and international attention, despite the setting up of committees, and despite the outrage of the Supreme Court, justice has failed so spectacularly for women and girl survivors of sexual assault in Manipur?
In the most high-profile of the cases—the stripping-and-parading video case—trial by a special CBI court in Guwahati began only in January this year. Although the faces of dozens of men are clearly visible, charges have been framed against only six.
A Manipur-based activist who asked not to be named said there is a “big question mark” about whether justice will ever be delivered not just for the 20-year-old but for all the other survivors of sexual assault. “The way things are moving, I’m not very hopeful.”
Grover added: “One young woman’s life has been consumed by the trauma. Due to unconscionable institutional lapses, hope too is fading.”
In 2013 India made comprehensive amendments to the rape law to include a separate section, 376(2)(g), that recognized the vulnerability of women and girls during communal and ethnic violence. The first conviction (and likely the only one) under this section was in 2023. It took nine years after the Muzaffarnagar riots, three Supreme Court interventions, a crack team of pro bono lawyers and the boundless courage of one gang-rape survivor and her family to finally get justice.
The price of justice is unacceptably high. And the constant vigilance by activists and lawyers, exhausting. In December 2025, there was public outrage over the Delhi high court’s decision to suspend the life sentence of Kuldeep Singh Sengar, a former BJP MLA, convicted for raping a minor girl in Unnao. The Supreme Court had to step in to put the earlier order on hold.
It was public outrage again over the remission granted to 11 men convicted of gang-raping Bilkis Bano during the Gujarat riots. The top court had to step in to cancel the remission.
Meanwhile, rape convict Gurmeet Ram Rahim who leads the Dera Sacha Sauda cult with thousands of followers is out on a 40-day parole—his 15th since he began his 20-year jail term in 2017.
In its August 2023 order, India’s highest court noted that “using women as instruments for perpetrating violence is simply unacceptable in a constitutional democracy.”
On the day we adopted our Constitution that promises equality for all, it is not out of place to ask what it takes for survivors of horrific sexual assault to get a modicum of justice and, hopefully, closure.
It is not out of place to ask what each failure means for the common citizen’s hope in our institutions.
(*Indian law prohibits the naming of survivors of sexual assault.)
