Shavei Israel Coordinator Tsvi Khaute, we’re told by this week’s article on “Khaute Questioned In Rape Case,” was last week “in Manipur on Shavei business.” B’nei Menashe Council General Secretary Ohaliav Haokip, the same article states, believes he was arrested last Wednesday “to put me out of action at a crucial time.” Shavei Israel wanted, Haokip states in an accompanying article, “to keep me from meeting with the fact-finding team from Israel that was then in Manipur.”
Hmmm. It sounds as if these things might be connected.
They indeed are – and we hope to dispel the mystery next week when we can write about developments that we were asked not to disclose until they came to their conclusion. We ask our curious readers to bear with us until then.
Ohaliav (seated in back) taken away in a police van.
On the morning of June 8, I was going over some documents related to the rump B’nei Menashe Council created by Shavei Israel to challenge the democratically elected BMC of which I am General Secretary when a police van pulled up outside my residence and I was served with an FIR or First Information Report. In it I was accused of falsely putting two names on a petition against Shavei Israel’s grip on B’nei Menashe Aliyah that was sent to The Jewish Agency and Israel’s Ministry of Immigration nearly a year-and-a-half ago. I was told that I was being taken into custody and barely had time to assure my family that I would quickly be released and to contact the BMC executive, whose members reacted immediately. Some even reached the police station before I did.
The next unpleasant surprise came when I was taken from the station to the district hospital for a medical checkup. This is a procedure followed only when an arrested person is slated for a lengthy detention. Why was this being done, I wondered, when no preliminary investigation of the charges against me had been conducted? It was totally irregular.
Ohaliav returned to police station from hospital.
Upon returning from the hospital, I was informed that I would be held by the police until brought before a district court judge. I was then kept for five hours, from 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., locked up by myself in a dingy, dirty cell with a doorless toilet and no running water. The stench was unbearable. The cell walls were covered with graffiti. One of them said, “Only God in heaven is my shelter and I have full trust in Him. Please help me, O Lord! Release me from this dark room and I will always serve You forever.” My first reaction was to panic. I knew I was the victim of a Shavei Israel plot and I knew Shavei was capable of anything.
Ohaliav’s supporters outside station.
However, after reading the FIR I had been served with, I calmed down. I realized that the charge was not a serious one and had been concocted, among other things, to keep me from meeting with the fact-finding team from Israel that was then in Manipur. In addition, I knew that my fellow BMC members were in the police station with me, and had even brought a supply of food and water that was passed on to me. I actually had a chicken lunch, although I had to eat it standing up because there was no chair in the room. I thought of Mahatma Gandhi and of all the times he was arrested during his struggle for Indian Independence, and I said to myself: “This is no big deal, Ohaliav. The B’nei Menashe are downtrodden by Shavei Israel just as India was by the British. It’s just something you have to go through.”
My spirits restored, I lay down for a nap on the filthy floor with an empty water bottle for a pillow. I never knew that a plastic bottle pressed against my ear could make so much noise! Meanwhile, my wife arrived along with her mother, carrying our three-month-old son, and she encouraged me through a small window that was out of my line of sight and from which all she could see of me was my arm dangling through the cell bars. I told her that Shavei was afraid of me because it knew I was about to produce incriminating documents against it and that, if I continued to be detained, she should help the BMC executive to locate them in the closet in which they were kept.
The first page of the FIR. Its file number appears at the upper left.
Later in the afternoon, I was finally taken to the district court in a police van, followed by an escort of BMC members, and brought before a judge. On examining the FIR, he noticed that the file number on it was that of an old FIR pertaining to someone else who was wanted by the police – in other words, that it had been faked to enable my arrest. This so enraged him that he debated out loud whether to lodge a complaint with Manipur’s High Court, accusing the Churachandpur police of negligence and maltreatment, from which he was deterred only when the police officer in charge pleaded with him not to. In the end, I was released on the surety of the BMC’s Culture Secretary Yoel Sehmang Haokip and told to appear in court again on June 22 at a session at which I would be able to defend myself.
I left the courtroom and we all went to my home for tea and a review of the day’s events. Then my friends who had stood by me all day long went their way and I sat down to dinner with my family. It was already late at night.
(June 15) Leaders of two rival B’nei Menashe organizations faced the Manipur police last week. One, Tsvi Khaute, Shavei Israel’s B’nei Menashe Coordinator, was interrogated about his role in the 2016 rape case of the daughter of Sarah Lamsi Baite. The other, Ohaliav Haokip, Secretary General of the B’nei Menashe Council, was freed without interrogation or bail after being taken into custody on charges filed by Shavei of having falsified names on a petition.
Sarah Baite.
Khaute, who lives in Israel and was in Manipur on Shavei’s behalf, was summoned for questioning by the Churachandpur police on Friday, June 10. He was questioned, our Newsletter has learned, about his suspected complicity in Shavei’s pressuring Baite at the time not to report the rape to the police; about his involvement in her subsequent expulsion from Churachandpur’s Beit Shalom congregation when the incident became publicly known; about his responsibility for the placement of the accused rapist, who now lives in Israel too, on Shavei’s 2018 Aliyah list, and about recent Shavei threats against Baite when she finally filed a police complaint last January.
The Shavei Israel Coordinator, our sources have informed us, denied all knowledge of these things and claimed to have learned of them only recently. When asked how someone in his position could have been ignorant of matters that were common knowledge in the B’nei Menashe community, he had no answer to give and reportedly contradicted himself repeatedly, as when he when he first stated that he had nothing to do with the choosing of Aliyah candidates and then offered to make amends to Baite and her daughter by having them put on the next Aliyah list.
After the interrogation, Khaute was released and told that the police would keep an eye on his future activities in Manipur.
Two days earlier, on Wednesday June 8, Ohaliav Haokip was locked up in the same Churachandpur police station following a complaint filed against him by two local B’nei Menashe, Ginkhoson Hangshing and Nemneichong Kipgen, for “dishonest misappropriation of property.” The actual charge, as stated in the FIR or First Information Report that Haokip was served with was that the B’nei Menashe Council had listed the two plaintiffs without their knowledge on a petition bearing the names of 1,230 B’nei Menashe that was sent to The Jewish Agency and Israel’s Ministry of Immigration and Absorption.
The 2021 B’nei Menashe Council petition.
The petition, which demanded an end to Shavei Israel’s grip on B’nei Menashe Aliyah, has been denounced by Shavei Israel ever since it was sent in February 2021. Its supporters have been threatened by Shavei with being denied Aliyah if they do not disavow it and this campaign has recently been stepped up. At a Shavei meeting held in Churachandpur on May 15, Shavei’s Assistant Administrator in Manipur, Bentsion Suantek, announced plans to file a court case contending that names had been illicitly been put on the petition and appealed to all who had supported it to now claim that they were the victims of fraud.
In the end, only two volunteers to do so could be found. Their accusation was doubly absurd, Ohaliav Haokip told our Newsletter. “In the first place, what possible motive could there have been for adding two false names to a genuine list of 1,228 people, none of whom have made a similar claim of fraud? And secondly, the charge sheet stated that the plaintiffs’ ID numbers on the petition had been taken from them during the B’nei Menashe Council’s 2020 emergency food distribution campaign in Manipur whereas in fact no IDs were ever asked for or recorded during the distribution. There is ample documentation to prove this. The whole thing was trumped up by Shavei to discredit the petition, frighten and intimidate the BMC, and put me out of action as its General Secretary at a crucial time. Hangshing and Kipgen were pawns used by Shavei, which put them up to it. But they knew that they were lying to the police and will have to answer to the law for it.
“Someone in the police will have to answer, too,” Ohaliav continued. “The whole thing was fishy. Normally, a First Information Report is drawn up after a preliminary investigation has taken place, but in this case there was no investigation at all. The FIR simply repeated the plaintiffs’ charges without first asking me or the BMC for our side of the story, and then locked me up for the better part of a day. Someone has some explaining to do.”
Ohaliav Haokip tells the full story of his arrest in an accompanying article in today’s Newsletter.
