your exaggeration, I can give a few examples of how Mr Moscow treated the Bharti basantis....but then again isn't your army that prefer to do home runs on own daughters.....certain ladies holding placards is one prime example.
IndEed. Iconic moments in the modern history of Hindustan.
The fascinating and moving story behind the unique protest in 2004 by 12 Imas in Imphal, Manipur...
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'Indian Army, Rape Us'
The fascinating and moving story behind the unique protest in 2004 by 12 Imas in Imphal, Manipur...
What's the use of clothes? You can strip me, but how can you clothe me again? Are you a man? ~Mahasweta Devi
In Mahasweta Devi's short story 'Draupadi', an adivasi woman from Bengal refuses to put on her clothes after she is taken into custody and raped by soldiers of the Indian Army. At the end of the story the naked Draupadi confronts the army officer who sanctioned her rape and who now stands before her as 'an unarmed target', in a state of total paralysis usually associated with the victim. In January 2000 Heisnam Kanhailal adapted the story as a play. When it was first staged in Imphal, with Kanhailal's wife Heisnam Sabitri playing the lead, the play did not go all the way. The magnificent final scene in which Draupadi faces her abusers, naked and bloody but fierce, was not shown, only suggested. But the troupe realized that for the play to really work it had to startle the audience. Later that year, the play was part of a festival organized by the National School of Drama in Delhi. When the play was staged at the Shri Ram Centre Auditorium, the troupe enacted it in its truest form, including the final scene. The audience was overwhelmed.
Four years later, the play turned out to be prophetic, a premonition of a real event in the history of Manipur when twelve Imas, mothers, stood naked in public to protest the killing and possible rape of a young girl, Thangjam Manorama. Quite like Mahasweta Devi's Draupadi they gave up modesty for justice and displaced some of the shame of nakedness and violation onto the soldiers of the Assam Rifles who were accused of raping and killing Manorama. Kanhailal got many phone calls that day. The morning newspapers of 16 July 2004 called him Ching'ü, a wise man, who could foresee the future.
There was a tiny quiver in the air when the twelve Imas threw off their clothes in front of the Kangla. No one is sure who was the first to disrobe. But they had come prepared, leaving behind their petticoats, blouses and fear. They hardly exchanged a glance, they didn't wince or hide. No one spoke. But in a few moments the air was ringing with slogans, like a chant.
'Rape us, kill us! Rape us, kill us!'
First a few meek voices, and then a chorus, sharp and strong.
'Indian Army, rape us! Kill us!'
Video footage of the incident shows one of the women protestors shouting, 'We are all Manorama's mothers, come, rape us, you bastards!'
The mothers had left their hair loose, a mark of mourning. Some wore slippers. Others were barefoot. All were on a fast and had prayed in the morning before they embarked on this Nupi Lan, this women's war. Their nakedness, old, haggard, was indescribably sacred.
To find fellowship in loss is easy in a brutalized land. The odd relief here is that you don't need to make people understand grief. They know what you have suffered because chances are they have suffered the same. Laisram Gyaneshwari had seen Manorama's body. As news of the brutality of her death became public, civil society organizations had demanded to see the body. Many women who went to the hospital were horrified at the mutilation and cruelty. There were scratch marks, a deep gash on her right thigh, probably made by a knife. There were gunshot wounds on her genitals. 'I didn't know Manorama, but that such a terrible thing can happen, can be done to a girl, shocked me. There was so much cruelty...so gruesome that my heart bled. It was like vultures had preyed on her,' Gyaneshwari would tell me....
