[Assam] From Tehelka/Re: AFSPA

[Chan Mahanta]

CURRENT AFFAIRS
 
Pros & Cons
NEW AFSPA

But will that serve to assuage Manipuri anger and outrage?
Sankarshan Thakur

Illustrations: Anand Naorem
By sheer quirk of the manner in which the Rajya Sabha is composed, 
the Northeast has a prime minister. Strange to sound, but true. 
Manmohan Singh comes elected from Assam. Does that mean the region 
can expect special treatment? A little favour once in a while? Little 
evidence of that. The region has remained what it has under 
successive governments and prime ministers - ignored, exploited, 
beaten, off the map. Any hope that its fig-leaf of a claim to 
providing the country its prime minister will earn the region greater 
attention and understanding remains only a hope. Manmohan Singh's 
visit to those parts last week is perhaps the most recent proof of 
that. The prime minister went to Kangla in Manipur - perhaps the 
ugliest and most insistent symbol of state authoritarianism to the 
people of Manipur - and made uncertain noises about trying to give a 
more "human face" to the hated Armed Forces Special Powers Act 
(AFSPA). No question of abrogating it, no possibility that the 
government might even suspend its application for a while to see what 
happens, no quarter to those that have resorted to the extreme and 
the unprecedented in opposing it. A dozen Manipuri widows went 
protesting to the gates of the Kangla Fort naked a couple of years 
ago in a demonstration that shook the nation but not its government. 
Irom Sharmila has been on a six-year fast that will not end until the 
AFSPA is gone. The people of Manipur must think there is something 
severely wrong with the laws that govern them. But apparently not 
those that govern them. This, in a democracy. Only the other day, the 
prime minister rebuffed a suggestion from the Intelligence Bureau 
chief that lethal teeth need to be added to anti-terror laws - there 
are enough laws with enough teeth, make them work. Apparently, he 
isn't empowered with similar convictions about how his political home 
- the Northeast - is governed. Manipuris would tell you the AFSPA has 
not worked, it has only made the situation worse. There isn't one 
less underground group in the state since the AFSPA was imposed, 
there probably are more. But the prime minister's advisers tell him 
the opposite - perhaps it has not made things better, sir, though of 
that we can't be sure, but things would surely be much worse without 
the AFSPA, end it and lose the Northeast. That's what they tell him 
in New Delhi, or things to that effect. Here is a clash between the 
people and the security establishment of the state. And the people 
are being told, by their prime minister, no less, that efforts shall 
be made to make the law less harsh on them. In a democracy, that's 
hard to stomach.
Dec 16 , 2006