The Armed Forces Special Powers Act : The Lawlessness Of A Law
By Anshul Kumar Pandey
26 October, 2012
Countercurrents.org
The Armed Forces Special Powers Act is nothing but an arm twisting piece of legislation for state repression which needs to be repealed immediately
Despite being a state in the throes of modernization, the Indian law and law enforcement agencies have had a soft corner for its colonial legacy. Many of these colonial era laws have made a splash on the national scene recently, the most famous of them being the Sedition act of 1870 which was used to put India against Corruption cartoonist Aseem Trivedi behind the bars. It was also slapped on Booker prize winner and respected writer Arundhati Roy for her remarks on Kashmir as well as on eminent pediatrician Dr. Binayak Sen for his alleged links with Maoists. There are many other colonial era laws that the Indian state uses with depressing frequency to muzzle dissent within its borders.
However, the most draconian law that exists in the rulebook of the Indian state is a gem of its own creation. The Armed Forces Special Powers act was passed first through an ordinance in 1942, and was then polished and passed as an act in the parliament in 1958. Originally intended to apply only to the states of Assam and Manipur, the act was later extended in 1972 to cover all the seven states of the North East. In 1990, in the face of utter chaos, the act was also imposed on Jammu and Kashmir. Currently it is applicable in two districts of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Nagaland, Tripura and Jammu and Kashmir.
Contrary to what its name suggests, the act does not glorify the armed forces in the north east. Rather, it has over time reduced them and the law to an embodiment of much that is wrong with our internal security. Far from restoring order to the “disturbed” areas where it has been brought into effect, AFSPA has instead fuelled popular anger and discontent.
The brutality of the law is manifest from the examples of inhumane ruthlessness that it has helped produce. The sweeping powers that the act gives to armed force personnel in a “disturbed” area has thrown up blood curdling instances of rape, torture, extrajudicial and summary killings etc. Consider these examples.
On 2nd November 2000, as Sinam Chandramani and nine other civilians waited at a bus stop in Malom, the troops of 17 Assam Rifles, who had been attacked earlier in the day by “insurgents”, opened indiscriminate fire. The 1988 National Child Bravery Award winner was immediately killed along with all the other nine civilians. The reverberations of this gross atrocity were felt across the state and on 4th November, Irom Sharmila Chanu, a Grade IV Veterinary worker from the state started her indefinite fast to protest against the killings and to demand a repeal of AFSPA. Having spent more than 500 weeks on the fast, the Iron Lady of Manipur would complete 12 years of her protest this year, making it the longest hunger strike in the entire documented human history, with no signs of ending soon.
Later in July 2004, the body of a 32 year old woman named Thangjam Manorama was found riddled with bullets in Ngariyan Maring Village. She had been picked up by the personnel of 17 Assam Rifles (again) in the middle of the night for her alleged links with the People’s Liberation Army and had been brutally tortured and summarily executed. Bullets and wounds were found on her chest, on her buttocks and even in her vagina. Demanding a proper investigation into the circumstances leading to her death and punishment for her killers, Manorama’s family has refused to take her body and it lies, till date, in the morgue of Regional Institute of Medical Sciences in Imphal.
Manorama’s brutal execution brought the simmering discontent against the armed forces in the state on the surface. Major women groups across the state announced a 48 hour shutdown and brought life in the state to a grinding halt. In what turned out to be the most powerful protest against the law, hundreds of women protested in front of the headquarters of Assam Rifles naked, holding placards that read “Indian Army, Rape Us!”
The enormity of these crimes and the subsequent ignominy heaped upon the victim’s kith and kin can be gouged by the fact that the Home Ministry has consistently denied requests for sanction to prosecute army personnel believed to be involved in these crimes.
It is an irony that AFSPA is a legislative act for it violates both Indian as well as International Law. As pointed out by the South Asian Human Rights Documentation Centre, AFSPA runs afoul of Article 21 (Right to Life), Article 22 (Protection against arrest and detention), The Criminal Procedure Code, The Army Act etc. under the Indian constitution and International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, International Customary Law and International Humanitarian Law under the International Law.
However, for the “mainland” politicians of this country, who are pressurized only by the popular two minute fasts like that of Anna Hazare and are connected to the land of Chinese and Bangladeshi looking people through the “chicken neck” coverage in the mainstream media, this hypocrisy and lawlessness has taken a backseat in the favor of more appealing jingoist nationalism. AFSPA is in the interest of “national security”, they say, and national security is a sensitive issue which acts as a vacuum pump for the voices of disagreement. Sucked in this vortex of national security against human rights, individual concerns do not find much air to hold on to.
For a country that takes immense pride in the procedure and justice meted out by its judiciary, these glaring legal anomalies only serve to rake up more dirt on a legislation that gives powers even to a non gazette officer to shoot any person on mere suspicion. It is no wonder then, that in the Wikileaks cables the then Governor S.S. Sidhu is caught describing these north eastern states to the then American Consul General in Kolkata Henry Gardiner, as “more of a colony and less as a part of the Indian state”.
In March this year, Christopher Heyns, the UN Special Rapportuer on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions asked India to repeal the Armed Forces Special Powers act. For a country whose Prime Minister heeds foreign media and agencies than the domestic ones, this recommendation too has gone unheeded. In fact, the government has been sitting on the recommendations of a committee that it had itself appointed (Jeevan Reddy Commission) and which had also recommended a total repeal of the act. Despite having promised back in 2004, to replace the existing law with a more “humane” law, all that the people affected by AFSPA have got till now are empty words and death packed bullets.
Max Weber said that State has a monopoly on violence. While this dictum may hold true in the contemporaneous sense, the protests and fasts of people like Irom Sharmila have added more color to it by conveying that the state may have a monopoly on violence but the monopoly of resistance still lies with its free thinking citizens.
Anshul Kumar Pandey is a student of Political Science in Zakir Husain Delhi College, University of Delhi. He can be contacted at anshulkumarpandey [at] gmail [dot] com.
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