'No time limit for AFSPA decision' : More than a license to kill
- The Sangai Express Editorial :: March 02, 2013 -
Jan Karwan, from Srinagar to Imphal for Repeal AFSPA at Imphal on October 27 2011 :: Pix - Bullu Raj
Basically a license to kill, the Armed Forces Special Powers Act is this and much more.
It is legal too, with the Supreme Court upholding its legal validity in the case filed by the Naga People's Movement for Human Rights many moons back.
Therefore the need to look at its continued imposition in the North East region and Jammu and Kashmir, beyond the ambit of merely giving extraordinary powers to the military.
An Act which was imposed to deal with extraordinary situation and by this very definition it should be clear from the continued imposition of the said Act for more than three decades that the situation in the North East and Jammu and Kashmir cannot be termed extraordinary.
An extraordinary situation should come within the understanding of a time frame, but when the situation warrants that the Act should continue for more than thirty years, then it is time to move beyond the mere understanding of this Act as an Army Act, but needs to be seen from the larger political perspective.
'No time limit for AFSPA decision' is the statement delivered by the Union Minister of State for Home Affairs.
Turn this observation on its head and it could well mean that there can be no time limit to the enforcement of this Act in the North East region and Jammu and Kashmir.
Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh flew down to Imphal in the winter of 2004 to announce the formation of the Justice Jeevan Reddy Commission to look into the provisions of the said Act and recommend its findings.
Close to nine years now and there is nothing to suggest that the Government of India is ready to act upon the recommendations of the said Commission.
Yet once again reinforcing the widely held notion that Commissions are nothing but time buying tactics with nothing to prove that it has the capability to produce anything concrete.
Something like a neuter gender, which is incapable of producing.
Irom Chanu Sharmila has been on a fast for more than ten years now, demanding the repeal of the said Act, after the Malom massacre of 2000.
Nearly nine years since the nude protest in front of Kangla, following the brutal killing of Th Manorama in 2004, and nothing yet to show that Delhi is ready to seriously look into the provisions of the Act and act upon the recommendations of the Justice Jeevan Reddy Commission.
It should be clear by now that the Act is something more than enabling the Army or the military to shoot and kill even on mere suspicion. It should be seen from a larger political perspective.
Using the military to achieve a political objective, waging war against the civil population in an undeclared state of war.
This mindset again came to the fore when the Government refused to entertain the proposal of the Justice JS Verma Committee that the immunity and impunity granted to security personnel under AFSPA be not invoked if they commit crime against women.
In other words, women in the North East and Jammu and Kashmir can be raped in the 'line of duty'. The chicken neck syndrome cannot be more complete than this.
There are enough material to demonstrate how the continued imposition of the Act has failed to contain the armed movement in the region and far from it, it should be clear that it has only succeeded in sowing the seeds of alienation.
An Act which is applicable to only the North East and Jammu and Kashmir and herein lies the need to understand and study the said Act from a larger political perspective.
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