In a devastating ambush this morning on a five-vehicle convoy of the 6-Dogra Regiment in the Moltuk area of Chandel district of Manipur, 110 km from Tengnoupal Police Station, close to the Indo-Myanmar border, at least 17 soldiers were reported killed and 16 others injured. The soldiers who had completed their posting at the remote Moltuk village were leaving with their bags and baggage, and probably with home in mind rather than a gunfight, putting themselves off guard and therefore made extremely vulnerable. The attackers probably also had intelligence of this vulnerable moment and timed the ambush accordingly. Claims are now beginning to come to newspaper offices, and so far they confirm suspicions that this could have been the handiwork of the newly formed, United Liberation Front of Western South East Asia, ULFWSEA, constituting of a number of insurgent groups from the Northeast, under the leadership of SS Khaplang, the chief of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland, NSCN, faction with which the Government of India had only recently called off its ceasefire. Khaplang on the other hand still holds a ceasefire with the Myanmar government. Nearly all of the insurgent groups from not just Manipur but also the entire Northeast, now have their bases in Myanmar enjoying the safe sanctuary provided by Khaplang. The Government of India ended its truce with Khaplang faction of the NSCN thinking it to have been reduced to a spent force in India, and to pursue peace with the stronger rival NSCN faction led by Isak Swu and Thuingaleng Muivah with which it has been holding peace talks since 1997. Today`™s ambush could be Khaplang`™s message that he can still hit back within Indian territory in many different ways, apart from dramatically announcing the arrival of ULFSEA.
Today`™s deadly ambush changed the complexion of a public outrage building up over the killing of a woman, M Ruisoting Aimol, a 56 year old social activist belonging to a small tribe Aimol in the Chandel district, by troops of the 20 Assam Rifles posted at Bonyang village. According to the villagers, the soldiers, accompanied by an officer, came to the village in a white Maruti Gypsy with some masked men at 9.45pm on May 31 and searched out the woman. They then planted some incriminating items at her place before shooting and injuring her. Villagers thereafter brought her to a hospital in Imphal where she succumbed to her injury on June 2. The villagers further allege that the soldiers had also earlier come to the village at 11.35pm on June 27 and harassed the villagers. The news of this atrocity remained lost in the din of the hotly contested Autonomous District Council elections in the hill districts, polling for which was held on June 1. However after the dust of the electioneering settled, public attention shifted back to the case of the murdered woman. The Aimol tribe called a general strike, and several civil society bodies all over the state responded to the call. However, no sooner did the strike begin, it was called off following a truce brokered by the Manipur government between the aggrieved Aimol tribe and the Assam Rifles. In Manipur`™s absurd theatre today, even grief and mourning are open to bargain and negotiation. This is understandable, considering the climate of official impunity introduced by the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. Victims virtually have no guarantee at all that perpetrators will be punished, so rather than lose everything, the intuition now is to bargain for some material compensation at least. In most cases the price demanded is a government job or cash.
Today`™s devastating ambush and the atrocious killing of the Aimol woman a few days earlier, illustrate the tragedy of a violent civil strife and the dilemma before the liberal State to come up with a liberal answer; a failure of the moral imagination. Often, in the AFSPA debate so sensitive in the Northeast region, the two kinds of violence are so falsely aligned on the `us versus them` binary, making them either the justification or else a case for condemning draconian measures of the State. The AFSPA debate thus gets reduced to the instrumental `you hit me first` rhetoric, or that of extraordinary situations deserving extraordinary measures. Lost in the process is the ethical question of whether the end always justifies the means. Placing the two kinds of violence on opposite poles is also false for one more thing. The objection to the AFSPA is not so much to the military meeting a military challenge to the State. It is more about making the atrocities committed under the AFSPA accountable to democratic law. This is what the Justice Jeevan Reddy Committee`™s recommendation on the AFSPA said in 2005; this is also what the Veerappa Moily Administrative Reform Committee 2005 recommended; this is what Santosh Hegde Commission on encounter deaths in Manipur 2013 also said. Let the AFSPA debate then not be swayed by the immediate and instead be thrashed out on the moral plane.
Leader Writer: Pradip Phanjoubam