For the peoples of the border regions of the northeast and Kashmir, Indian citizenship thus confers not the rights and privileges of citizenship in a democracy, but conversely the full force of repressive laws which deprive them of basic human rights and liberties. The moment of Independence in 1947 ironically became the moment of the denial of the basic human right of self-determination to the peoples of these borderlands—now home to more than 57 million people according to the 2011 census—who all had distinct histories, identities and notions of what they wanted to do with their own futures. Their aspirations drowned in the righteous narrative of Indian nationhood and nation-building, which viewed cultural difference as dangerous, independent political activity as treason, and the demand for self-determination as secession. The long and continuing history of military interventions began with the Nagas in 1953, and is still far from over as the newly independent nation saw itself–and to some degree still sees itself–as the rightful inheritor of the territories and concerns of the British empire in South Asia. In Manipur, as in Kashmir, years of military rule and political repression buried local aspirations for democracy, constitutionalism and self-rule.
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India’s hidden wars of counterinsurgency, are coeval and coterminous with the sixty-four years of Indian independence and cannot be dismissed as temporary lapses from democratic rule. They represent a consistent policy for dealing with the religious and ethnic minorities who inhabit the northeast borderlands. That these policies have rarely been challenged—despite the existence in India of a free press, an independent judiciary and thriving civil society institutions—speaks of a consensus in Indian society that cuts across political lines. Indian acquiescence in the maintenance of authoritarian rule in the border regions overlooks the very real danger that the principle of absolute power will not remain confined there, but has in fact already moved to the Indian heartland, as a method for dealing with tribal and agricultural populations who stand in the way of “economic development.”
The full story of abuses under AFSPA will likely never be told; those remembered by the Manipuris, the Nagas, the Kashmiris and others are unknown. A recent booklet put together by the Campaign for Peace and Democracy (Manipur) on the Manipuri experience under AFSPA brings together a remarkable collection of documents: debates in the Indian Parliament on AFSPA with nearly unanimous support for unchecked military power; letters from the first Home Minister of independent India, Sardar Patel, to Nehru which record Patel’s view of the inhabitants of northeastern states as untrustworthy on account of “Mongoloid” sympathies; the destruction of villages and crops by the Indian army, torture, forced labor, exile, rape and the haunting letter written to her boyfriend by Chanu Rose, a young woman who committed suicide after she was gang-raped by Indian army officers in 1974. Together they evoke the continuous struggle by the people of Manipur for a life of peace and dignity. It shows how military violence, intended to terrorize a population into submission, has achieved the opposite. In this compendium, memory and lived experience merge to produce a resolve to end state terror and the political conditions that support it.
Indifference and silence, within and outside India, have been the strongest weapons supporting these policies. After generations of silence, the stories of abuse and violence in Kashmir and Manipur are finally being told. They have struggled to gain attention in India where the typical reaction is denial, boredom, self-pity and justification. Abroad the international community remains entranced by what anthropologist Cynthia Mahmood has called “an Alice in Wonderland” image of the country’s mystic pacifism. In much political commentary on South Asia, Pakistan is derided and dismissed as a failed state. It remains to be recognized that the success of the Indian state in controlling border regions through military force and in covering the traces of its violence makes it a danger to those it claims as its citizens and to regional peace and stability.
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More here.