Whether it is the killing of Inspector General of Manipur Police T Thangthuam recently, whose cavalcade inadvertently walked into a trap laid by a local insurgency group or the nude protest by half a dozen women last year in Imphal demanding scrapping of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act 1958, (AFSPA) the target in Manipur has always been the Army for almost two decades now.
Taking cognizance of the hue and cry, the Central Government had, last year, set up a committee under a High Court Judge to look into various powers of the AFSPA. The committee submitted its report some time back.
Tucked in a remote North-East corner of India bordering Myanmar, Manipur, one of the smaller states of India, has been the heartland of separatist movement in the North-East for more than twenty years. It has almost 30 insurgent groups of various hues accounting for approximately 5,000 insurgents who are armed to the teeth. In their arsenal, they boast of latest weapons like the deadly Rocket Propelled Grenade launchers, latest Light Machine Guns, M-16 Chinese Rifles, AK series rifles and even the artillery guns. Pakistani Intelligence Agency ISI is very helpful to them as also the Bangladesh Army.
The main source of income for these insurgent groups in Mainpur is extortion. Be it the Chief Secretary of the State, Director General of Police or the Cabinet Minister, everybody has to pay a portion of their salary to the insurgents. For every development work sanctioned in the state a certain percentage must be deposited for the cause of insurgency. How much these varied insurgent groups are really interested in the welfare of the local population as against their own gun culture is anybody’s guess.
{{/usCountry}}The main source of income for these insurgent groups in Mainpur is extortion. Be it the Chief Secretary of the State, Director General of Police or the Cabinet Minister, everybody has to pay a portion of their salary to the insurgents. For every development work sanctioned in the state a certain percentage must be deposited for the cause of insurgency. How much these varied insurgent groups are really interested in the welfare of the local population as against their own gun culture is anybody’s guess.
{{/usCountry}}Another unwritten law of these terrorist groups is that any IAS or IPS officer who is not a Mainpuri is so terrorised that no outsider gets posted to Manipur if he can help it.
A long porous border with Myanmar lends a helping hand to smuggling business especially of narcotics kind in which a large percentage of population also dips in. Moreh, a town located on Manipur’s border with Myanmar is the hub centre of all these activities. Recently there has even been a demand by women protester groups in Manipur for removal of 24 Assam Rifles, a Para Military force Battalion commanded by Army officers located at Moreh, to be removed from there.
The only road block to this free-for-all situation in Mainpur is the Army deployed there and the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, 1958 which confers upon the Army, powers to arrest a person without warrant, fire upon and even cause death to any person working in contravention of law and order and destroy any arms dump or shelter or training centre of the insurgents. No prosecution suit or other legal proceedings can be initiated against any Armed Forces’ personnel functioning under this Act without prior sanction of the Central Government.There are suitable checks and balances. Any person arrested by the Army under this Act must be handed over to the civil police within 72 hours.
Besides, the Army can only function under this Act once things have really gone out of control of the civil administration and the local Government has declared the entire area disturbed. In other words Army is called in only as a last ditch effort by the local government. Further, this Act unlike other legal provisions in India is not a colonial legacy but was brought in force full eight years after India got its independence with due thought and consideration. At that time whole of erstwhile Assam was in turmoil with full-fledged insurgency going on in Nagaland, Mizoram and adjoining areas.
The AFSP Act, 1958 has withstood the test of time admirably. It was instrumental in curbing the insurgency and bringing in normalcy in Mizoram, Nagaland, Punjab, Assam, Arunanchal Pradesh and Tripura in the last four decades gone by. For the last fifteen years Army is fighting the Pakistan sponsored proxy war in the State of J&K under a variant of this Act only. In 1997 the Supreme Court upheld this Act in a PIL filed (Naga People Movement vs Union of India) against it.
To check the excesses under this Act, Army on its own has been training its personnel on Human Rights, an effort which was praised by no less an organization than the Human Rights Commission of India in its 2001-2 Annual Report. Since 1990, a total of 1380 human rights violation cases have been reported against Army out of which 65 have been found correct and 135 Army personnel’s have been punished.
The modus operandi being employed by the local secessionist groups in Manipur is to provoke Army and exploit the local media. By asking for scrapping of the AFSP Act 1958 and not demanding removal of the Army these insurgent groups through the medium of protests by local population aim to defang the Army and make it as ineffective as the local civil police. Surely this is a dangerous ploy and needs to be nipped in the bud. In the final analysis one does not kill the goose, which lays the golden eggs. Any tinkering with AFSP Act 1958 at this juncture is not advisable when the entire North-East is on the boil.