The rains were pounding down that night—March 30, 2017—at Digaldong village in Assam’s Chirang district. Khwrmdao Basumatary, in his mid-forties then, was getting ready to call it a day after making sleeping arrangements for Lucas Narzary, 30, and David Islary, 25, who had taken shelter at his house amid the downpour. It was then that a group of gun-toting security personnel barged into the house. He was dragged out of his house, his hands tied up and assaulted over suspicion that he was a member of the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB), an outlawed militant organisation waging war for a separate state to be carved out of Assam. He was let off only after his mother’s pleadings to the security personnel.
But Lucas and David were not that lucky. The two suspected NDFB cadres were taken away for “questioning” and their bullet-riddled bodies recovered the next day from a paddy field, not too far from Khwrmdao’s house. Security forces said they were killed in an “encounter”. But the official version soon fell apart. Rajnish Rai, a 1992-batch IPS officer who was then an Inspector General with the CRPF, filed an internal report that termed the incident a “fake encounter” by the combined team of the Indian Army, Assam Police, CRPF and Sasashtra Seema Bal (SSB) of two suspected militants of NDFB. Two months after Rai filed the report, he was transferred out of the Northeast.
Despite widespread protests in the Bodo belt of Assam, there was no inquiry into the serious allegations made in Rai’s 13-page report. The victims’ families too filed a police complaint over the killings of the two youth but they always knew that justice was going to be a long shot. In a state with a long history of insurgency, security forces have been getting away with human rights abuse and even alleged extra-judicial killings, with AFSPA providing the protective shield.
Anjali Daimari, a rights activist who has worked in Bodoland Territorial Region—an autonomous area administered by the Bodo plains tribe, and some other parts of Assam—said there was little hope of justice for victims’ families because such cases can never be tried in a civil court. “Numerous cases filed over Army atrocities are pending in various police stations. These cases are going nowhere because the Army cannot be brought to the civil court. So, we don’t know whether the guilty person gets punished or not. There are many rape cases lodged against them as well. When we protest, they say this case would be tried in a special court but no one knows what happens there,” Daimari told Outlook.
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Daimari leads the Bodoland Women Justice Forum, an organisation fighting for community rights, especially for Bodos. During the 34-year-long insurgency in the Bodoland Territorial Area, there have been several instances of alleged extra-judicial killings by security forces. Bodo insurgency ended with a peace accord between the NDFB(S) and the Centre in 2020.
But before the Bodo insurgency took off, other parts of Assam were already witness to several instances of security forces targeting civilians, often with tragic results. In 2006, soldiers opened fire on a group of people protesting the custodial death of a villager in Tinsukia district’s Kakopathar. At least 10 villagers were killed in the Army firing which was later described as Assam’s “Jallianwala Bagh massacre” by the outlawed United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), a militant secessionist outfit which is itself accused of targeting civilians during its more than two-decade-old existence.
The ULFA has long since ceased to be a potent force, with most of the cadres killed or captured in counter-insurgency operations and many coming overground over the years. Despite little militant activity in the state over the past several years, both the central and state governments have refused to lift the ‘disturbed area’ tag from it. Almost three months before the killing of 14 civilians by Assam Rifles in Nagaland’s Mon, the Assam government declared the entire state of Assam “disturbed” with effect from August 28. On September 11, the Act was extended to the entire state for another six months.
The move drew flak, given that both the state government and the Centre had signed two major peace agreements with ethnic rebel groups—the Bodo Accord and the Karbi Peace Accord. The move also went against chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma’s oft-repeated claims of peace returning to Assam since the BJP came to power in the state in 2016.
Khwrmdao Basumatary with his mother and son; (and) anti-AFSPA protest in Guwahati. (Photograph by Surajit Sharma)
On July 14, he claimed that since 2016, a total of 3,439 militants have surrendered in Assam. “Under the guidance of Prime Minister Narendra Modiji and Home Minister Amit Shahji, we have had a major achievement towards permanent peace in Assam. The last remaining cadres of UPRF/KNLF [Kuki groups] surrendered and handed over 17 weapons including four assault rifles to DIG and SP, Karbi Anglong (sic),” the chief minister tweeted.
However, on December 20, Sarma justified extension of the controversial act. “AFSPA or not cannot be a call of the government. It has to depend on the overall law and order situation of the state. Now suppose I withdraw (the Act), will that be reciprocated by the militant organisation?” Rights activists say that governments often take recourse to such lopsided arguments to justify imposition of AFSPA. However, they also point out that successive state governments led by different parties have resisted calls to repeal AFSPA or withdraw it.
Human rights activist Suhas Chakma, for one, feels that AFSPA has not helped tackle militancy in the region. “Militancy has been tackled through political dialogues. Insurgency in Tripura and Mizoram ended because of the peace agreements. There is no substitute for political processes and regional cooperation to tackle insurgency in the long run,” he says.
ULFA cadres at a camp. (Photograph by getty images)
Following the Mon incident, Assam has witnessed a groundswell of support for the repeal of AFSPA, with several students’ organisations leading a renewed agitation against the law. The Northeast Students’ Organisation (NESO), the apex body of students’ groups of the region, held demonstrations in Assam and other states demanding scrapping of the act. In Guwahati, top leaders of All Assam Students’ Union, a constituent of NESO, too, led a sit-in by demonstration. “The Centre should remember that there is a part of India beyond Calcutta, that is Northeast India. Attack on the people of Nagaland is an attack on the people of Assam,” AASU chief adviser Samujjal Bhattacharyya said. He added that the agitation against AFSPA will continue until the act is scrapped.
As expected, the government’s political rivals have also joined the repeal-AFSPA chorus. “We have been seeing the Army committing such excesses on innocent civilians in the Northeast region in the name of counter-insurgency operations,” said Akhil Gogoi, a vocal critic of the government and Raijor Dal MLA. Assam Congress president Bhupen Kumar Borah too made a case for withdrawing AFSPA, conveniently forgetting that his own party-led governments at the Centre and state had refused to either withdraw or repeal the act. While AFSPA has been in force for 63 years in Assam, the Congress was in power for almost 50 years in the state.
Lurinjyoti Gogoi, president of another opposition party, the Assam Jatiya Parishad (AJP) and Ashraful Hussain, the youngest MLA of Assam who represents the All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF), too, called out the security forces over the Nagaland killings. “Real justice for the victims would be ending this type of killings with impunity. There should be a collective voice from all sections against the draconian AFSPA which allows such impunity,” said the legislator. Veteran Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Hemen Das termed the incident “state terrorism”.
Rajeev Bhattacharya, a Guwahati-based journalist who has been writing on insurgency in south-east Asia, feels that “the government has developed an infatuation for AFSPA while the Army is always opposed to repealing the law”. The author of Rendezvous With Rebels: Journey to Meet India’s Most Wanted Men, added, “The Centre does assessments of the security scenario regularly, but it must be said that vital aspects are being missed out.”
In 1958, when the Nehru government introduced the proposed law in Parliament in view of the fast-deteriorating internal security situation in then undivided Assam, which included Nagaland, several MPs had made critical observations about the bill. Laishram Achaw Singh from Manipur had termed the act as “lawless” and said that AFSPA would only “harass innocent folk and deteriorate the situation”. Surandra Mohanty, an MP from Odisha, went a step further. “We want a free India. But we do not want a free India with barbed wires and concentration camps, where havildars can shoot at sight any man.”
More than six decades later, the Northeast continues to bleed as military jackboots trample upon civilians, and AFSPA shields even the most brutal assault on human life and dignity.
(This appeared in the print edition as "Back To Where It Began")
(Views expressed are personal)
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Syeda Ambia Zahan is a guwahati-based freelance journalist
