Aheli Moitra
When we were young, those of us who were sportspersons or would stood up against unjust actions by school authorities had a singular dream—to join the Indian Army when we grew up.
The Indian Army was the culmination of how justice could be enforced. We could be dutiful towards our country, save it from ‘enemies’ everywhere, fight to the end of life with every strand of honour in our guns and bones. Using violence to fulfill requirements of honour and peace was a part of our natural training. The ‘enemy’ had to be ‘destroyed’ and badly so—we had to learn to use weapons of mass destruction.
History lessons in the World Wars glorified war even more with their victorious exploits of ‘defeating unjust regimes’. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were taught in detail but stirred little in us to feel the pain of peeling skin and flattened home. Anne Frank’s diaries were taught as lessons in justifying war instead of the power in her words to humanize, even our ‘enemies’.
For me, the greatest ambition in Class VI was to be in the Indian Air Force. Imagine saving your country by bombing whole ‘enemy’ cities! What disaster struck my teenage years when myopia and poor vertical growth put an end to dreams of hawkish flights with the hopes of defending our fragile nation of nations.
So imagine how I, and plenty of others in our imagined ‘justice league’, felt when the Supreme Court on April 18 asked the Indian Army, why were you silent on allegations of rape and murder by army personnel? The apex court bench was hearing a Public Interest Litigation seeking fresh probes into 1,528 alleged extra-judicial killings in Manipur from 2000 to 2012 by security forces and police.
The Supreme Court, in an exemplary show of questioning power and impunity attached with armed services in the country, wondered if it is alright for Army personnel to commit rapes and murders, and the Government adjusts this with payment of ‘compensation’ for ‘violation of procedure’. Is the rape of a minor, if committed, a violation of procedure? The Court stressed on a fresh probe into some of the incidents.
In a bizarre argument, the counsel for the Army said that it would not be appropriate to open the cases after 14 years. Pat came the Court’s response—when Bangladesh could prosecute war criminals for atrocities committed in 1971, the Indian government should not shy away from punishing culprits accused of killing innocent persons in the last three decades.
In July last year, the apex court had directed a thorough probe into the alleged fake encounter killings in Manipur saying that the use of “excessive or retaliatory force” by the armed forces or police was not permissible in ‘disturbed areas’ under the Armed Force Special Powers Act.
For many peoples residing in the Indian Union, life is not blinded by simple equations in which violent armed forces are messiahs of justice. It took people like me a decade to shed the cataract of violence and learn that just societies are created through recognition of humanity in the other (aka the ‘enemy’), not an air or home raid. The Supreme Court’s observations are a step in the right direction to break the endless cycle of romance with violence and ending the silence and impunity surrounding it—those who have joined the Indian security forces with the hope of shaping a just society should not shy away from recognizing this either.
For more notes, please write to moitramail@yahoo.com
