Opinions- Manipur's Battle Is India's Battle

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Manipur's Battle Is India's Battle
By Dipankar Bhattacharya
Manipur is witnessing an unprecedented mass upsurge. Sixty-two years after the original Quit India movement, the spirit of the freedom movement seems to have truly come alive in this North-eastern State. Indeed, Manipur is fighting for freedom- freedom from the draconian military rule that the Indian State has imposed on this State for the last four and a half decades. Manipur is one of those Indian provinces where the armed forces enjoy special powers and the people are thus subjected to a special misery to live permanently at the mercy of the army in a supposedly free and democratic country. When the Assam Rifles jawans abducted the thirty-one year old Manorama Devi from her house, raped, tortured and killed her, and then threw away her brutalized body, they were merely going through the motions of a routine exercise that the security forces have been told is both their right and duty. Yes, this is what the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act is all about. And they do it in the name of maintaining ‘public order’. The only plea the army has for meting out this treatment to Manorama is that she was an activist of the PLA. Under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, the army can act merely on the basis of suspicion and it enjoys complete immunity from the law of the land. It was therefore, all routine - perfectly ‘legal and constitutional’ - for the army, but the women of Manipur chose to challenge this routine. In the past, the women of Manipur have waged several brave battles against colonial rulers, battles that have become famous in Manipur’s history as ‘Nupi Lan’ or Women’s war. In a spirited act of protest, on 15 July a group of women reached the Assam Rifles headquarters in Imphal, took off their clothes and unfurled banner that screamed "Indian Army Rape Us" and "Indian Army, Take our Flesh". As subsequent events have proved, it was not one of those fancy protests aimed at making just a visual statement. This was merely the beginning of one of the greatest mass movement in ‘free’ India against the Indian Army and the Indian State. The people of Manipur are not demanding merely posthumous justice for Manorama. They know what the army did to Manorama was not an accident or aberration. It was routine and could have happened with anybody. They are therefore demanding an end to the AFSPA itself. This Act was passed by Parliament in 1958 after a debate that lasted only seven hours. Like many other features of the Indian State, this Act too is a relic from the colonial era which has been preserved and reinforced by the post-colonial State. And like most other draconian laws, it was also mooted as a temporary measure with highly restricted applicability. But now it has become a permanent weapon of the Indian State to defend ‘public order’ in any area it considers ‘disturbed’. Introduced for Assam and Manipur, over the years the Act has been applied virtually in the entire North-East, Punjab, Jammu and Kashmir and even Andhra Pradesh. The AFSPA is the mother of all black laws in India. When the Act was legislated in 1958 to ‘combat’ insurgency there was only the Naga movement in the North-East. Over the forty-five years the Act has been in force, it has only contributed to the rise of more and more insurgent outfits in the region. While parliamentary democracy requires the army to be kept away from the tasks of internal policing and administration, the AFSPA virtually introduces military rule in a democratic garb. Manipur alone has witnessed a series of massacres and ‘disappearances’. The Army itself says that till date it has had to punish 66 of its men in the North-east as they were found guilty of excesses even though it asserts that only 25 of the 451 complaints received were found valid in its internal scrutiny. The fighting people of Manipur and especially the brave sisters of Manorama and Sharmila (who has been on a protest fast since November 6, 2000) deserve all our support and solidarity for their exemplary courage and determination. The Central Government’s response to the Manipur agitation has of course been typically arrogant. Incidentally, Manipur at the moment is ruled by a coalition (Secular Progressive Alliance led by the Congress and backed by the CPI) which is quite akin to the UPA combination at the Centre. The Centre is therefore also trying every trick to browbeat the State Government and prevent it from recommending a withdrawal of the Act from the State. On the eve of the fifty-seventh anniversary of our freedom from colonial rule, let all of us join the fighting people of Manipur in demanding an end to draconian laws. There can be no place for black laws like AFSPA, TADA or POTA in a democracy. Courtesy: ML Update * The article was published sometime during the upheaval after the 'Killing of Thangjam Manorama' by Assam Rifles personnel. * This article was made available by The Poor People's Production Rangers, Kangleipak
(Courtesy: The Sangai Express)

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