IMPHAL: The executive committee of the Editors’ Guild of India (EGI) condemned the FIRs lodged by the Manipur police against its members.
Manipur police filed FIRs against the EGI president, Seema Mustafa, and three other members – Seema Guha, Bharat Bhushan and Sanjay Kapoor.
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All the four individuals were part of the fact-finding team that visited Manipur to study media reportage of ethnic violence that rocked the state for four months.
“The Guild is extremely disturbed that rather than respond to the concerns raised in the report in a meaningful way, the state government has registered FIRs,” EGI’s executive committee said in a statement.
The EGI said that it was “shocked by the intimidatory statements made by the chief minister of Manipur, Mr N Biren Singh, in response to the report”.
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CM Biren Singh told the media that the FIRs were filed because the EGI was “trying to create more clashes in the state of Manipur”.
“There are clear indications that the leadership of the state became partisan during the conflict. It should have avoided taking sides in the ethnic conflict but it failed to do its duty as a democratic government which should have represented the entire state,” the fact-finding team’s report claimed.
It added: “The net result is that the executive, its instruments (the police and other security forces of the state) and the bureaucracy are today divided along ethnic lines. There is a Meitei government, Meitei police and Meitei bureaucracy in Imphal and the tribal people living in the hills have no faith in them.”