Experts, Ex Officers Allege Factual Errors In PUCL Report On Manipur, Raise 16 Points

Fourteen individuals including Manipur's noted filmmaker Aribam Syam Sharma and 24 civil society organisations have alleged several factual errors and incongruences in a recent report by a Delhi-based non-profit on the Manipur ethnic violence.

"The report is highly judgmental while indulging in selective sampling of narratives and information reportage," said a statement signed by the individuals from different locations and backgrounds - academia to ex-military to retired bureaucrats - including the Padma Shri awardee Mr Sharma.

In the report, the People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) had alleged former chief minister N Biren Singh played a partisan role and also flagged alleged complicity of state security forces in arming non-state actors and allowing widespread violence to occur unchecked.

The prominent individuals from Manipur and other parts of the country in the joint statement said while the report accused the state government and the Centre of abject failure to contain violence, the PUCL "in its typical judgmental spectre squarely blames and vilifies a community, the Meiteis, in this case."

They also acknowledged the PUCL's significant work on protection of civil liberties, including on issues linked to the controversial law Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958, or AFSPA. However, they drew a sharp comparison between the PUCL's latest fact-finding work on the Manipur violence and the non-profit's legacy, calling the latest exercise "an epistemic blunder which will only weaken the collective solidarity amongst struggling peoples."

The PUCL, currently led by rights activist Kavita Srivastava, was formed under the aegis of Jaya Prakash Narayan as People's Union for Civil Liberties and Democratic Rights (PUCLDR) in 1976. It was re-christened as PUCL in 1980.

"The methods employed and contents of the PUCL report are amateurish, riddled with factual errors and a lack of ethnographic familiarity, selective in omissions, unilateral, and side-taking, and against its own bygone legacies," the joint statement said.

"In complete contradiction to the actual sequence of events, the PUCL report opts for a naming-and-shaming exercise by letting itself get trapped in an identitarian favouritism. PUCL's report openly projects the Meitei groups as the ones who started the attacks on Kukis in Imphal, while the Chin-Kukis are almost given a clean chit for having just 'retaliated in Churachandpur and Kangpokpi' [Page 20]. However, the testimonies of victims in the report itself and publicly available sources evidently prove otherwise," the joint statement shared with the media said.

"Factual Incongruences"

They listed 16 points to illustrate what they called "factual incongruences" that should be corrected, and asked the PUCL to withdraw the report "for the sake of public order and de-escalation of tensions in Manipur."

In the first allegation, the individuals and civil society organisations said the PUCL report misinterpreted data on district-wise detection of 'foreigners' in Kuki-dominated Churachandpur, "only to be contradicted by the table in the report itself, which records Churachandpur as the fourth largest district with the highest number of undocumented 'foreigners/immigrants' detected among the 11 districts listed in Manipur."

Another point alleged the report reinforced false narratives on eviction drives and empathised with the claims of Chin-Kukis who saw the government's drive against illegal occupation of land and forest as "anti-minority". However, the joint statement said official data shows the evictions between October 24, 2015 and April 18, 2023 affected Meiteis the most - of the 413 families evicted from illegally occupied reserved forest areas, 280 families were Meiteis, 59 were Kuki, 38 Naga and 26 from the Nepali community.

The joint statement alleged the PUCL report contradicts facts, testimonies and its own statements which conclude the violence started in Churachandpur with Kuki mobs torching Meitei homes.

A significant omission, they alleged, was PUCL's "silence and cover-up of Kuki insurgents and their related information."

"In the 692 pages of the PUCL report with a total word count of over 1.85 lakh, a troubling aspect is its silence on the role of the Kuki armed groups operating under the garb of the suspension of operations (SoO) agreement. The report fails to acknowledge the impunity these groups have exercised on the highways for decades and their infringement on civil liberties," the joint statement alleged.

"Several members of SoO groups have been arrested by the country's top investigating agencies like NIA and CBI for their alleged involvement in abduction, attacks and killing of civilians and even central security forces and Manipur Police personnel. Yet, it [PUCL report] does not name any militant groups under SoO," they said.

They alleged another critical flaw in the report was the "biased and one-sided reportage of atrocities and violence."

"The entire chapter 4 deals with the 'testimonies of murder, rape, arson and looting' of the Chin-Kukis, but black out the story of the other side. None of the 10 photos implicated in chapter 4 are Meiteis. The report is a tragic failure as the Jiribam massacre that killed 6 unarmed women and children, including  a 10-month-old infant, in a cold-blooded manner or the cold-blooded abduction and murder of 2 Meitei students that drew national outrage does not find even a mention in PUCL's frame of addressing the rule of law and civil liberties," the joint statement said.

"It is established beyond doubt that the report of PUCL contains innumerable discrepancies... There is an enormous denial of constitutional rights to the people of Manipur, almost producing another condition of lived exceptionality - unlike in other parts of India - whereby the right to life, free movement, and livelihood gets severely compromised. To our disbelief, these issues have not attracted the attention of PUCL," they said.

"This is not an ethical fact-finding initiative. The distinguished tribunal members tragically end up perpetuating what it blames others for acting in 'partisan manner, spreading misinformation and inflaming hostilities, rather than fostering peace'," they added.

Leaders across party lines including Inner Manipur Congress MP Angomcha Bimol Akoijam, Republican Party of India (Athawale) national secretary Maheshwar Thounaojam, BJP Rajya Sabha MP Maharaja Sanajaoba Leishemba, and the former chief minister had in August also spoken out against the PUCL over the report that they alleged was biased, unprofessional and partisan.

People from the valley community living in relief camps after they lost their homes in Kuki-dominated hill areas have also strongly criticised the report over what they called a perceived silence on the role of heavily armed and well-trained Kuki insurgents who participated in gunfights and recruited teens under the name of 'village volunteers'.

They have pointed out key issues missing from the report, such as politicians especially from the controversial Any Kuki Tribes (AKT) category who allegedly instigated Kuki mobs before clashes began on May 3, 2023, and the use of language seen to be biased and partisan ("Kuki-Zo communities were 'driven' out of the valley. Meitei communities 'left' tribal-dominated hill areas.")

PUCL Report Suggests SIT

The executive summary given at the beginning of the PUCL report concluded that "the violence was not spontaneous but orchestrated, enabled by armed Meitei vigilante groups like Arambai Tenggol and Meitei Leepun, and facilitated by state complicity and law enforcement failures."

The PUCL recommended the setting up of a special investigating team (SIT) under the Supreme Court's supervision to probe all cases of ethnic violence and the role of the security forces. The SIT should investigate incidents of hate speeches which occurred directly prior to and during the conflict and arrest and prosecute the perpetrators, including political figures and state functionaries, and the state government should provide adequate protection to all the witnesses, the PUCL report said.

The team members visited a number of relief camps in Manipur to talk to survivors, including children, women and elderly displaced on account of the conflict. Thereafter, a major part of the report comprised meeting people from Manipur who came to Delhi to speak to the PUCL team.

The valley-dominant Meitei community and the Kuki tribes, who are dominant in some hill areas of Manipur, have been fighting over a range of issues such as land rights and political representation. Over 260 have died in the violence and nearly 50,000 have been internally displaced.

The general category Meiteis want to be included under the Scheduled Tribes category, while the Kukis who share ethnic ties with people in neighbouring Myanmar's Chin State and Mizoram want a separate administration carved out of Manipur, citing discrimination and unequal share of resources and power with the Meiteis.