A dozen soldiers burst through the front and back doors of a small home here in the middle of a July night, dragged Thangjam Manorama into a room and began to torture her. Her elder brother tried to stop them and was badly beaten. Her mother rose to defend her and was knocked unconscious.
After about an hour, Thangjam was taken out of the house. The next morning, the family found her bullet-ridden body by the side of the road nearly 5km away.
Soldiers later claimed that Thangjam was an insurgent who was shot while she was trying to escape.
A medical examiner determined that she had been shot from close range while lying down, that stains on her dress were from semen, but that multiple gunshots to her vagina made any determination of rape impossible.
There was little doubt who was responsible: The soldiers made little effort to hide their faces.
Thangjam’s death led to months of local protests, including one in which a dozen women stripped naked in front of the local military headquarters carrying a red-lettered banner: “Indian Army Rape Us.”
The circumstances of Thangjam’s death were so outrageous that even then-Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh promised redress.
However, a decade later, no one has been arrested or charged with a crime. Activists, lawyers and ordinary people here say they know exactly why: A colonial-era law in effect in India’s periphery gives blanket immunity from prosecution in civilian courts to Indian soldiers for all crimes, including rape.
SPECIAL POWERS
Human rights advocates have for years called for the repeal of the law, known as the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. Christof Heyns, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, wrote last year in a report to the UN Human Rights Council that the powers granted under the law “are in reality broader than that allowable under a state of emergency as the right to life may effectively be suspended.”
Yet it endures. As the world’s largest democracy and home of Mohandas Gandhi, a pioneer of nonviolent resistance, India has long been counted among the world’s most progressive nations, with robust anti-poverty programs and efforts to provide special benefits to marginalized communities. The country now has 168 state and federal rights organizations, including the National Human Rights Commission.
However, a darker reality has always lurked beneath this progressive image, particularly in India’s hard-to-reach places. In Kashmir, there are thousands of unmarked graves in secret cemeteries created by the army and the police to hide their crimes. Even when civilian officials confirm that innocents have been slaughtered, nothing is done.
“We have all these great human rights institutions, but still nobody in India gets justice when the state murders one of their family members,” said Henri Tiphagne, chairman of the Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development based in Bangkok. “That’s true all over the country, not just in Kashmir.”
Government commissions have repeatedly recommended that the law be repealed, but India’s military has stymied all such efforts.
“If we don’t have this constitutional protection, would you like us to be dragged to court for small allegations?” General J.J. Singh, the former chief of army staff, said in a 2005 news conference.
The law is in place in large parts of India’s northeast, a protrusion of land sometimes no more than 22km wide that loops around the top and eastern side of Bangladesh and nestles in green mountains along the border with Myanmar. The region’s vast array of languages, cultures and animosities have fueled decades of bloody insurgencies in a beautiful landscape.
STATE-SPONSORED CRIME
Perhaps because of the limited attention given this remote part of the world, soldiers and police officers do not even bother to hide the evidence when they murder and rape innocents, said Babloo Loitongbam, founder of Human Rights Alert in Imphal.
“The political leadership and judiciary here have created an ecosystem where state-sponsored killing is routine, and they do it with complete callousness,” Loitongbam said. “They don’t plan it; they don’t hide it; they just kill people.”
An investigation last year by a panel appointed by India’s Supreme Court into six representative cases from Manipur State found official explanations of killings so entirely at odds with common sense and available evidence that it concluded that the victims, including a 12-year-old boy killed in view of his parents, had all been murdered. Still, no one has been arrested. One of the suspect officers was given India’s highest peacetime honor for bravery.
In 2009, an Indian magazine published a series of photos showing the police questioning an unarmed man, pulling him into a pharmacy and then moments later dragging out his dead body — all in front of dozens of witnesses. Nine officers were eventually charged in the case, but none had been convicted.
“Killing is infectious, and the atmosphere here is that anyone in uniform thinks they can do it,” Imphal Free Press editor Pradip Phanjoubam said. “In fact, the murderers are usually rewarded.”
Calls to Manipur Chief Minister Okram Ibobi Singh were not returned. Singh has been in office since 2002. Voting fraud is so blatant in the state that precinct turnouts sometimes exceed 100 percent and journalists have witnessed vote-stealing.
LITTLE HOPE
An attempt to interview Manipur Home Minister Gaikhangam Gangmei, charged with overseeing the police, at an evening Lions Club meeting in Imphal was rebuffed by an aide.
Manipur’s top police officer, Director-General of Police Shahid Ahmad, would not see a reporter who sat outside his office for nearly two hours.
Efforts by victims’ groups as well as the Supreme Court investigation have had an effect, Loitongbam said. The police and soldiers once killed hundreds each year; this year has seen only a handful of killings.
Widows of those killed formed the Extrajudicial Execution Victim Families’ Association Manipur to help women try to get justice. The association has documented 1,528 police killings between 1979 and 2012, a fraction of the killings that occurred in Kashmir during the period, but enough to affect most communities in a state of 2.7 million people.
Thangjam Bashu, one of Thangjam Manorama’s brothers, said he has little hope that his sister’s killers will ever face justice.
“Those people were beasts only looking for their immediate carnal pleasures,” he said.
The law that gave them legal impunity must be repealed, he said, “otherwise my sister’s fate will be the same fate of many more sisters.”
Indian Defense Minister Arun Jaitley said last month that the immunity law would remain in place until peace was secure.
A series of strong earthquakes in Hualien County not only caused severe damage in Taiwan, but also revealed that China’s power has permeated everywhere. A Taiwanese woman posted on the Internet that she found clips of the earthquake — which were recorded by the security camera in her home — on the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu. It is spine-chilling that the problem might be because the security camera was manufactured in China. China has widely collected information, infringed upon public privacy and raised information security threats through various social media platforms, as well as telecommunication and security equipment. Several former TikTok employees revealed
For the incoming Administration of President-elect William Lai (賴清德), successfully deterring a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) attack or invasion of democratic Taiwan over his four-year term would be a clear victory. But it could also be a curse, because during those four years the CCP’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) will grow far stronger. As such, increased vigilance in Washington and Taipei will be needed to ensure that already multiplying CCP threat trends don’t overwhelm Taiwan, the United States, and their democratic allies. One CCP attempt to overwhelm was announced on April 19, 2024, namely that the PLA had erred in combining major missions
At the same time as more than 30 military aircraft were detected near Taiwan — one of the highest daily incursions this year — with some flying as close as 37 nautical miles (69kms) from the northern city of Keelung, China announced a limited and selected relaxation of restrictions on Taiwanese agricultural exports and tourism, upon receiving a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) delegation led by KMT legislative caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅崑萁). This demonstrates the two-faced gimmick of China’s “united front” strategy. Despite the strongest earthquake to hit the nation in 25 years striking Hualien on April 3, which caused
The Constitutional Court on Tuesday last week held a debate over the constitutionality of the death penalty. The issue of the retention or abolition of the death penalty often involves the conceptual aspects of social values and even religious philosophies. As it is written in The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay, the government’s policy is often a choice between the lesser of two evils or the greater of two goods, and it is impossible to be perfect. Today’s controversy over the retention or abolition of the death penalty can be viewed in the same way. UNACCEPTABLE Viewing the