CM N Biren Singh said the Manipur Government has registered an FIR
against four members of the Editors Guild of India or EGI over a biased report published
on the ethnic clashes in the State.
The CM confirmed that the FIR was filed for allegedly trying to
“create more clashes in the State.”
CM Singh said the fact-finding committee members of the EGI did not
meet representatives from both communities and came to an incorrect conclusion.
The FIR was filed at the Imphal police station on the complaint of
a social worker. The complainant listed different parts of the report, which he
said were false and fabricated.
The FIR said the EGI report showed a photograph of a burnt building
captioning that it was a Kuki house which was burnt on May 5.
“The true fact of the case is that the building is the office of a
forest beat officer at Mata Mualtam Village, Churachandpur,” said the FIR.
The EGI had clarified there was an error in a photo caption in the
report released on September 2.
“We regret the error that crept in at the photo editing stage,” EGI
said on X (formerly Twitter).
The complainant said the report was false, fabricated and sponsored
on different accounts.
As per EGI, they had constituted a three-member committee that visited
Manipur from August 7 to 10 after receiving representations that the media was
playing a partisan role in the ethnic conflict between the majoritarian Meitei
community and Kuki-Chin minority.
EGI said they had received a complaint from the Army’s 3rd Corp
headquarters on July 12, 2023 citing instances where the Manipur media may be
“playing a major role in arousing passion.”
EGI said that while the committee’s mandate was not to examine the
cause of the ethnic clashes, it would be difficult to understand the media’s
behaviour without getting into the social and political context within which
the violence took place.
At least 160 have died and over 50,000 were displaced in the
clashes that started on May 3 in Churachandpur and quickly spread to other areas
of the State.
The EGI’s report titled – Report on the Fact-Finding Mission on Media’s
Reportage of the Ethnic Violence in Manipur – said CM Singh had circumvented
rules and facilitated collective anger of the Meitei community towards the
Kukis through seemingly partisan statements and policy decisions.
The report said the State leadership had labelled the entire
community of Kuki-Zo tribals as “foreigners and illegal immigrants” without any
reliable data or evidence.
It also said that the government had declared parts of hills as
reserved and protected without following the due procedure as laid down in the
Hills Area Committee Act of 1972.
“All land ownership documents within these areas were cancelled and
a drive to evict them started in December 2022,” said the report.
Groups such as Indigenous Tribal leaders Forum (ITLF) have in
recent months accused CM Singh of targeting Kuki in hill areas by holding the
anti-encroachment drive in the hill where the majority of Kukis reside.
The complainant in the FIR said the areas were declared reserve
forest or protected before 1990.
The committee said in their report that media houses in Manipur
wrote one-sided reports and listed different instances when fake news was
published by local media to spread disinformation.
