Assuring life to the lifeless
- Hueiyen Lanpao Editorial :: April 30, 2014 -

In the latest recommendation that has come from yet another United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC)-mandated special representative of the Secretary-General; Rashida Manjoo, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, has asked the Government of India to repeal Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (or AFSPA, in short) from North eastern States and the Armed Forces (Jammu and Kashmir) Special Powers Act from Jammu & Kashmir ‘as a matter of urgency’ so as to ensure that criminal prosecution of members of the Armed Forces involved in crime against women in these two trouble-torn regions of the country is free from legal barriers. Of course, this recommendation for repeal of AFSPA, which was made among others in her 22-paged final report on the visit to India (mission to India) from April 22 to May 1 in 2013, may not be any surprise to anyone as Rashida has all along been very critical of such legislations that ‘violate international laws India has and ratified’ by protecting members of Armed Forces from effective prosecution in non-military courts for human rights violations committed against civilian women among others.

She strongly felt that “The consistent violence under AFSPA indicates India’s violation of international laws” and the failure to respond and prevent violence is the Government’s inability and /or unwillingness to acknowledge and address the core structural causes of violence against women.

Rashida’s area of concern and mission may be limited to just violence against women and the implication of such violence on the effective exercise of human rights by women, but the heat of AFSPA is something no one, including the high and mighty, in the place of its imposition have been able to escape for the last many years in the North eastern States including Manipur.

So, before Rashida, Christof Heyns, another UN’s Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions who was on a fact finding mission to India earlier in March 2012, had also made it clear that laws like AFSPA which allows the State to override rights of the people in areas proclaimed as ‘disturbed’ should have no role to play in a democracy and so the repeal of such laws will not only bring the domestic law more in line with the international standards but also send out a powerful message that instead of a military approach the Government of India is committed to respect the life of all people in the country.

However, all these recommendations and suggestions have only fallen on deaf ears of the Governments both at the Centre and the AFSPA-affected States.

In such a backdrop, the assurance given by President of India Pranab Mukherjee during his 3-hour long visit to Manipur on Tuesday (interestingly, the same day on which the final report of Rashida’s ‘mission to India’ came out) that the Government of India and the State Government of Manipur are determined and duty bound to ensure dignity with equal rights and opportunities to every Manipuri was nothing short of a scene lifted from a play of Theatre of the Absurd - full of nonsensical dialogues and meaningless actions.

In other words, assuring life to the lifeless.

Mr President is forgetting the fact that it is AFSPA that takes away the same dignity, equal rights and opportunities that he is assuring and as long as it remains, some section of the people in this supposedly great democratic country would continue to struggle for survival under the menacing shadow of AFSPA every day of their life.