Sarah Baite Leaves Churachandpur To Flee Threats of Violence

(January 27) Ten days after complaining to the Churachandpur police that she was being threatened by Shlomo Sejalal Kipgen, Shavei Israel’s Manipur administrator, Sarah Baite decided she had had enough. Although she had told B'nei Menashe Council officials the previous day that she wanted their help to answer a letter from Shavei Israel chairman Michael Freund (see today’s article “Michael Freund writes to Sarah Baite”), she left the city on Wednesday without informing them where she was going.

The most recent threats received by Baite came from a small underground faction, a splinter group within the Kuki nationalist movement in Manipur. Although Sehjalal had warned Baite that the main Kuki movement, the Kuki National Organization, would take action against her if she didn’t withdraw her charges regarding the 2016 rape of her daughter by a Shavei Israel crony, his K.N.O. contact, our Newsletter learned from its B.M.C. sources, were low-level personnel who were subsequently told by their K.N.O. superiors to leave Baite alone.

Shlomo Sehjalal Kipgen

It was then that Sehjalal turned to the splinter group, which is known for its extremism. As related by Baite before leaving Churachandpur, its commander phoned her and said, “The stick is waiting for you. If you don’t want a beating, you had better get out of its way.”

Asked by the B.M.C. why she was certain that it was Sehjalal who was behind the commander’s call, Baite said, “Who else could it have been? The group wouldn’t have known I existed if Sehjalal hadn’t asked it to get involved. What interest in my case could it have had?”

Although the name of this group and of the commander who threatened Baite are known to our Newsletter, B.M.C. officials have asked us not to divulge them. Both the man and the group are dangerous and unpredictable, they said. The group’s stronghold is the Churachandpur district of Tuibong, in which Sarah Baite lived at the time of her daughter’s rape. That, indeed, was why Sehjalal turned to it.

A resumé of the last two weeks in Sarah Baite’s life makes matters clearer:

January 11: Sarah files an FIR, a First Information Report, with the police in which she details the circumstances of her daughter’s rape and gives the name of its perpetrator, a member of the B’nei Menashe community now living in Israel.

January 12: Sarah is summoned to a hearing by the Village Authority of Tuibong. The Authority’s headman, Satkhohao, had sought to arrange a reconciliation between her and the rapist when her daughter’s case was brought before him in 2016 after Sarah was pressured into not going to the police. At the January 12th meeting, at which Sehjalal and the faction commander are also present, Satkhohao asks Sarah why, despite the agreement reached in 2016, she decided to go the police after all. Sarah explains her reasons. That same day, after the hearing, Sehjalal Kipgen phones her several times, threatening her with K.N.O. retaliation if she does not withdraw her FIR.

January 13: The Village Authority meets again in Sarah’s absence. It rules in her favor and informs her that it has no objection to what she has done.

January 14: Sarah files a second FIR against Sehjalal, accusing him of intimidation.

January 20: The faction commander calls Sarah for the first time. In the week following the Village Authority’s January 14th decision, it would seem, he has been persuaded by Sehjalal not to abide by it.

January 24: Sarah receives a letter from Michael Freund, which she cannot read because she knows no English. She turns to officials of the B.M.C., who translate it for her and agree to translate her reply. Meanwhile, the faction commander continues to threaten her over the telephone. That evening she informs the B.M.C. that she is scared and is leaving Churachandpur the next day, without waiting to answer Freund’s letter. She will, she says, look for work in the rice fields in the countryside.

January 25: Sarah leaves Churachandpur in the morning without telling anyone where she is going.

No one knows when she will return. Michael Freund will have to wait for his answer until she does.

Sarah Baite Files Rape Charge In Face of Shavei Intimidation

(January 22) Bolstered by mention of her case on the floor of Israel’s Knesset by MK Miri Regev, and by the rallying to her side of many B’nei Menashe, Sarah Baite overcame her fears and went to the police on January 11 to file a complaint. In it she charged a fellow member of the B’nei Menashe community with close connections to the Manipur leadership of Shavei Israel with the 2016 rape of her then 8-year-old daughter.

Since the rape’s occurrence over five years ago, Baite, a 43-year-old widow and mother of three, has undergone heavy pressure not to file charges with the police. [See “Sarah Baite Tells Her Story” in our December 30 Newsletter.] Shortly after the incident took place, she was expelled from Churachandpur’s Beit Shalom synagogue, Shavei Israel’s Manipur headquarters, for allegedly appealing for help to a Gentile authority, the headman of the Churachandpur neighborhood of Tuibong in which she lived. (Each of Churachandpur’s many neighborhoods, all formerly independent villages, has a chief with quasi-legal powers.) Subsequently subjected to the additional punishment of being barred from Shavei Israel’s Aliyah lists, she wrote a letter in 2020 to Israel’s minister of immigration Pnina Tamano-Shata, pleading for intervention on her behalf. No answer from the ministry was received. In a December 22 Knesset debate with Regev on the subject of B’nei Menashe Aliyah [see our December 23 story, “Regev, Tamano-Shata, in Knesset Showdown”], Tamano-Shata claimed never to have seen Baite’s letter.

When Baite walked into the Crimes Against Women division of Churachandpur’s police station two weeks ago, she handed the officer on duty, a Sub-inspector in the department, a formal accusation that read (in keeping with its policy to date, our Newsletter is printing only the first letter of the accused’s name):

“I, the undersigned, would like to inform you that an individual, Mr. K--------, raped my daughter (8 years old at the time of the rape), at knifepoint at his residence, L. Semoul Village, at around 6 p.m. on 15th July when she was at his house playing with his children.

“I would like to request you to kindly investigate the matter and if possible book the culprit with the appropriate Indian penal code and serve us justice so that I and my daughter will live in peace.”

A police investigation will now be launched. While the accused rapist lives in Israel, having made Aliya under Shavei Israel’s auspices in 2018, witnesses able to testify to events surrounding the crime are still in Manipur. Moreover, Israeli law makes provision for an accused’s being tried in Israel if the country in which the crime was committed does not request extradition.

Sarah Baite (left) and Shlomo Sehjalal Kipgen (right)

On June 12, the day after her visit to the police station, Baite began receiving telephone calls from Shlomo Sehjalal Kipgen, Shavei Israel’s chief administrator in Manipur, threatening her that, “for your own good,” she had best withdraw her complaint. After several such conversations, Baite decided to record the next one. Translated from Kuki, here is a transcript of a section of it:

Shlomo Sehjolal Kipgen: It seems you’ve been a very active woman.

Sarah Baite: What have I done?

SSK: I’ve been hearing about you.

SB: What have you heard?

SSK: Oh, I don’t know. Nothing much. I went to the home of Satkhohao [the headman of Tuibong] and was told that you had been there.

SB: I went to his home twice, but he wasn’t in. Did you meet with him?

SSK: Yes, I met with him.

SB: Satkhohao was the headman where I used to live. He was the one who dealt with my case. That’s why I went to look for him now.

SSK: The matter will be discussed by the K. N.O. [the Kuki National Organization] tomorrow.

SB: The K. N. O. is discussing it?

SSK: Yes. They know there was an FIR [a “First Information Report,” i.e., a complaint] filed in your name at the police station.

SB: Oh.

SSK: You did go there, didn’t you?

SB: Yes, I did.

SSK: I thought the case was all over.

[The remainder of the conversation dealt with Sarah Baite’s 2016 expulsion from Beit Shalom.)

The Kuki National Organization referred to by Sehjalal Kipgen is a semi-underground body founded in 1988 with the aim of carving out a Kuki-majority state within the Indian Union and has an armed wing known as the K.N.A. or Kuki National Army. Exerting a powerful influence in Kuki-populated areas of Manipur, it is often turned to for settling intra-Kuki disputes and its decisions are expected to be obeyed. Most Manipur Kukis choose not to run afoul of it.

Clearly, Shavei Israel’s chief administrator in Manipur was seeking to frighten Sarah Baite into withdrawing her police complaint by letting her know that he had K.N.O. contacts that could endanger her. Baite, however, refused to be intimidated. Two days later, on January 14th, she returned to the police station with a new complaint, this time against Sehjalal Kipgen, that said in part:

“I, the undersigned, would like to inform you that an individual, Mr. Sehjalal Kipgen, has been harassing me on account of the FIR which I have lodged against my daughter’s rapist on 11th January at your office….I would like to request you to kindly take stern action against Sehjalal Kipgen so that my FIR is not swept under the carpet and I and my daughter are served justice according to the law of the land.”

Further developments can soon be expected.

“This Is The First Time That I Have Heard Of These Allegations”: Is He To Be Believed?

(January 23) In a dramatic announcement made over the B’nei Menashe Facebook site Menashe Hayom, Shavei Israel founder and chairman Michael Freund has professed shock at learning of the 2016 rape in Manipur of a B’nei Menashe child by a fellow member of the community.

Michael Freund’s Facebook post.

“This is the first time,” Freund declared, “that I have heard of these allegations and if there is any truth to them, they are simply horrifying.”

“Given the seriousness of these accusations,” Freund went on in his Facebook post, “I cannot remain silent, and I am writing to you, the leaders of the community, in both Israel and India, to request that you please send me a full and detailed account as soon as possible in order to clarify what occurred.”

Can Michael Freund really never have heard prior to this week of the rape of the eight-year-old? “There are really only two possibilities,” says Yitzhak Thangjom, executive director of Degel Menashe. “Either Freund is lying, or else he is living on the moon.”

The case of Sarah Baite and her daughter, Thangjom told our Newsletter, should have come to Michael Freund’s attention in the summer of 2020 when Sarah asked Degel Menashe to forward to Israel’s minister of immigration and absorption Pnina Tamano-Shata an English translation of a letter she had written to her.

Sarah Baite.

“In late August of that year,” says Thangjom, “I personally handed Sarah’s letter, which told the story of her daughter’s rape and Shavei Israel’s attempted silencing of it, to Almog Moscowitz, a senior aide at the ministry, with the request that he pass it on to Tamano-Shata along with many other complaints against Shavei. Then, afraid that it might get lost among so many documents, I emailed it to Moscowitz separately in early September. It was understood that he would convey it not only to the minister but to Michael Freund and Shavei as well.”

Thangjom says he can only assume that this was done. But even if Moscowitz was derelict in his duty, he says, “Freund should already have known about the rape of Sarah Baite’s daughter two years earlier, in 2018.” That, he states, was when Ohaliav Haokip, today General Secretary of Manipur’s B’nei Menashe Council, sent an 18-page letter to Freund, via Laura Ben-David, Shavei Israel’s Director of Marketing, detailing the many flagrant offenses of Shavei’s Manipur leadership.

From Ohaliav Haokip’s letter to Michael Freund.

An entire page of this letter, with photographs of Sarah Baite and her daughter’s alleged rapist, was prominently devoted to the incident. “It’s highly unlikely,” says Thangjom, “that Ben-David failed to transmit such a serious and damning letter to Freund, even though Haokip never received an answer. I don’t know whether Michael Freund didn’t think it worth responding to or whether he simply threw it in the trash without reading it.”

And yet, Thangjom asks, even if Sarah Baite’s story failed to reach Michael Freund by means of either Almog Moscowitz or Laura Ben-David, is it conceivable that Shavei Israel’s chairman was not aware in the past month of the December 23 debate in Israel’s Knesset between MK Miri Regev and Minister of Immigration Pnina Tamano-Shata, in which Regev accused Shavei, among other things, of covering up rape?

Regev and Tamano-Shata in Knesset.

“The YouTube video of the debate went viral among the B’nei Menashe,” Thangjom says. “It had over 2,500 viewers. Can it be that the whole B’nei Menashe community knew about it and that only Michael Freund didn’t? If he’s telling the truth, it can only mean that he isn’t remotely in touch with the community that his organization is supposed to be serving. In that case, I suggest that Shavei Israel find itself a new chairman. And I also have a suggestion for Freund regarding his appeal for ‘a full and detailed account’ of what happened to Sarah Baite and her daughter. Let him begin by reading what Ohaliav Haokip wrote to him in 2018. If he no longer has a copy of it, I’ll be glad to provide him with one.”