In one of the sharpest attacks yet on a national civil liberties body, Dr. Angomcha Bimol Akoijam, Member of Parliament from Inner Manipur, delivered a scathing rebuke to the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) over its recently released report, Independent People’s Tribunal on the Ongoing Ethnic Conflict in Manipur.
The report, launched in Delhi on August 20, was described by Bimol as an “embodiment of insensitivity, intellectual bankruptcy, ideological blind spots and a hangover of racist orientalism.”
He warned that rather than helping heal the wounds of a state ravaged by two years of bloodshed, the PUCL had added fuel to the fire and committed what he called “an irresponsible and dangerous blunder.”
The parliamentarian said he was shaken that a group of eminent personalities—former judges, senior scholars, and public figures who had once been regarded as voices of justice—could stoop to producing what he described as a partisan and counterfactual narrative at a time of unprecedented suffering in Manipur.
According to him, the report reeked of prejudice from the very first line and was built on insinuations and distortions that painted one community as the victim and the other as the perpetrator, while conveniently ignoring the deeper forces and political bargains that have sustained the violence.
He questioned the PUCL’s insinuation that Meiteis, because they are “primarily Hindu” and happen to head the state government, had struck a secret understanding with Union Home Minister Amit Shah to unleash violence on Christian tribal minorities.
He described this as not only an outrageous and unsubstantiated suggestion but also a deliberate conflation of an entire community with the BJP. He reminded the PUCL that the Biren Singh government also had Kuki ministers in the cabinet, and he asked why the so-called investigators had chosen to remain silent on the widely reported connections between the BJP and armed Kuki groups under the Suspension of Operations agreement, including the pre-election financial transactions that ran into crores.
He argued that the refusal to probe this angle exposed the ideological blind spot of the PUCL and its failure to unearth the real political forces behind the violence.
Bimol further attacked the report for giving legitimacy to SoO armed groups by suggesting that peace talks would gain “legitimacy” only if such groups were included. He said that the PUCL had, in effect, elevated armed actors complicit in violence into stakeholders in dialogue, while at the same time scrutinising Meitei groups in the harshest light. He said this imbalance showed the one-sidedness of the investigation and laid bare the partisan orientation of the tribunal.
On the report’s claim that mobs first rampaged through Kuki settlements in Imphal and that only “retaliatory violence” later took place in Churachandpur and Kangpokpi, Bimol thundered that the PUCL had turned facts upside down. He pointed out that the report itself contained depositions showing how Meitei homes in Churachandpur and Bishnupur borders were burned before any violence had erupted in Imphal that evening. Yet, he said, the PUCL shamelessly presented a narrative of Kukis merely retaliating to Meitei aggression. This, he charged, was not just hypocrisy but a brazen attempt to sanctify one-sided victimhood while pretending to preach reconciliation.
Perhaps the most damning charge he levelled was against the selective use of gruesome images in the report. He said the PUCL deliberately published graphic photographs of Kuki victims, including even a decapitated body shown twice, while completely excluding Meitei victims. He said this act was a chilling revelation of the PUCL’s motive to project one community as the sole victim and the other as the sole perpetrator.
He described the choice as nothing less than racist orientalism, likening it to the colonial-era double standards of Western media, which hide the images of their own dead while splashing pictures of dead bodies from Africa and Asia without shame. To inflict the same indignity on Manipur’s people, he said, was a profound betrayal and an act designed to keep hatred alive rather than help peace return.
Concluding his attack, Bimol declared that the report was a dangerous document masquerading as an “independent inquiry.” He said it lacked reflexivity, ignored crucial political contexts, twisted timelines, and presented half-truths and insinuations in a manner that could only deepen the divide and perpetuate the cycle of violence.
He demanded that PUCL show “fortitude and self-respect” by immediately withdrawing the report and issuing an unconditional apology to the people of Manipur and the country. Only then, he said, could the organisation salvage its credibility and contribute meaningfully to restoring justice, dignity, and peace.
