Article

Comment

Freedom of Belief

2 June 2023

6 min read

The month of May(hem) in Manipur

On the 27th May, Archbishop Justin Welby tweeted about the violence unfolding in Manipur. Belle Tindall re-winds the clock to May 3rd and tracks the events that led to his tweet.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A church interior glowing red as parts of its furniture burn. A man walks down the aisel

A video still of a church interior on fire, during violent clashes in Manipur, India.

Open Doors.

A note to our readers: this article includes reports that some readers may find particularly distressing.

On 27th May, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, tweeted about his concern at what has been, and still is, unfolding in Manipur in India. He wrote,

‘I’ve been distressed to hear about the attacks on the indigenous tribal Christians of Manipur, India, and of the churches that have been destroyed in recent weeks.

Kailean Khongsai is training for ordination to the priesthood in the Church of England, and is from Manipur. I join him in praying regional authorities would protect all minority groups, including Christians and their places of worship, and that justice and peace would prevail.’

In doing so, Archbishop Justin pointed the world in the direction of those who are facing extreme pressure, discrimination, and violence in their home of Manipur. Therefore, allow me to paint a fuller picture of what has been happening (largely unnoticed) for weeks now – let’s rewind to May 3rd.

May 3rd

On the streets of Manipur, a state in the northeast of India, indigenous communities protested the (apparent) impending accreditation of Scheduled Tribe status to the Meiti community. Let me provide some context as to why this would be a development to protest about.

Manipur is a self-governed state. A state that is home to the Meiti community, who make up around 53 per cent of the population, and other indigenous communities – the largest of which are the Kuki community, to the south, and the Naga community to the north. There is, and has long been, friction between these neighbouring people groups. The Kuki and Naga communities, being minority groups, have Scheduled Tribal status, thus ensuring that they have a right to protection (particularly regarding the reservations they call home) and representation. The Meiti people, being the state’s majority demographic, do not have such a status… yet.

Despite their legal protection, the Kuki people, in particular, have already faced ongoing evictions from their homes in the hill regions that they have inhabited for hundreds of years. Their expectation is that this is only the beginning. The fear is that, if the Meiti people were to be granted a similar Tribe status, it would result in the Kuki people further losing the right to keep and protect their spaces in both the hills and the forests. It would also pave the way for the Meiti people to assert more societal dominance, as they would be entitled to increased governmental representation; the imbalance would no longer be countered.

And so, on May 3rd, people from both the Kuki and Naga communities took to the streets and marched for ‘tribal solidarity’.

Within a matter of hours, a peaceful protest was transformed into riotous violence as the people marching were met with a wall of resistance. Since that Wednesday afternoon, whole villages have been burnt down, around 15,000 people have been made homeless, hundreds have been injured, the price of essentials has risen to unprecedented levels, schools and public facilities have been closed, internet has been suspended, and although numbers are proving a challenge to confirm, it is thought that anywhere between thirty to seventy people have been killed. Some media outlets are perceiving this violence as the rumblings of an impending civil war; while the Kuki and Naga communities are placing the entirety of the blame upon the Meiti people, The Meiti community are directing all blame toward the tribal communities. And the violence continues to rage on.

May 4th

Recent footage has emerged of a particularly heinous incident taking place on 4th May, one that has re-caught the world's attention and thus prompted Prime Minister Narendra Modi to break his silence, declaring that the attack has 'shamed India'.

Two women, both of whom belonging to the Kuki community, were taken from a police van, stripped, publicly paraded and sexually assaulted in broad daylight. Two men, the younger woman's brother and father, were killed while trying to protect them. It is now being reported that this attack was carried out by armed Meiti men, none of which were arrested until astonishingly recently, more than two months after the attack took place.

Manipur is imploding, and the violent ramifications are devastating.

But there is just one more piece of context that undergirds the Archbishop’s tweet, one more thing to note about the societal dynamics at play in Manipur: while the Meiti community are a majority Hindu people group, the various indigenous groups are almost entirely Christian. As such, Open Doors have reported that the women who were subjected to to the afore-mentioned attack were Christian women.

A complex ethno-religious conflict

The goings-on in Manipur are anything but simple; and so, it is not my intention to reduce the geographic, political, and historic complexities of this conflict, nor to wholly define it as a war between religions. Following Archbishop Justin’s lead, it is with particular caution that I speak of violence being inflicted particularly on Christians in Manipur, acknowledging that it is not the only identity marker that is proving to be targetable.

Nevertheless, it is being widely reported that Christians are being singled out; their Christianity used as a target to aim at, their identity wielded as a weapon against them. Whether it be as the means or the end, as the goal or merely the tactic: it is happening.

According to further Open Doors’ reports, derived from their partners in Manipur, around three hundred churches have been burnt down thus far, one of which still had people in it when it was set alight. A further one hundred public Christian buildings have been destroyed, while one thousand homes which were owned/inhabited by Christian people were ruined, while neighbouring properties remained untouched.

And it isn’t only the Kuki Christians who are facing such discrimination, the (very few) Meiti Christians are also facing particular difficulties as a result of their unusual ethno-religious identity. Noticing this, one Indian news publication is reporting that from the perspective of the Meiti Hindus, Meiti Christians are somewhat of an oxymoron, personified. It is believed that to be Christian is to have converted to a tribal way of living (assimilating the Kuki and Naga people), and therefore comes with assumptions of deep betrayal. And yet, the publication also observes that ‘if their [Christian] faith is making them feel insecure in the valley, it has not come to their rescue in the hills either. The Kukis have made no distinction between them and other Meiteis’. They are, subsequently, a community that are ‘sandwiched’ in conflict.

While the conflict is undoubtedly spilling over ethnic and religious lines, Manipur has just become one of the most dangerous places on earth to be a Christian. In yet another part of the world, it is now a hazardous faith.

And so, back to Archbishop Justin’s tweet.

The need to be seen

One only needs to spend thirty or so seconds tracking the comments generated by this particular tweet to get a sense of how powerful it is to be seen. To be noticed when in distress, to be acknowledged when in chaos, to be advocated for when in danger.

In many ways, social media is a genie that we wish we were able to squeeze back into the bottle. And as justified as such feelings often are, in this case, as in many others in our recent history, it has proved to be a way in which our eyes are opened to what is happening in the most remote corners of our world. Archbishop Justin has publically called for protection, justice, and peace, and in doing so, has made it difficult for the conflict to continue to rumble on unnoticed.

It is now on all of us to refuse to look away. The people of Manipur, Christian and otherwise, need us to continue to look in their direction.

Article

Comment

Morality

Sport

3 July 2023

6 min read

The day the Ashes caught fire

After the upset following Alex Carey’s controversial stumping of Jonny Bairstow at Lord's, Graham Tomlin reflects on the so-called 'Spirit of Cricket' and what it tells us about our innate sense of justice and morality.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

Illustration generated by Dan Kim using Midjourney

Unless you have a complete aversion to sport or wilfully avoid all reference to cricket, you can’t have missed the controversy over the dismissal of the English player Jonny Bairstow by the Australian wicketkeeper Alex Carey at Lords during the final day of the second Ashes Test. Bairstow let a ball go through to the keeper and, thinking the ball (and the over) was finished, wandered down the pitch to chat to Ben Stokes his fellow batter, at which point Carey smartly threw the ball at the wickets to get him out stumped. The Aussie captain, Pat Cummins felt it was a fair cop, as it was within the rules of the game, and on that level, most English players and fans agreed with him. But what the English went on to say is that it was not within the ‘spirit of the game’, and therefore sneaky and underhand. Hence the unremittent booing of the Australians for the rest of the game from the usually sedate Lords crowd, hostility which is only likely to ramp up for the rest of the five-match series with the notoriously partisan Yorkshire crowd at Headingly next in line.

According to the Laws of Cricket, Bairstow was out. He had left his ground before the ball was considered ‘dead’ – which requires both teams to consider it such. The Aussies still felt the game was live, Carey threw the ball as soon as he received it, and so the England batsman has little grounds for complaint. Yet the distinction between the Laws of Cricket and the ‘Spirit of the Game’ has been invoked often since the incident to suggest the Australians are dastardly cheats who will do anything, however underhand, to win a game of cricket, just like they once famously got a young teammate to rough up the ball with sandpaper (clearly illegal) but got caught.

Laws and rules, whether in cricket, a business or charity or within a legal system, are there to protect something else, something deeper than the rules. Our legal system exists to protect more important things like families, community harmony, innocence or human life.

So where does this distinction come from and what does it tell us about our deepest moral instincts? The Laws of cricket are a human invention. Like all sports, cricket is a game which emerged in past centuries and then developed a complex series of rules (in cricket they are always called ‘Laws’) to govern the playing of the game. Those rules develop and change over time. Recent changes include instructions on what you do when a dog invades the pitch, or banning the use of saliva on the ball to make it swing more. Changes even come even in the new format called the Hundred, where bowlers bowl units of five or ten balls at a time instead of the traditional six-ball over. Yet each of these rules are in a way artificial. They are invented and monitored by humans to develop and monitor a human construction called the game of cricket.

Yet we also sense that the Laws cannot do everything. There is this elusive and instinctive thing called the ‘Spirit of Cricket’, so much so that the phrase ‘it’s not cricket’ has seeped into common usage to describe something that just doesn’t feel right. The MCC even runs a lecture every year at Lord called ‘The Spirit of Cricket’ inviting a former player or journalist to reflect on something deeper about the game than the nuts and bolts of the laws, individual performances or team results.

Yet the Spirit of Cricket is more than just about cricket. It appeals to a deeper sense, shared amongst all of us, that some things, even though not codified in human law, just don’t feel right. They go against our deepest moral instincts. They just seem wrong. When Ben Stokes said he wouldn’t have wanted to win a game in the way that the Australians had just done, he was appealing to a deeper moral structure than could ever be codified in a written rule.

So what does all this tell us? Two things, I suggest. The first is that we humans have a deep moral instinct of fairness. We have a sense of conscience, that is not just a human construct, and appeals to something more deeply embedded in the human heart and mind – and conscience is not just a matter of individual preference or cultural difference. We sometimes talk about respecting individual conscience, yet in a more important sense, something called ‘the spirit of cricket’ or the spirit of any game or human enterprise for that matter, testifies that conscience has a universal dimension that is common across societies and cultures – so much so that the spirit of cricket is said to hold whether the game is played in England, Australia, India or Afghanistan. Spot-fixing, or manipulating a game to win a bet, even though it’s not mentioned in the Laws of cricket, is thought of as bad practice wherever you are in the world. There is something universal about Conscience. It may not always be easy to deduce exact rules from it, and in grey areas like the Bairstow incident, it doesn’t lead to straightforward conclusions, but it does nag away at us when we are doing something shady or devious - even when we get away with it.

Secondly, It points to the distinction between human laws, that try to codify our way of living together and regulate human relationships, and a deeper moral law, that individual laws try to protect. Laws and rules, whether in cricket, a business or charity or within a legal system, are there to protect something else, something deeper than the rules. Our legal system exists to protect more important things like families, community harmony, innocence or human life. You might say that the Laws of Cricket are there to preserve the nebulous, but more important and very real thing we call the Spirit of Cricket – to ensure the game is played in a sporting, respectful and generous way, so that it can be enjoyed and not endured, and the competitive instincts it draws on at its best are regulated and don’t get out of hand into open conflict and violence.

once you take away.. the deeper natural law that pricks our consciences ... all you are left with is power – the imposition of the will of some upon the destiny of the many.

In one of his lesser known books, The Abolition of Man, CS Lewis called this deeper moral structure the Tao, drawing on a concept in east Asian religions. He said it included things like duties to parents, elders or ancestors, the importance of justice, good faith & truthfulness, valuing mercy, magnanimity and so on. This natural law is embedded in us, he argued, and that all our value systems are but fragments of the Tao. Despite our ideas of progress, we can no more imagine a deeper or different Tao than we can invent a new primary colour. To try to live outside this Tao, leads, he argues, to the Abolition of Man - the ultimate unravelling of humanity, because once you take away the Tao, the deeper natural law that pricks our consciences, that God-implanted instinct for what is right and wrong, fair and unfair, all you are left with is power – the imposition of the will of some upon the destiny of the many.

St Paul once described what happens when the divine Spirit of God begins to work in a person – they begin to produce “love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,gentleness and self-control.” He goes on to say: “Against such things there is no law.” You cannot demand or legislate such things into life, yet individual laws exist to create the conditions in which they can flourish and grow. There is a moral law that we dimly sense underneath our human legal constructions and moral deliberations, which protects things that matter to us and to which we feel ourselves compelled to conform – unless that is we have silenced the voice of conscience, something we all feel is a dangerous thing to do.

Whether or not Bairstow should have been deemed out, whether or not the Australians were being unsportsmanlike or taking fair advantage, maybe a rumbling dispute over a fine point of cricketing practice can point to something profound about the nature of the world we live in after all.