Doing a great disservice to the Kuki-Chin cause
- The People's Chronicle Editorial :: September 08, 2023 -

WITH the Supreme Court of India granting them interim protection from arrest, albeit till Monday, the four members of Editors' Guild of India (EGI), who have been named in the two FIRs registered by the Manipur police, may be having a sigh of relief.

The two FIRs have been registered by the police acting on complaints filed by two concerned citizens of the state against their fact-finding report on media's reportage of the ethnic violence in Manipur.

But it seems that this relief is not going to help in ensuring protection for themselves from the storm they have created by coming up with a highly skewed report which is not only filled with factually incorrect information but also offer nothing substantial on the table that could be of some use in the effort of resolving the humanitarian crisis in the northeastern state of Manipur which is witnessing an unprecedented communal conflict between the Meitei/Meetei and Kuki-Chin communities since May 3 last.

With its earlier appeal to the Government of Manipur for withdrawal of the FIRs registered by the Manipur police yielding no favourable result, EGI wasted no time in knocking at the door of Supreme Court to save its president Seema Mustapha, and three members of the fact-finding team namely Seema Guha, Sanjay Kapoor and Bharat Bhushan.

Accordingly, the Supreme Court of India granted interim protection from arrest to those named in the FIRs filed under different sections of IPC including Section 153-A, 200/295/298/5000/505(1)(B)/505(2)/120-B, which, among others, pertain to defamation, promoting enmity between different communities, criminal conspiracy, instigating people against the state, etc., and deferred the matter for hearing till September 11 while seeking the response of Government of Manipur on the matter.

Even though EGI is doing everything possible to save its members from facing arrest, it is yet to act on the point-by-point joint rebuttal issued earlier by All Manipur Working journalists' Union (AMWJU) and Editors' Guild Manipur (EGM) on the report of its three-member crowd-funded fact-finding mission that made swift Conclusion that the media in Manipur got transformed into "Meitei-media" and the journalists wrote "one-sided reports" in the current humanitarian crisis.

Amidst this, 33 eminent citizens of the country have strongly condemned and denounced the report of EGI-commissioned fact-finding mission.

While maintaining that almost the entire report is "biased, baseless," the 33 citizens who are living in different parts of the country and engaging in different professions have also come up with a rebuttal citing methodological flaws, inconsistent citations, misrepresentation of legal proceedings, misleading information on evictions, biased portrayal of Meira Paibis, misquotation on internet ban judgement, lack of professionalism and violation of journalistic ethics in framing the report, some of which have not been noted earlier.

It only seems that further reading of the EGI's supposedly crowd-funded fact-finding mission report has only spilled out more muck that would be hard to cover up anymore even with the court intervention.

Now, with the confirmation that many of the texts and paragraphs used in the EGI's fact-finding report have been directly lifted from the website maintained by Indigenous Tribal Leaders' Forum (ITLF) without even bothering to paraphrase them, it seems the three members in the EGI's fact-finding team "with more than 60 years of journalism experience between them", have not only put their own reputation at stake by doing a smear job on the working of media in Manipur rather sloppily but also done a great disservice to the Kuki-Chin people, who are waging a war against the Meiteis/Meeteis in pursuance of their demand for a separate administration.