Scrap afspa says fake encounter order

Scrap afspa says fake encounter order

The army has court-martialled seven soldiers — a retired major general, two senior officers, and four of other ranks — to life imprisonment for a fake encounter in Assam in 1994 in which five youths were killed and labelled as militants. Even if the verdict comes 24 years after the killing, it is welcome. However, the sentence is subject to appeal. A life sentence awarded to assorted army men for killing three Kashmiri youth at Machchlis in 2010 — one so young that the killers had to paint a beard on his dead face to make him look older — was later suspended, and the accused were released on bail. These incidents show not so much that the army has an effective internal mechanism for checking high-handedness by its personnel as the need to scrap the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA), to restore to common people the rights of citizens that the law takes away from them.

The Assam finding comes in special circumstances. Fellow activists of those killed, all members of the All Assam Students’ Union, are ministers in the present BJP state government, one of them the chief minister. Such special circumstances do not attend on every fake encounter killing, either at the hands of the police or the army. The correlation of forces in India’s deeply unequal society is such that it is extremely difficult for an individual to fight back against violence and injustice by the state. Arbitrary violence by the police, at least, does not enjoy any legal protection. It is conceivable that justice can prevail in some cases. But AFSPA gives armed forces a statutory shield for arbitrary use of force against the country’s own citizens.

India needs to evolve as a democracy, as much as an economic and a strategic power. Undemocratic laws such as AFSPA should be removed from India’s statute book.