'How They Raped And Killed My Sister'

Fourteen years ago, Assam Rifles broke into a house in Imphal, took a woman into custody, tortured her in front of her family, and then killed her. No formal police investigation has yet been ordered. The report of a judicial inquiry into the incident was kept secret for 10 years. The document is now public, but the harrowing details in it have never been fully reported. This is the untold story of the final hours of Thangjam Manorama, whose torture and murder India has chosen to forget.

- Rabi Banerjee

On October 13, a summary general court martial held at an Army unit in Assam’s Dibrugarh district sentenced a major general, two colonels and four soldiers to life imprisonment. The court found that they were involved in the killing, in 1994, of four members of the All Assam Students Union, whom they branded members of the militant United Liberation Front of Asom.

Cases related to rights violations and alleged fake encounters are hounding the Army. On August 14, as many as 356 officers filed a writ petition asking the Supreme Court to stay all court-monitored investigations into alleged fake encounters by the Army. The petition repeatedly mentions the barrage of cases against the Army in Manipur, which has had 1,500 cases of encounter killings in the past two decades.

Last year, the Supreme Court ordered the CBI to inquire into 46 of 1,528 alleged extrajudicial killings in Manipur. Sadly, though, almost everyone seems to have forgotten the state’s most notorious fake encounter. In fact, there is not even a first information report about the killing that shocked India—the killing of Thangjam Manorama in 2004.

IMPHAL’S HEART HAS for long belonged to women.

The proof of it is a sprawling market in the heart of the city, where more than 5,000 women vendors sell everything from clothes and handicrafts, to dried fish and the famous umorok chilli. The place is called Ima Keithal, meaning mother’s market in the Meitei language. The keithal is run by married women; male vendors are banned.