While some groups and individuals have expressed their opinions for or against the imposition of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (1958) in Garo Hills following the Meghalaya High Court directive, there is as yet no concerted effort to deliberate on whether AFSPA is the only remedy to militancy in Garo Hills. Asking for AFSPA to address the present lawlessness in Garo Hills is actually giving the state police an alibi not to perform. Some questions that merit answers are: Why is it that when militancy in Assam (Bodo militants) is almost under control and when Naga militants are in talks with Government of India, what gives the Garo militant outfits the fuel they need to bolster their fire power leading the High Court to come up with a desperate directive? The correct thing for the Court to do is to find out by a quick research how and why militancy remains intransigent in Garo Hills.
In this country, it has become the norm to use the military for internal security. Much has been said about the army’s prime purpose and mental and psychological conditioning being to fight an external enemy and not its own citizens and hence it should not be deployed for internal security purposes. Yet the repeated failure of the police to tackle the Garo militants is perplexing and forcing even the judiciary to go for quick-fix solutions. Interestingly, the Counter-Insurgency and Jungle Warfare School (CIJWS) in Vairengte, Mizoram continues to remain a training and research establishment of the Indian Army specialising in unconventional warfare, especially counter-insurgency and guerrilla warfare. Should this school not be used to train police personnel instead, considering that the terrain in Mizoram and Meghalaya are similar? CIJWS has a name for being one of the premier counter-insurgency training institutions in the world. The school’s motto is to “fight the guerrilla like a guerrilla”. Yet our cops are trained in the Greyhound school, Hyderabad which is better known for tackling the Naxalites/Maoists in Andhra Pradesh. It is true that commandos under this model have to undergo one of the toughest training phase in the country; specialise in creating a grass root level network of informers and maintain constant touch with the masses. They penetrate the strongholds of insurgents/militants not by force but by persuasion. This helps in gathering more information than any other police force. They are also trained to maintain a Special Intelligence Branch to monitor these activities. So why are the Commandos in Garo Hills failing repeatedly? These reasons need to be investigated before the judiciary could suggest an extreme measure like the imposition of AFSPA. But the discourse on AFSPA has to start now. Written and sit-in protests are not enough!