By all accounts, the tears have dried up, the fury has ebbed and the remote hills of Mon, Nagaland, have turned somnolent again. The families of the 15 people who died in a botched operation by an Army special forces unit and the ensuing violence have been promised compensation. The Nagaland government has also ordered a probe by a special investigating team that is mandated to submit its report within a month. Significantly, the Nagaland Cabinet has decided to support the demands of the influential Konyak Union, an apex body of the Konyak tribe that mainly inhabits Mon. The Konyak Union has demanded that the Army men be booked and punished “under applicable civil court”.
But there is doubt over this as the Army has also instituted a court of inquiry, reportedly headed by a Major General. If the Army decides to try the case, it prevents any police jurisdiction and a trial by a civil court appears remote, especially as military officials enjoy protective cover from prosecution because of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. The Machil encounter in Jammu and Kashmir in 2010 is a case in point. Three porters were taken to an Army camp near the Line of Control and killed. After the police chargesheeted 11 Army personnel, including the battalion’s commanding officer and two majors, the case went to the High Court, which ordered an Army trial and this ended the police jurisdiction over the case. Although six Army men were found guilty and given life sentences, an armed forces tribunal later suspended the sentence, allowing the convicts to walk free and robbing the families of the porters of justice.
The Pathribal case of 2000 followed almost the same path. The Army’s Rashtriya Rifles claimed to have killed five foreign militants responsible for the Chittisinghpora massacre in which 36 Sikhs were gunned down by militants. The five later turned out to be innocent locals. After a long trial, the CBI chargesheeted five Army men, who challenged it in the courts. The Supreme Court upheld the challenge and the Army was allowed to hold its own trial. Although the Nagaland police have filed an FIR in Mon, it appears to be following the Machil and Pathribal trajectories as a parallel probe by the Army is likely to preclude a civil trial as demanded by the Konyak Union.
While the results of the SIT and Army probes will be keenly awaited, it is illustrative to note the change in mindset that has shaped the government’s responses to insurgency and armed groups over the years. Introducing the Armed Forces Special Powers Bill in Parliament in 1958, then Union home minister Govind Ballabh Pant told the Lok Sabha that “certain misguided sections of the Nagas” were involved in “arson, murder, loot, dacoity, etc.”. He said in view of these incidents, it had become necessary “to adopt effective measures for the protection of the people”. Implicit in this statement was that those who had picked up the gun in the Naga hills to launch India’s longest running armed movement had been misled, could be reformed and shown the right path as these men were our own.
But in sharp contrast to Pant’s accommodative approach, a strong militarism seems to form the foundational base of today’s response to insurgency and militancy. An eye for an eye or a bullet for a bullet appears to be the guiding principle in the troubled regions with immense faith in the power of the gun to eliminate the scourge of armed rebellions. Such an approach was illustrated in the Centre’s stand before the Supreme Court in 2016 in a PIL filed by the Extra Judicial Execution Victim Families Association alleging 1,528 fake encounter deaths in Manipur in the last decade. While Pant had described the Naga insurgents as “misguided”, the Centre in written submissions and affidavits told the top court during the hearing of the Manipur PIL that “militants, terrorists or insurgents” were “enemies” of the state who needed to be dealt with as such. Delivering the judgment in the case in 2017, Justices Madan B Lokur and U U Lalit pointed out that the Centre had emphasised during the hearing “that a militant or terrorist or insurgent is an ‘enemy’ within the definition of the Army Act, 1950, and it is the bounden duty of all Army personnel to act against a militant or a terrorist or an insurgent while he is deployed in a ‘disturbed area’ under (the) AFSPA… the armed forces are entitled while maintaining public order in a disturbed area to cause the death of an enemy.” The judges also noted that according to the Centre, an insurrection against the government is a “form of war” that needed an iron-fisted response.
This militaristic approach to dealing with insurgents and armed groups leaves little space for understanding the underlying causes of an armed struggle. On the contrary, such a strategy has the potential to feed reckless misadventures such as the one witnessed in Mon. Unfortunately, this militarism has a strong support structure in today’s pervasive milieu of hyper-nationalism and exhibitionist patriotism. This exhibitionism manifests itself in Twitter profiles with a ‘India first’ proclamation and an emoji of the tricolour. Any patriotic deviance invites a backlash from nationalistic stormtroopers who are ready to consign the offenders to the depths of the Arabian Sea. The need is to lower the nationalistic rhetoric and view insurgency and its byproducts in perspective. The Mon incident has predictably renewed calls for the AFSPA’s repeal. The law’s defenders point to the 1998 Supreme Court judgment, which upheld its constitutionality and legality. But the top court did not go into the desirability and the merit of the law, an aspect the Justice B P Jeevan Reddy committee stressed while recommending its scrapping.
H Khogen Singh
Resident Editor, New Delhi, The New Indian Express
(khogensingh@newindianexpress.com)