Dr Asangba Tzudir
The Ministry of Home Affairs, Govt. Of India has once again extended the draconian law – The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) in eight districts and twenty one police stations in Nagaland for another six months starting from April 1, 2025. The Naga Students Federation (NSF) in condemning the extension called the extension as an “unjust and regressive move” and that it “disregards the realities on the ground” and further stressed that, “the continued designation of our ancestral land as a ‘disturbed area’ under AFSPA... is a blatant affront to the dignity, rights and democratic aspirations of the Naga people.”
In perspective, within a Paradigmatic Exception, for over sixty years, India’s North East in general has witnessed and still continues to witness the harsh realities of a hugely debated Act that seek to restrict, suspend, deny the civil liberty of the individual citizens, or even ‘shut down’ on mere suspicion. The contentious AFSPA contravenes the spirit and principles of democracy that is central to the individual’s life, dignity, civil liberty and thereby peace.
Today, with continued extension under the guise of ‘Disturbed Area Act’, very undemocratically an act that came to be applied as a temporal measure has been ‘transformed’ into a permanent ‘state of being’. Its prolonged imposition has rather brought in a state of lawlessness rather than a state of law, and which has the spontaneity to become an ‘exception to the rule’ any moment wherein the exception itself becomes the ‘rule of law.’ The exception is legitimated through a “state of necessity” by declaring a particular area as ‘disturbed.’ In German theory the “state of necessity” is commonly known as “Ausnahmezustand” which is not a ‘state of law’ but a space without law or a ‘state of lawlessness’ where ‘necessity’ produces ‘extraordinary’ unlawful acts.
It is through such undemocratic definition that a supposed law enters into a ‘zone of indistinction’ between law and politics giving rise to a juridico-political law. Such a political order becomes institutionalised on the ‘body’ which then displaces humans from the institutional and legal framework beyond any discourse on law and justice, ethics and morality. The new being AFSPA moves at a threshold between law and politics in a zone of indistinction, and every passing day we too traverse through different zones of life between human and non-human. Its application has only resulted in the dehumanization of humans.
In the guise of aiding civil power, it rather takes away the rights and liberties of the citizens wherein killing within AFSPA has no legal implication or bearing. It is undoubtedly a rhetorically inflated claim regarding its presence considering the gross human rights violations in contravention with the very spirit and ethos of Human Rights. The changing democratic and legal fabric of the society we live in only dispiritingly attests the vulnerability of humans, and where the impunity of AFSPA is a living testimony that is legitimated through an act of the ‘sovereign.’ India as a democratic country is supposed to promote constitutional and democratic values, but the reality presents a stark contrast wherein the sovereign power of the State sanctions to perpetrate, indefinitely, a regime that violates human rights.
Foucault while expressing about “power over life” and “right of death” in The History of Sexuality draws us back to ancient “Patria Potestas” that granted the father of the Roman family the right to dispose off the life of his children and his slaves just as he had given them life. In a similar strain, the sovereign power privileges itself a ‘right’ to decide life and death. Today, the ‘sovereign’ has become more pronounced and it can be said to be the new juridical being that decides whether an area should be declared or not, and the fact is that the sovereign power comes to forcibly dwell on the body of every living being.
Today, the continued extension of AFSPA reflects the experiences of the Nazi ruled concentration camps as a praxis of the ‘state of necessity’ that becomes an exceptional space wherein the camp inmates are stripped of all rights, humanity and their names replaced by a mere numbering waiting their death within their dying hope to die as humans. In the modern day, the camp can be taken to be any ‘spatial perimeter’ where an area is ‘unconstitutionally’ declared disturbed ushering a regime that violates human rights where even killing is legitimated. It also presses upon an underlying ‘exception’ which accounts for the existence of a realm of human life that is not subjected to law and thereby becomes a mechanism to ‘capture’ life within the sovereign control.
Time is prudent for the Indian policy makers to re-examine the promulgation of Nagaland as ‘disturbed’ and ‘dangerous,’ one is made to wonder how a civilized nation can still legitimate such ‘exceptional laws’ notwithstanding the aberrant human condition. Now which is more disturbing - the land or the ‘law’ itself?
(Dr Asangba Tzudir contributes a weekly guest editorial to The Morung Express. Comments can be emailed to asangtz@gmail.com)
