Why a ‘Black Act’ Needs To Go

By Patricia Mukhim

The debate on the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act has always been trapped in a binary of “for and against”. Army generals are pitted against those who live under the shadow of the Act in the Northeast and Jammu and Kashmir. Other Indians do not seem to want to engage in this problematic discourse. Those who believe the Act should be repealed and make their views public are termed “over-ground sympathisers of militant outfits”.

This is akin to the post-9/11 war cry from George Bush – those who are not with us (meaning, in attacking Iraq) are against us. Bleeding heart patriots like Arun Jaitley believe the Act should remain in all “disturbed” areas because to withdraw it would be “political ingratitude”. Jaitley has not lost any family to the Act. He does not know the humiliation of a body search, or of his home being violated and members of his family being subjected to rough treatment “on mere suspicion”.

Army honchos argue till they are blue in the face that the AF(SP)A is meant to be used with responsibility. Was that not how the Prevention of Terrorism Act was meant to be used, too? But wasn’t it misused and abused?

Until it was thought fit to be reviewed? So why is the AF(SP)A sacrosanct? Let’s get real here. How can a force trained to be absolutely ruthless and unforgiving with the enemy be asked to tone down its muscle because they are fighting their own people?

This simply does not work! Let us also remind ourselves that the Act was first used in 1958 to quell what was at the time coined “Naga secessionism”. But today the Nagas are engaging with the government of India and have gradually toned down their demands for “sovereignty”.

Things on the ground have changed but our rulers desire to hang on to a colonial Act because they can’t think of a better way of tackling internal dissensions. Indeed, it is a national shame that a country with a 5,000-year-old civilisation, a country that has experienced the pangs of repressive foreign rule, a country that has produced a Gandhi for the world, should adopt a draconian colonial law to suppress its own people long after the colonial masters have left this soil. That its Army generals and the country’s defence minister should continue to defend the Act is, indeed, pathetic.

The AF(SP)A draws its lifeblood from the Rowlatt Act enacted by the Rowlatt Commission on 10 March 1919 to curb the seditious tendency of Indians. It allowed the then British government absolute power and authority to arrest people and keep them in prison without any trial if they were suspected of being terrorists. As can be expected, all movements aimed at ousting the British from India were termed “seditious” and freedom fighters were equated with terrorists despite Gandhi’s avowed path of non-violence. Naturally, this vicious piece of legislation earned the infamous nomenclature of a “Black Act” even while Indians across the country revolted in protest against it.

While the protests in Delhi were more subdued, in Amritsar the protesters became agitated because two front-ranking Congress leaders, Dr Satya Pal and Dr Saifuddin Kitchlew, were arrested and taken to an unknown destination (in the same way many Kashmiris are made to disappear). A public meeting at Jallianwala Bagh on 13 April 1919 was where the Rowlatt Act bared its fangs. A peaceful meeting attended by women and children was construed to be a conspiracy against the British. The infamous Brigadier-General Dyer entered the park, shut the gates to prevent people from exiting, and then ordered his troops to fire at the crowd. This lasted 10 minutes. Sixteen hundred rounds were fired indiscriminately. This horrific crime was committed on the plea that Indians had no right to protest, not even non-violently. The Jallianwala Bagh massacre claimed more than 1,000 lives and left at least 2,000 people injured.

In 1935, the Rowlatt Act and other repressive laws were sought to be diluted following largescale protests. But the Indian Freedom Movement had begun to gain momentum and the British sense of desperation was evident. To crush the 1942 Quit India Movement, the British enacted the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Ordinance, 1942.

British records reveal that this Ordinance was intended to be used as an instrument for furthering British imperialism. The AF(SP)A is simply a carbon copy of the 1942 British law and is as draconian and potent as the law enacted by an alien power. If the Act were effective, insurgency would have been contained only within the Naga Hills. The fact that it has replicated itself in nearly all the seven states tells us that the Act is a failure and needs to be reviewed immediately. State terror unleashed on the people of Nagaland in the late ’50s and early ’60s is, to the people of that state, no less traumatic than Hitler’s Auschwitz agenda. The largescale burning of Naga villages and crops and the brutality with which the men were handled and women raped is a saga that India should be ashamed of. The Nagas, after all, are as Indian as the soldiers who wreaked the utmost cruelty upon them.

This is where the AF(SP)A becomes indefensible. How can you have a law that allows an Indian Army NCO the right to shoot to kill based on mere suspicion and to claim that it is necessary to do so to “maintain public order”.

What makes the Act so offensive is that it gives such overriding powers to Armymen to shoot, arrest, search individuals and homes on mere suspicion and on the plea of “aiding the civil administration”. Over the years the AF(SP)A has been identified with arbitrary detention, torture, rape, looting by security personnel and, in the case of Jammu and Kashmir and Manipur, the unexplained disappearances of alleged terrorists or their relatives. Can an enlightened democracy such as ours continue to have such cruel laws in place without allowing for a review?

The standard argument trotted out by Army bigwigs is that extraordinary circumstances demand extraordinary laws. But insurgency in this country is old enough to have brought forth more creative ways of dealing with the issue and without the need to use the Army on a continued basis. The Army, as has been oft argued, is best left to deal with an external enemy. Let the soldiers reserve their brutality and sheer might to tackle India’s enemies, not other Indians.

The latest debate on the Act vis-à-vis Kashmir appears to be posited not so much on its repressive facets but on the political expediency to bail out Omar Abdullah. Why do so many hearts in Delhi beat with empathy for Kashmir while the voices in a region that has faced the worst brunt of the AF(SP)A are completely blacked out? And mind you, the North-east has shown by example that it has the strength of character to raise a non-violent protest against the Act in the person of Irom Sharmila, who completes her 10th year of fasting this November.
Does this count for nothing in the average Indian psyche? Do we want people in some parts of the country to live without some of the rights enshrined in the Constitution? Which is more sacrosanct – the AF(SP)A or the Constitution? Let us also not forget that there are other parts of this country that are as violence prone as the North-east and Jammu and Kashmir. So the Act truly has no legs to stand on!

The writer is editor, The Shillong Times, and can be contacted at patricia17@rediffmail.com