Labels that Divide: Dangers of media narratives in Manipur

“Subliminals are things we can’t see or hear; they fly below the threshold of conscious awareness…..The idea is that, while we don’t consciously notice these messages, they are taken on board and acted upon by our subconscious.” Mathew Philip Syed, journalist. 
 
 A few days ago, a headline in some of our national dailies relating to my home state of Manipur sent off alarm bells. What may have passed off as an innocuous, run of the mill turn of phrase about everyday violence, caught my eye only because it related to Manipur, where for over a year now, there has been an ongoing crisis. It was the identifiers used for the two parties involved in the news report that day that got me thinking about the role of the media in informing the public of critical national events, it’s apparent lack of care in the language it uses when disseminating news, particularly from volatile parts of the country, as well as a lack of a sense of urgency in wanting to push for the restoration of peace. 

The crisis in Manipur has received widespread media coverage, but often lacks the depth, context, and understanding of the region’s complex realities. This manifests the disconnect between the people of Manipur and those reporting from Delhi, highlighting how distant both the place and its people are from the national conversation. 

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If we take the example of the recent violence, which flared after a brief period of uneasy calm, it brought home a rather disturbing trend in the way the media just does not report enough, especially when women are increasingly becoming the target. When the media is inured to violence, the public follows suit. Even the brutality of how a 31-year-old Zosangkim Hmar was burnt alive and her body mutilated on the night of 7th November in Jiriban, did not get the coverage it should have. 

A post-mortem report showed that a 5-cm nail was drilled into her skull and three rounds of bullet fired at her. Photos of her shattered skull went viral. What followed was a fierce battle in the Jiribam district at the western periphery state of Manipur resulting in deaths on both sides of the warring communities – the Kuki Zo and the Meiteis. However, when certain national media outlets, sitting thousands of kilometres away from the epicentre of the violence, hastily reported it with bias, it raised serious concerns. A case in point is when, during the gunfight, 10 Kuki-Zo village guards were killed, they were labelled as “militants,” while for two others who died were referred to simply as “Meiteis.” When the media falls into such flawed and misleading portrayals, it undermines the truth and fuels division. This event of course, did not stop there as it only escalated into further violence, perpetuating the vicious cycle of conflict. This was particularly evident in Imphal last week, where people barged into the homes of politicians and demanded answers.

The oversimplification of any news, driven by sensational headlines, has profound consequences. It subliminally creates stereotypes and what in criminal law is called implicit bias. That implicit bias dehumanises entire communities, reducing them to monolithic “sides” that are either victims or aggressors. For journalists, reporting on such a distant and complex issue can often feel like just another headline to complete before moving on to the next story. Or the person on the desk job, it’s just another story. But for the communities involved, these headlines carry much more weight. Every word matters, and the language used can shape their reputation, identity, and future. 

Often, for the communities the labels “militant,” “insurgent,” even “terrorists” in many references, and “victim” are definitely not neutral descriptors. On the contrary, they define entire identities and shape public perception. In Manipur, these labels can mean the difference between life and death, justice and injustice. The Kuki Zo community, for example, has often been labelled as “terrorists’ or “insurgents, or “narco-terrorists” while the Meitei community is portrayed as the victim of violence or the true inhabitants of the land while the others come from outside of the border. These generalisations, based on thin or unverifiable sources, obscure the underlying political and historical dynamics and reduce individuals and communities to their most extreme characteristics. 
The media’s framing of the violence as an ethnic or religious clash further perpetuates this binary narrative, ignoring the complex, long-standing grievances that fuel the violence. The conflict is not merely about ethnic divisions but also about issues like political autonomy, resource control, and historical marginalisation that are seldom looked into with depth and intent. But the national media, often distant from the region and unfamiliar with its intricacies, prefers to simplify the story to a conflict between two “sides” that are cast in opposition to one another. Such simplification can ignore the fact that both communities have shared experiences in marginalization and the fact that both suffer from the instability that has plagued the region albeit in different magnitudes and quantum.

The real danger, however, lies in the complacency that media narratives breed. Over time, as the violence ebbs and flows, media outlets may lose interest, which they evidently are, moving on to the next crisis. This disengagement from the issue can lead to the normalisation of violence, when violence becomes routine, it ceases to shock. It is then that the suffering of displaced families, of which there are more than 60,000, is ignored. As winter approaches, bringing with it more hardship for the displaced, the crisis risks fading from public consciousness entirely. And some of my media friends as they tell me, in earnestly, are really tired of the issue that’s “going nowhere.” Sadly, the human cost of this ongoing tragedy becomes mere footnotes in the headlines, making it even harder to break the cycle of violence.

There is no greater danger than assuming that the situation in Manipur has become “normal” or “business as usual.” As Manipur approaches two years of ongoing crisis in May next year, in less than five months, with no solution in sight, can the media not amplify the urgency for a resolution?

( Hoihnu Hauzel is an independent Journalist)