Northeast up in arms against AFSPA
- The People's Chronicle Editorial :: December 11, 2021 -

THE Union home minister Amit Shah admitted in the Parliament that the Mon district firing incident was a case of mistaken identity, charges being levelled by both villagers and parliamentarians that the perpetrators attempted to hide the victims' corpses and change their attires into combat fatigues deepen the suspicion that the innocent civilians were about to be branded as militants.

Narrating the sequence of events, Amit Shah had told the Lok Sabha two days after the incident that the Army had received information on the movement of insurgents in Mon and '21 Para Commando' unit had laid an ambush.

As per his account, probably based on inputs by army authorities, a vehicle was signalled to stop but it tried to speed away subsequently resulting in the security forces opening fire suspecting the presence of insurgents in the vehicle.

However, official version of the incident is being challenged by both lawmakers and civil society organisations.

Consequent to news reports based on accounts of local eye witnesses that the military personnel involved in the botched ambush nearly succeeded in covering up intelligence failure and in branding the coal miners as dispensable insurgents, there has been growing disenchantment in the entire northeast region over devaluing worth of the indigenous communities.

Amid organisations in the northeast demanding befitting action against those responsible for the death of the innocent civilians, Congress MP Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury accused the Home Minister of misleading the Lok Sabha while Nagaland chief minister Neiphiu Rio categorically stated that the December 4 firing by the security forces that left 14 civilians killed and 30 others injured, was misuse and abuse of the Armed Forces (Special Power) Act, 1958.

That the Mon incident is being viewed as fallout of unbridled power granted to the security forces could be gauged from the Nagaland government deciding to hold a special session of the Assembly on December 20 to discuss and pass a resolution for repealing the AFSPA.

Regardless of Neiphiu Rio showing firm resolve to see the end of the pro-military law and statesmanship by stating that it is the time to defeat violence in a non-violent manner and asking the people to shun violence, students and rights organisations in the region are likely to take the anti-AFSPA agitation to its logical end this time around.

With the Mon incidents uniting the indigenous communities in the region in demanding repeal of the AFSPA, which everybody sees as bringing only pain and suffering, it seems that the northeast will remain restive if any further attempt is made to justify the killing of innocent civilians rather than the government doing the needful to bring the perpetrators to justice.

In the backdrop of the intense campaign for diluting the unbridled constitutional power granted to the security forces to contain insurgency movement in the northeast, the few options left vis-à-vis demand for scrapping the AFSPA is either for the policy makers to ignore the outcries and hope for the situation to wane with the passage of time or the military schemers to adopt new tactics based on a combination of cautious crackdowns and minimal harm to civilians.

The army authorities should also acknowledge the fact that when insurgents are slain in genuine encounters then there would be no public outcries anywhere in the region but when harm done to law abiding citizens then the situation would naturally be volatile.