The bandh on the Imphal-Moreh road by several civil organisations, especially of the Tengnoupal area where the 24 Assam Rifles post is located needs to be looked at more seriously. The agitators, spearheaded by the Kuki Students Organisation, KSO, Tengnoupal, are demanding the removal of the Assam Rifles post from Tengnoupal on the ground that soldiers of this paramilitary unit have been haranguing the public in unwarranted manners. The particular incident which triggered the present public protest is serious. According the agitators, the 24 Assam Rifles here, as has become their tradition, detained and harassed passengers travelling along this highway, and on the particular day this included a pregnant woman and a paralyzed BP stroke patient who were on their way for a health check up. The soldiers refused to listen to pleas and even the two were not only detained inordinately at the check gate, but were also made to proceed on foot for a distance of more than 2 kms to the other extreme of their cordoned area. The Assam Rifles of course denied this charge as expected. Technically, the veracity of the charge will depend on whose words one chooses to believe, but even if there are no irrefutable proofs on which is the correct version, circumstantial evidences will have a different story to tell. Anybody who has travelled along this highway will testify that on any given day there always is a long queue of passenger vehicles, especially on the return route from Moreh, outside this Assam Rifles post. Each vehicle has to go through the routine of the goods they carry being checked, often after unloading them. All this is supposed to be part of the government`™s counterinsurgency measures.
While this concern of the troopers is certainly legitimate and probably within the mandate given to them to execute, the impression often is, this legitimate concern is being used as a cover for other more worldly motives. These uniformed men performing the checking duties would appear to anybody who has not been conditioned to believe anything is possible in the name of counterinsurgency, as custom officials checking for smuggled merchandises. The popular verdict of those who frequent this route is also very much this, and that all the harassments come with the rewards of undeclared fees paid by these small timer merchants who want their less than legal merchandises not to be confiscated, to the checking authorities. In other words, this is a case of a shared stake in smuggled merchandise. Or to put it more bluntly, this is a case of one thievery being committed on another thievery in a chain of thieveries all along this highway from Moreh to Imphal. Indeed, the Imphal-Moreh highway is now infamous for this chain in which any uniformed organisation given a handle to state power, sets up their own check gates, all in the name of counterinsurgency, but actually to fill their own individual Moreh chests.
The remedy may not be in dismantling these gates, for they do have their original purposes which are no doubt legitimate. The remedy then may be to specify strictly the list they can act as the filter of. Surely counterinsurgency cannot be about confiscating and levying taxes on blankets, battery inverters, water filters etc. Perhaps also the government`™s trade authorities should augment the list of officially tradable items to include ordinary harmless merchandises most in demand in the market, instead of its current approved list of obscure items hardly ever seen in the market. Once this is done, there will be no excuse for the `counterinsurgency check gates` to harangue those carrying these items. True even the tradable items cannot be tax free, but let this be the worry of the customs and not the `counterinsurgency forces`.
Leader Writer: Pradip Phanjoubam