There is an ‘unbroken continuity’ between the colonial and post-colonial aspects of the State in South Asia, including the armed forces. That continuity is remarkably conspicuous in the way the North East is being envisioned. In the 1930s, describing what they called ‘permanent mark’ that would be left behind by the colonial presence in India, British historians Edward Thomson and G.T. Garratt wrote,

Whatever the future may hold, the direct influence of the West upon India is likely to decrease. But it would be absurd to imagine that the British connection will not leave a permanent mark upon Indian life. On the merely material side the new Federal Government [the Government of India recognized under the 1935 constitutional arrangements] will take over the largest irrigation system in the world…some 60,000 miles of metalled roads; over 42,000 miles of railways…scholastic institutions…a great number of buildings...An effective defensive system has been built up on its vulnerable North East frontier, it has an Indian army with century-old traditions, and a police force which compares favourably with any outside a few Western countries.

That the imagery of a ‘vulnerable’ region called the ‘North East’ (frontier) came together in the same sentence as that of the ‘Indian army’ and ‘police force’ as part of the ‘permanent mark’ left behind by the colonial presence is prophetic. Except for the fact that the post-colonial Indian State claims the region and its denizens as part of ‘we the people of India’ while simultaneously accusing them of having ‘no established loyalty or devotion to India’ from almost day one of the republic, the colonial imagery of the region continues in the post-colonial Indian State. And the fact that the AFSPA is a reinvention of the colonial Armed Forces (Special Powers) Ordinance, 1942, which was promulgated by the British Government to suppress the Quit India Movement, only serves as an uncanny reminder of the continuing colonial legacy. However, nothing anticipates the distinctly 'colonial' and ‘militaristic' character of the regime inaugurated in the region by the AFSPA in 1958 than the manner in which the controversial merger of Manipur was effected in 1949.

Manipur, a princely state bordering then-Burma, now Myanmar, was the first territory within South Asia to have a democratic legislature elected on the principle of universal adult suffrage. The Manipur Constitution Act came into force in 1947, and the position of the Maharaja (King) of Manipur became that of a constitutional monarch. Following this, the Manipur Legislative Assembly was constituted in 1948 as an organ of self-governing representative democracy.

At the time of the transfer of power in 1947, Manipur, like many other princely states, was party to a ‘stand still’ agreement with the British crown that would defer for the moment the delineation of its precise constitutional status vis-à-vis the two major states (India and Pakistan) that were due to emerge as successor states with the demise of the British Indian empire.

From August 1947 till September 1949, the state of Manipur functioned as a virtually autonomous entity, governed in its external relations by the provisions of the ‘stand still’ agreement. Following the decision by the Indian Dominion Government to ‘take over’ Manipur, based on strategic considerations, the newly independent Dominion of India effected the Manipur Merger Agreement with the Maharajah of Manipur on 21 September 1949. This was done by placing him under ‘house arrest’ and military custody in neighbouring Shillong, a city in what was then ‘undivided’ Assam, a province of the Indian dominion. The Merger ‘Agreement’ did not have the sanction of the Manipur Legislative Assembly, the constitutional sovereign in Manipur at the time, and the only political body at that time in all of South Asia to be based on universal adult suffrage. In other words, the Merger Agreement ignored the democratic will of the Manipuri people as expressed in the legislative assembly.

Subsequently, a battalion of the Indian army was sent to Manipur. The battalion arrived on 12 October 1949 in Imphal, the capital of Manipur; the Manipur Legislative Assembly was unceremoniously dissolved on 15 October 1949. Thus began 23 long years of direct bureaucratic rule of Manipur by New Delhi. A state with its own written constitution and a democratically constituted Legislative Assembly was transformed into a fiefdom of New Delhi. It was fated to remain so, governed by Chief Commissioners and Lt. Governors who were not accountable to the people of Manipur for almost a quarter of a century. In a sense, the post-colonial period of the post-1949 experience of Manipur was less than ‘post-colonial’ for a long time.

While there are other instances of ‘Merger Agreements’ being signed in situations of stress and duress (Jammu and Kashmir) as well as of military intervention (the ‘police action’ that ended the Nizam’s rule in Hyderabad in 1948), what makes the Manipur situation unique is the steamrolling of the ‘democratic institutions’ that the controversial merger represents. The irony of a state (India) which at that time aspired to be a democratic republic, but was not one yet, effectively undermining the foundations of an existing democratic state through a military manoeuvre makes the case of Manipur quite exceptional.

That all this was justified not by reference to the ‘will of the people’ of the territories concerned (as was the case with Hyderabad), or by a response to aggression (as was the case with Jammu and Kashmir), but by invoking ‘strategic necessity’ is all the more revealing. The reason cited for the decision to ‘take over’: Manipur is a ‘border state’ and ‘backward’; therefore its take over is a ‘strategic necessity’. These were the expressions used by V. P. Menon (Patel’s able bureaucratic lieutenant, who has been described as the ‘Arch Maneouverer’ of ‘Integration’) when referring to the merger of Manipur with the Indian Dominion. The fact that he uses the expression ‘take over’ to mean ‘integration’ speaks for itself.

A ‘border state’ that is also ‘backward’ needs to be ‘taken over’ because it is a ‘strategic necessity’. A ‘backward’ people need not be consulted about whether they would actually like to be ‘taken over’. A battalion marches in, and a population is told by the armed forces of a state that is still trying to get its own constitution together, that the constitutions that ‘backward’ people give to themselves, or the democratic institutions that they evolve in the course of their history, are of no consequence. What is of consequence is the ‘strategic necessity’ of the emerging Indian state, trying to live up to the imperatives of its Imperial inheritance.

The preponderance of the dual logic of ‘backward’(ness) and ‘strategic thinking’ that was instrumental in effecting the Merger of Manipur continues to influence the ‘carrot-and-stick’ approach that defines India’s policy, not only towards Manipur, but towards the entire north-eastern region today. ‘Backward’ people need to be propped up with subsidies, not left free to govern themselves; and a ‘strategic necessity’ needs to be maintained by military force. The evolution of democratic institutions can be arrested, or held in abeyance, or paid ritual obeisance to; but at all times, real power must be exercised not by the people of the region through free and fair processes, but by Indian state through the continued and uninterrupted presence of its armed and military forces.

This is the realisation of a perspective that envisions Manipur, and the North-East in general, at best as something that one does not really have to think about. Hence its virtual absence in the standard histories of ‘Modern’, ‘Medieval’ or ‘Ancient’ India, except when some sites find mention as footnotes to the history of the Indian National Army in World War II. Or more generally, as a hostile and an alien space, inhabited by ‘backward’ people and ‘tribal’, who can ‘integrate’ with the national mainstream either under gunpoint, or by dancing their way through to citizenship on colourful ‘folk dance’ floats in Republic Day parade in New Delhi each year.

As early as 7 November 1950, five years before the first spark of armed rebellion had been lit in the small corners of the Naga-inhabited hills of Assam, home minister Sardar Patel, the ‘Iron Man’ of India, wrote an exceptionally revealing letter to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. In this letter he refers to the people of the entire North East in the following words:

The people inhabiting these portions have no established loyalty or devotion to India…Even the Darjeeling and Kalimpong areas are not free from pro-Mongoloid prejudices.

When reading the exact quote, we would do well to remember that in the sweep of the statement about the 'people' of the North East, Patel would either have included Indian nationalists from Assam such as Gopinath Bordoloi, and members and supporters of the Manipur State Congress, (thus rendering them insincere in their patriotism) or would have completely neglected to mention them, because 'their' patriotic feeling for India was of no real consequence. In either case, the race-inflected character of such a comment is symptomatic of Indian nationalism’s myopia about the North East, and of a wholesale and uncritical appropriation of the 'orientalist' lens of European colonialism and its view of the peoples of Asia. It is this 'orientalist' consciousness that allows the narrative of an armed revolt in a small corner of the region, started in mid 1950s in the Tuensang and the Naga Hills, to inhabit the imaginary space of the entire North-East. It is also the same ‘orientalist’ consciousness that produces the envisioning of the North-East as an alien space, a necessary condition for the AFSPA to become a statutory reality.


Offensive Moves of a Paranoia

The militaristic subversion of democracy to ‘secure’ the ‘integrity’ of the ‘nation’ has been an offensive move in the region that was initiated with the controversial Merger of Manipur. The AFSPA, which was essentially enacted for the North East, is only incidental to this offensive militaristic strategy against the people in the region. Indeed, contrary to what most people tend to think, the Act does not talk of ‘terrorists’ or ‘armed insurgents’; it addresses to ‘any person’ who inhabits the ‘disturbed area’! Indeed, unlike the laws of war which restrict the legitimate target (e.g., confining to military personnel and installations etc), the AFSPA expands its legitimate target by incorporating ‘any person’ or ‘any structure’ or ‘shelter’ within the ‘disturbed area’. Thus, the AFSPA empowers the armed forces to wage a war not only on the proscribed organizations and its supporters but also on the entire inhabitants of the areas that are brought under the Act as the ‘disturbed’ areas.

The incorporation of the whole population residing in the ‘disturbed’ areas as the legitimate target of the Act raises ethical, historical and political question. The AFSPA is ostensibly a response to the threat from the armed proscribed organizations which are waging a ‘secessionist’ insurgency. But why does the Act incorporate the whole population? How can a state initiate a war against a population which it claims as its own citizens? Theoretically, a just war is a defensive move against the enemy who initiate against one. That is why the military forces in the contemporary world are called the Defence Services or Defence Forces. If this being the case, the question is: did the population in a ‘disturbed area’ initiate any action against the Indian nation for them to be at the receiving end of the onslaught of the armed forces under the AFSPA? Inversely, what is that the armed forces are ‘defending’ against? The only way to justify the expansion of the legitimate target under the AFSPA is to say that the people in these ‘areas’ have initiated actions or harbored ill intention against the Indian State. If one cannot say that, then the disguised war promulgated under the AFSPA is an unethical war. But there must be something that makes the disguised war under the AFSPA to appear as legitimate and ethical. And that something is the political paranoia of a ‘nation’, which is ‘hegemonically defined and heavily dependent on the idea of the ‘enemy within’’.

The people in the ‘disturbed area’ who are incorporated as the legitimate targets under the AFSPA are the ‘enemy within’. They become enemy, not necessarily because of what and how they feel or do but in the minds and hearts of a racially grounded suspicion, they are people who do not have ‘established loyalty and devotion to India’! This suspicion has least to do with facts. For instance, this suspicion was there even before ‘secessionism’ was to take root in Assam or Manipur, or Tripura (incidentally ‘secessionist’ trends in South India, and even, Punjab can be traced before the North East sans a section of the Nagas) or that (contrary to what was expected by the paranoid suspicion) the assumed ‘pro-Mongoloid prejudices’ of these people did not allow them to join hands with China when the latter invaded India in 1962, or that right from the days of the nationalist struggle during the colonial periods there were Indian nationalists in the region who were as passionate and enthusiastic about India as any other nationalists in the rest of South Asia. But that is what paranoid suspicion is all about: a suspicion based on an internally and deeply located sense of mistrusts and powerful self-fulfilling narratives to maintain the persecutory beliefs, many of which can be traced in the earlier or past experiences; and this state of mind cannot easily be changed, even by marshalling facts against its beliefs, and it tends to react with disproportionate emotions and behaviour to slight provocations. But nonetheless, it is not difficult to understand this paranoia.

The theme of ‘disunity’ as a fact that led to colonial domination over South Asia had been a part and parcel of the awareness of the nationalist awakening since the nineteenth century. This anxiety of ‘disunity’ was further accentuated at the time of independence with the birth trauma of the Partition in 1947. Informed by ‘nationalism’ which became an ‘avatar of orientalism in the later colonial and postcolonial periods’, and the racial inflection of the great Aryan theory, India grows up to be a nation ‘mirroring’ the occidental. The pride of the ‘ancient’ and the ‘classical’ pasts, primarily discovered with the tools and sensibility of modernity during the colonial period, the needs to prove its worth as an equal to the master race, the young nation also carries the scars of the unresolved birth trauma. It is this complex of political psychology which responded to the emergence of Communist regime in 1949 in China with a heightened sense of a persecutory anxiety, an anxiety that derives its ‘primordial’ energy from the images of the ‘castrating Muslim plunderers’ and ‘bad-British colonial mother’. Thus, despite the seduction of the promise of an integrated self through a spirit of ‘unity in diversity’, the deep suspicion of the loyalty of the people in the North East and their assumed ‘pro-Mongoloid prejudices’ construed the people in the North East an ‘enemy within’. Hence, the incorporation of the people as the legitimate targets of the disguised war under the AFSPA has not been able to create any moral compunction.

This paranoid suspicion does not simply exist outside the Act. It works expresses itself in spirit of the ‘opinion’ and the ‘suspicion’ that makes the AFSPA to generate the brutal force, which, to a rational mind, would be disproportionate and unethical. For instance, the offences under section 4(a) for which the personnel of the armed forces can shoot to kill do not threaten the personnel to justify the deployment of the deadly force. This section 4(a) of the AFSPA allows the soldiers to shoot to kill when there is an unlawful assembly, not defined as threatening, or for carrying ‘weapons’ or ‘things capable of being used’ (to be determined by the soldiers whose ‘opinion’ and ‘suspicion’ served as the basic grounds). The disproportionality between the offence and the force can only be rational to those who harbor a paranoid suspicion. The manifestation of the brutality characteristic of a paranoia manifest itself when the armed forces gunned down civilians, such as in Heirangoithong (1984) or RMC (1995) or Malom (2000)—all in Manipur, in ‘retaliation’ to an earlier attack on them by the suspected armed insurgents. For the armed forces under the Act, this is only to be expected. The civilian space, which is already the ‘other’ for the armed forces, is superimposed with a sense of a space inhabited by the ‘cultural other’, and it is the same space which is declared as the ‘disturbed’ areas inhabited by the ‘enemy within’. Therefore, these tragedies are not the outcomes of ‘abuses’ or ‘excesses’ but natural outcomes of the AFSPA in action wherein ‘suspicion’ becomes their presiding deity of the ‘disturbed’ space where they carry out their duties.

Thus, the AFSPA is an offensive move of a nation that has appropriated the demos, and continued to unleash the violence of the state on a section of a population while subverting the society and the polity in the region under the ASFPA. While many can to see what Michael Mann terms ‘the dark side of democracy’ — the genocidal crimes under the Nazi or in Rwanda or Bosnia or even Gujarat — but the paranoia that creates the embedded disorder of the Indian democracy hardly surfaces to the consciousness, and subsequently refuses to bother the conscience, of the Indian self. As a result, the tragedy and sufferings of the people under the Act continues.

Under the AFSPA, the columns of the ‘armed forces’ conduct the ‘combing operations’ and the troops patrol the streets, towns and villages, frisking civilians; these may not have restricted the activities of the insurgents in the region who are as active as, if not more than say, they were 20 years ago. But these movements and activities of the armed forces definitely convey the presence of the might of the Indian State to the people to remind that they need to be ‘loyalty’ and have ‘devotion to India’. It is a reminder that also tends to communicate with frightening dimensions through the so-called ‘excesses’ in which men, women and children are being killed in ‘retaliation’ to attacks on the armed forces by the ‘insurgents’.

On the other hand, through the disguised war, the military of post-colonial Indian state driven by an illegitimate nationalism continues to augment what Partha Chatterjee called the ‘unlovely ironies’ as patriotic soldiers of the armed forces are conferred gallantry awards on National Days of the post-colonial Indian State for their acts of fighting or killing the Assamese, the Manipuris, the Nagas etc in the ‘counter-insurgency operations’ in the North East. Indeed, true to the character of orientalism, the essentialization of group differences and their institutionalization in political representation continues in the post-colonial period.

Sadly, it is this colonial legacy that is obfuscated by the post-colonial nationalist discourse of all hues — and recently invented fashionable discourse on ‘terrorism’ — of the political class as well as the intelligentsia of this country. And it should go without saying that the tragedy and decades of sufferings of the people in the region are the direct results of that obfuscation rather than of the ‘foreign hands’ or ‘loyalty’ of the people in the region.