Image caption,

Glory's village was attacked and her father and brother were pulled away by the mob

By Divya Arya

BBC News, Manipur

Six months after they were stripped, paraded naked and allegedly gang raped by a mob in north-east India, two women, whose ordeal was made public in a viral video, talk to the BBC in their first face-to-face interview. They speak about living in hiding, their fight for justice and their call for a separate administration for their community.

Warning: This article includes descriptions of sexual violence.

At first, all I see is their lowered eyes.

Big black masks hide Glory and Mercy's faces and scarves cover their foreheads.

The two Kuki-Zomi women do not want to be seen. But they want to be heard.

Their ordeal was filmed and shared online. It is a disturbing watch. Less than a minute long, it shows a mob of men from the majority Meitei community in Manipur state walking around two naked women, pushing, groping them, and then dragging them into a field where they say they were gang raped.

"I was treated like an animal," says Glory, breaking down. "It was hard enough to live with that trauma, but then two months later when the video of the attack went viral, I almost lost all hope to continue living," she adds.