By SAMANTH SUBRAMANIAN 
Lord Linlithgow, in a 1935 file photo.
For several weeks now, Omar Abdullah, the chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, has been campaigning vigorously to have the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (or AFSPA) withdrawn from his state.
The act, which confers upon soldiers in “disturbed areas” extraordinary powers and legal immunity, has operated in the Kashmir valley since 1990 and in Jammu since 2001. Mr. Abdullah has been soothing and diplomatic in his efforts; at one point, rather paradoxically, he assured the media that he wasn’t intending to “undermine the role of the army.”
He hasn’t called the act unconstitutional or unjust, as many civil society activists have done; the most prominent of these, a Manipuri woman named Irom Sharmila, has been on a hunger strike since November 2000, demanding that the AFSPA be repealed in India’s northeastern states.
The AFSPA arrived into this world swaddled in acrimony and bitterness, and it has failed to divest itself of those qualities ever since. Ironically, the spirit of its provisions derives from an ordinance that was designed to quell the Quit India movement, and that was issued by the Indian viceroy Lord Linlithgow on Aug. 15, 1942. The Raj did not view Quit India’s theoreticians kindly. That July, the Secretary of State for India, a conservative politician named Leo Amery, had written to Prime Minister Winston Churchill, urging the sort of swift action that was later enshrined in the ordinance:
To my mind the only course is to act promptly now: ‘Twice armed he that has his quarrel just; But thrice armed he who gets his blow in fust.’ I hope the Cabinet will this afternoon authorize Linlithgow to arrest Gandhi and the Congress Working Committee at once… We are dealing with men who are now definitely our enemies… To appease them or delay in striking at them can only discourage the army and all the loyal elements
In 1958, though, it was Jawaharlal Nehru – one of the Quit India agitators himself – who hoped to get his blow in fust. As prime minister, Nehru was fighting India’s first separatist insurgency: the Naga National Council’s attempt to create a sovereign state in the northeast. The Naga leader, Angami Phizo, had proclaimed the Federal Government of Nagaland in 1954, but the Indian army’s efforts in combating this insurgency had not been going very well; the historian Sarvepalli Gopal compared the army’s challenge to “eating soup with a knife.” The Times of London reported: “[T]he Indian army does not know who is a loyal Naga and who is a rebel; they look the same… Unable to identify the enemy, Indian soldiers have killed several innocent people on the slightest suspicion.”
A regulation had already granted the army some degree of special powers because, according to Nehru, it was “fantastic to imagine that the Government of India is going to be terrorized…by Phizo and company.” In August 1958, the government sought to install these powers within an act, allowing officers to make arrests and conduct searches without warrants, and to open fire, “even to the causing of death,” upon anybody suspected of breaking the law.
For a divisive bill, the historian Srinath Raghavan informs me, the debates in Parliament were surprisingly short: two hours in the Lok Sabha on Aug. 18, and a few hours per day in the Rajya Saha on Aug. 25, 27 and 28. But even in these brief periods, parliamentarians staked out their positions and defended them with vehemence. The home minister, G. B. Pant, referring icily to “misguided Nagas … indulging in mischievous activities,” called the proposed act “a very simple measure.” It was not possible, he said, “over such a vast area to depute civil magistrates to accompany the armed forces wherever there may be trouble, because [trouble] happens unexpectedly.”
Pant met fierce opposition. Some MPs accused the government of obfuscation on the precise nature of the Naga troubles. One Manipuri parliamentarian argued that his state’s residents were already being harassed enough by the army. Naushir Bharucha, of the Praja Socialist Party, quoted the bill’s focus on armed land forces and, laying the sarcasm thick, said: “That probably means that the government very mercifully has not permitted the air forces to shoot or strafe the area.”
Perhaps the most vocal opponent of the bill was Surendra Mahanty, of a party called the Gantantra Parishad. In a speech of high heat, Mahanty said:
“This is a unique legislation, the kind of which has never been contemplated by since this Indian Parliament came into existence… What I am trying to submit is that this is a martial law…. It is being sought to be introduced in this House as a most innocuous measure. If anybody analyses this bill, one will find that it seeks to indemnify any person for any act done for quelling disturbance in an area declared so by either the Governor of Assam or the Chief Commissioner of Manipur within their jurisdiction… [W]e want a free India. But, we do not want a free India with barbed wires and concentration camps, where havaldars (sergeants) can shoot at sight any man. If that is the concept of free India, I think I may as well be a traitor.”
Mahanty notwithstanding, the bill was passed without amendment in the Lok Sabha; in the Rajya Sabha, it was passed 10 days later. Its stoutest defender there was none other than Nehru, who pleaded that his government had treated the Nagas with friendliness. “No infirm government can function anywhere. Where there is violence it has to be dealt with by government, whatever the reason for it may be; because otherwise you drift; the country drifts into, if I may use the word, Fascist methods, all groups, private groups and others, indulging in violence and trying to coerce the governmental authority by organized violence.”
To journalists and observers in the northeast, the effects of the AFSPA upon the civilian population unfolded almost immediately. Gavin Young, a journalist from The Observer in London, traveled illegally through Nagaland in 1961, and one of his dispatches included an interview with P. Vikura, a lieutenant in the Naga home guard:
“His face was impassive as he told me his story. His father had been bayoneted to death by Assamese riflemen of the Indian Army in 1956, and his mother gaoled. Vikura, who was eighteen at the time, was at school in central Nagaland. He and two hundred other students ran off into the jungle when the Indians began to organize Naga students into labor squads. He has been with the Home Guard ever since.”
That the AFSPA would further polarize the very societies it was supposed to help knit back into India started to become clear very soon; it remains one of the keenest criticisms of the act. Even Nehru realized as much. In a letter dated May 1956, he wrote to B. R. Medhi, the chief minister of Assam, promising to use the army “to the fullest extent possible.” But, he added, “we have always to remember that the real solution will require a political approach and an attempt to make the Nagas feel that we are friendly to them and that they can be at home in India.”
Source: nytimes.com
Kohima, Nov 22 : Preparations for the National Hornbill Festival of Nagaland at the Kisama Heritage village are on in full swing with various Naga tribes making whole-hearted efforts to get their respective Morung (dormitories) sites ready on time. 
