AFSPA

In the Name of the Nation: India and Its Northeast by Sanjib Baruah, New Delhi: Navayana Publishing (by arrangement with Stanford Univ Press), 2021; pp xiii + 278, `599.

The burden of grief for victims of regime-sponsored repression and state atrocities is compounded by the public denial of their loss and suffering. The Supreme Court's decision on the writ petition filed by Extra Judicial Execution Victim Families Association Manipur and families of persons extrajudicially executed by security forces in Manipur is a milestone in the struggle for truth and justice. The judicial response has refashioned the law, responding to the suffering and pain of the aggrieved and tempering the law with justice.

If the jails are full in Kashmir, it is not because of preventive detention. The number of detainees is reported by official sources to be less than 500, and by non-official sources as about 1,500. These are very small numbers considering that 35,000 people have been arrested since January 1990 (official figure). When I pointed this out to someone, the answer seemed pretty obvious to him. He asked "how can the number of detainees increase if instead of being detained, people are deliberately killed?" In the context of Kashmir, if this is the only choice, detention, for all its abuses, seems positively benign. Indeed it could be argued that in Kashmir the immediate task of human rights groups should be to focus attention on preventing custodial deaths, even if in the short term this means accepting greater use of detention.