The Rhetoric of Atrocity: Analysing PUCL's Report on Manipur Violence

Reports from advocacy groups like the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) occupy a peculiar and potent space within public discourse: they are not judicial verdicts, yet they are uniquely capable of shaping perception, rallying transnational sympathy, and fuelling potent demands for institutional action. The PUCL’s Report of the Independent People’s Tribunal on the Ongoing Ethnic Violence in Manipur (August 2025), though ostensibly privately circulated, was swiftly disseminated online. It is a document that deliberately interlaces curated fragments of purported “hard evidence” with a pointed, morally charged call for justice. Yet its true force derives not from any legal authority but from its sophisticated rhetoric: words wielded with precision as instruments of persuasion.


This essay examines how the report, whilst compelling in its narrative thrust, advances a fiercely partial account. Its storyline relentlessly and asymmetrically indicts the Indian State apparatus and the Meitei majority community (mostly Hindu), constructing them as the prime, orchestrated agents of Manipur’s tragic bloodshed. A thorough analysis of the report’s Executive Summary reveals its core posture: strategic advocacy couched in the language of impartial inquiry, and perspectival bias presented as established fact. The enormous volume is simply a eye wash.


Why Words Matter: The Architecture of Persuasion

In conflicts characterised by competing truths, words do more than simply recount events; they actively sculpt perception, assign moral valence, and construct reality. The PUCL report deftly deploys what scholars term a “rhetoric of atrocity,” using harrowing, visceral scenes to ignite collective memory, summon international outrage, and fix blame squarely upon official institutions and the majority community. By embedding legally and morally loaded terminology such as “ethnic cleansing,” “atrocities,” and “state complicity” from the outset, the authors perform a crucial act of framing, converting a complex, multi-faceted regional conflict into a stark moral drama demanding immediate external intervention.


Two analytical lenses are essential to unpack this construction. First, the ancient framework of Aristotle’s triad of persuasion: Ethos (the appeal to credibility), Pathos (the appeal to emotion), and Logos (the appeal to logic). Second, modern Framing Theory, which elucidates how the selective emphasis and salience of certain aspects of reality, such as preferring the term “ethnic cleansing” over the more neutral “clashes,” powerfully steers public and institutional interpretation. Together, these lenses expose how the report’s narrative consistently and systematically spotlights state culpability and Meitei mobilisation whilst muting, minimising, or dismissing other dimensions of the conflict, thereby manufacturing a singular, compelling but ultimately reductive truth.


How the Report Wins You Over: The Triadic Strategy


The PUCL text masterfully fuses credibility, emotion, and logic into a cohesive and persuasive package. However, the considerable weight of its rhetorical construction falls repeatedly and overwhelmingly upon a single axis: the condemnation of the governing apparatus and dominant ethnic actors.

1. Building Trust (Ethos): The Veneer of Judicial Authority

From its very title, the label “People’s Tribunal” is a profound rhetorical manoeuvre, strategically evoking the impartiality and procedural rigour of a judicial body to lend its findings an aura of incontestable authority. This constructed credibility is meticulously bolstered through linguistic choices: verbs like “documents” and assertions of “overwhelming evidence” imply a forensic, unbiased process. Furthermore, strategic citations to established international organisations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch serve to borrow their legitimacy, embedding the report within a recognised discourse of human rights professionalism. This carefully cultivated ethos is paramount, as it ensures that the subsequent, highly emotional claims appear grounded, credible, and objective rather than partisan or polemical. Yet it is crucial to recognise that this credibility is marshalled in service of a predetermined verdict: that government agencies and Meitei organisations are the primary architects and enablers of the conflict.

2. Stirring Emotions (Pathos): The Engine of Moral Outrage

The report’s most potent weapon is its unrelenting use of emotive storytelling. Phrases such as “homes and churches destroyed,” “sexual violence,” “civilians burned alive,” and “the forced displacement of over 60,000 people” are deployed to jolt the reader’s imagination and demand a response of pure moral outrage. Specific invocations of religious targeting (“places of worship”) amplify sympathy exclusively for the Kuki-Zo community, framing their experience through a prism of profound victimhood while rendering Meitei perspectives and sufferings virtually invisible. This asymmetrical framing is compounded by the consistent portrayal of Kuki-Zo actions as defensive “retaliation,” a term that carries inherent moral justification. Consequently, the narrative ensures that emotional solidarity and the imperative for justice are channelled in a single, unequivocal direction, foreclosing empathy for the other side.

3. Using Logic (Logos): The Illusion of Irrefutable Causality

To discipline its emotional appeals and appeal to judicial and political audiences, the report constructs a skeletal but coherent causal chain. This sequence begins with the Manipur High Court’s ruling on Scheduled Tribe status for Meiteis, moves to peaceful protests, and culminates in a “violent counter-mobilisation” by Meitei groups. This flawed but logical progression offers a neat, intelligible clarity to otherwise chaotic and reciprocal violence, providing a satisfyingly simple explanation. The deployment of statistics, such as the number of looted firearms or the scale of displacement, lends this storyline an aura of empirical rationality and evidence-based conclusion. However, this logical framing is highly selective. The language used is value-laden: Meitei mobilisation is consistently labelled “aggression” or “orchestrated violence,” while Kuki-Zo actions are sanitised as “response” or “retaliation.” This pre-determines agency and guilt within the very structure of the argument, using the appearance of logic to reinforce a biased conclusion.


Building a Story of Blame: The Narrative Arc

The report’s persuasive power lies not just in its rhetoric but in how it sequences its storyline. A narrative is never a neutral list of events; it is a tool that sets out causality, allocates blame, and justifies specific outcomes. Structured with the deliberate intent of a prosecutor’s brief, the report guides its readers inexorably to one conclusion: that the government machinery and the majority Meitei community are the principal culprits. Its architecture is meticulously crafted:
1.    Scene-setting: Long-term state policies and the judicial ruling on Meitei ST status are portrayed not as complex political issues but as deliberate sparks for violence, attributed to state orchestration.
2.    Catalogue of Atrocity: Graphic, lengthy accounts of attacks on Kuki-Zo communities are presented in devastating detail, whilst violence against Meiteis is mentioned only briefly as “retaliatory,” a term that diminishes its scale and moral significance.
3.    Humanitarian Breakdown: Documented failures in relief distribution and healthcare are marshalled not merely as tragedies but as further evidence of systemic state negligence and partisan malice.
4.    Allocation of Responsibility: Meitei militias and a complicit official apparatus are cast as the undisputed perpetrators, while Kuki-Zo militancy is minimised or excused as a defensive necessity.
5.    Call for Action: The narrative culminates in specific demands for judicial and policy intervention, presented as the only logical and moral response to the established facts.
The narrative arc leaves no room for ambiguity: the conflict was “planned, not spontaneous; ethnically targeted; and state-enabled.” The conclusion is foregone; the evidence is curated exclusively to sustain
it, creating a closed hermeneutic circle where every fact serves the overarching thesis.


The Art of Framing: Selection, Omission, and Ideology


The report’s power leans on more than just persuasive technique and a tight storyline; it resides in its strategic framing. Persuasion is not merely about what is said explicitly, but how an account is framed, what is omitted, and what ideological work the language performs behind the scenes. The report’s deliberate word choices, its inherent limitations as an advocacy document, and the implications of its framing reveal how its tactics, whilst powerful, tilt overwhelmingly against official institutions and the dominant community, raising significant political and ethical questions.


1. From “Clashes” to “Ethnic Cleansing”: The Ultimate Framing Device

The most striking and consequential rhetorical manoeuvre is its terminological choice. The decision to label events as “ethnic cleansing” is a masterful act of framing that immediately aligns the situation in Manipur with historical precedents in Rwanda or Bosnia. This consciously discards the government’s milder, more ambiguous framing of “clashes” or “disturbances.” This radical lexical shift is transformative, elevating a regional ethnic conflict into the realm of international atrocity law and crimes against humanity, thereby demanding a different order of response. Yet, in choosing this elevated, horrifying language, the report necessarily reduces complexity. It flattens the reality of reciprocal, communal bloodshed and simplifies a multifaceted history of tension into a monolithic narrative where one side are the systematic architects of atrocity and the other are pure victims. This framing is not descriptive but performative, intended to produce a specific international reaction.


2. The Monolithic State: A Rhetorical Simplification

Equally problematic is the report’s persistent conflation of “the State” into a singular, malevolent actor with a unified intention. This ignores important scholarly work from thinkers like Philip Abrams and Timothy Mitchell, who remind us that the state is not a monolithic entity but a fractured, often contradictory assemblage of institutions, actors, and practices, frequently characterised more by incompetence, inertia, and internal conflict than by coherent conspiracy. By merging Union and state-level institutions, elected officials, police departments, and judiciary into one culpable “state” entity, the report prefers a dramatic, easily digestible morality tale over a nuanced, accurate analysis. This reductive framing enhances its advocacy punch but sacrifices explanatory precision, obscuring points of potential accountability, internal resistance, or simple bureaucratic failure.


3. Silencing Counter-Narratives: The Strategy of Omission

A profound weakness in the report’s claim to comprehensive analysis is its strategic silencing of counter-narratives. Meitei concerns, including those over illegal migration, narco-trafficking’s impact on society, and land encroachment, are not engaged with substantively but are dismissed out of hand as mere “hate campaigns.” This is a critical omission. A robust analysis would first acknowledge these anxieties as a perceived reality for the Meitei community, examining their historical and social roots, before then critically interrogating how these grievances were weaponised into violence. By refusing to engage with these rationales, the report strengthens its own advocacy position but catastrophically weakens its credibility as a balanced analysis. It engages in what critical discourse analysts call the “ideological square”: emphasising our good things and their bad things, while mitigating our bad things and ignoring their good things. This entrenches the very divisions it claims to wish to resolve.


Strengths and Flaws: The Advocacy Paradox


A fair assessment of the PUCL report requires a clear-eyed weighing of its strengths as a bold call to action against its profound flaws as a one-sided account that systematically targets government institutions and the Meitei majority.
Strengths
●    Unambiguous Moral Stance: It provides a clear, unequivocal condemnation, refusing to downplay the violence through euphemism or false equivalence, and forcefully rejecting characterisations of spontaneous “clashes.”
●    Coherent Narrative Structure: It successfully distils immense complexity into a cogent and emotionally compelling storyline, making a chaotic situation intelligible to external audiences.
●    Impactful Advocacy: It raises international awareness of critically neglected issues, particularly the systematic use of sexual violence and the partisan failure of relief mechanisms, forcing them onto the national agenda.
●    Mobilising Potential: Its powerful framing is designed to force national and international institutions to break from political inertia and intervene.
Flaws
●    Partisan Lens: It valorises Kuki-Zo victimhood accounts whilst consistently vilifying the official apparatus and Meitei actors, presenting a Manichean good-vs-evil dynamic that fails to reflect the conflict’s reality.
●    Politically Loaded Vocabulary: The use of “ethnic cleansing”, whilst rhetorically powerful, risks significant exaggeration outside a strict legal definition and may harden positions, deepen communal rifts, and make future dialogue more difficult.
●    Neglect of Context: It brushes aside deeper, long-standing structural tensions, such as disputes over illegal immigration, land encroachment, and the complex roles of armed insurgent groups on all sides, in favour of a simplified narrative of immediate triggers and villainy.
The report is thus most accurately understood as a potent advocacy document, not an impartial judicial or analytical exercise. This dual nature, urgent yet partial, invites us to ask what such advocacy achieves, and, just as importantly, what it obscures and potentially jeopardises.


Implications: The Consequences of Framing


The PUCL report ultimately wields words as weapons, reframing Manipur’s conflict in the stark terms of moral absolutes. Its rhetoric is designed to galvanise sympathy and internationalise the crisis, but it achieves this at the cost of balance and, potentially, long-term reconciliation. As Robert Entman observes, framing functions by “selecting some aspects of a perceived reality and making them more salient... thereby promoting a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and treatment recommendation.” Crucially, he notes that “what is omitted matters as much as what is said.” In this report, omission is not an oversight but a deliberate strategy.
Different audiences will receive and act upon its message in divergent ways:
●    Judicial bodies may treat its curated “evidence” as a prima facie case justifying independent probes, though its lack of judicial procedure limits its evidentiary value.
●    International activists and organisations will inevitably seize upon the “ethnic cleansing” frame as a powerful rallying cry for solidarity and sanctions, amplifying the conflict on a global stage.
●    Policy-makers and peacebuilders, however, may find its polemical, one-sided tone obstructive rather than constructive, as it leaves little room for the complex negotiation and mutual acknowledgement necessary for lasting political solutions.


By amplifying Kuki-Zo suffering whilst muting Meitei experience and grievances, the report risks deepening the very fissures it seeks to address. It speaks the language of accountability but not of reconciliation. As peacebuilding scholar Lisa Schirch argues, advocacy that relies on ritualised condemnation and the mobilisation of shame, whilst effective for short-term naming-and-shaming, can often entrench conflict binaries. It makes peace harder to achieve, as fiery, absolute calls for justice can obstruct the messy, imperfect compromises necessary for dialogue and sustainable peacebuilding.


A Bold but Biased Voice


In conclusion, the PUCL report is powerful precisely because it is unapologetically partisan. It is not intended to be an even-handed chronicle but a strategic rallying cry and a corrective to perceived state silence and media bias. Its strength lies in its courageous spotlight on atrocities and suffering that have been systematically omitted from dominant national narratives; its profound weakness lies in its simplistic, asymmetrical allocation of blame and its failure to provide a holistic context.

To engage with Manipur’s tragedy responsibly, one must read this report not as a definitive record but as a single, powerful voice in a much larger chorus of pain. It is advocacy: urgent, necessary, but partial. The real task for scholars, journalists, and policymakers lies beyond this document: in the difficult work of weaving together its findings with independent journalism, nuanced scholarly analyses, and, crucially, the diverse testimonies from all affected communities to confront the fuller, more agonising picture of displacement, historical land disputes, immigration, narco-politics, and mutual atrocities. The report ensures Manipur’s suffering commands attention in 2025. Yet it should be treated not as the end of inquiry, but as its beginning. It stands as a vital reminder that responsible engagement demands reading not only the lines but also between them, critically interrogating both what is proclaimed and what is strategically, and perhaps consequentially, silenced.