Documentary Erasure: Sexual Violence, the Politics of Counting, and the Gendering of Ethnic Conflict in Manipur

Abstract

Feminist scholarship on ethnic conflict has established that women’s bodies carry the symbolic weight of communal boundaries, and that wartime sexual violence operates as a strategy of collective humiliation rather than as private criminality. This article argues that symbolic analysis alone cannot explain how gendered harm survives its own public exposure. Drawing on the conflict between the Meitei and Kuki-Zo communities in Manipur since May 2023, it identifies a second mechanism: the documentary regime through which the state records, classifies, and compensates for violence. Of the 6,523 First Information Reports registered by August 2023, eleven concerned crimes against women and children. Ex gratia lists count the dead but hold no category for rape. A 142-day communications blackout removed the channels through which survivors reach police, lawyers and journalists. India appears in no United Nations register of conflict-related sexual violence. The article also reads the May 2023 stripping of two Kuki-Zo women against the Kangla Fort protest of 2004, arguing that perpetrators expropriated a repertoire Manipuri women had themselves built for resistance. It closes with proposals for disaggregated conflict data, gender-specific compensation categories and shutdown exemptions for reporting infrastructure.