Making sense of the Prime Minister’s offer to lift AFSPA in the Northeast

The AFSPA will figure as a major item in the discussion at the United Human Rights Council  in September this year when it discusses India's periodic report, and then again at the United Nations Human Rights Committee in November this year.

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THERE are four audiences that the Prime Minister's statement on the possible lifting of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958 [AFSPA] in northeast India is aimed at. The first audience is the people of the North East. However, the people of Nagaland and Manipur have longer memories than the Prime Minister's Office and the security establishment allow for. They are still awaiting the sanction for prosecution of Assam Rifles personnel pursuant to the Supreme Court's EEVFAM judgment of 2016. Forget the detritus of Operation Golden Bird and Operation Bajrang in Assam.

The people of the North East are painfully aware that these periodic pies in the sky are like the debate on the need for two time zones in India. One for the Indo-Gangetic plains, which is Indian Standard Time (IST) and the long pending demand for a second time zone for the North East which they have waited for so long that for those in Mokokchung, IST has come to mean "Instantly Stretchable Time".