Our job is not to kill our people, Army tells SC

A-G defends the Army over panel report on atrocities in insurgency-hit Manipur

A day after the Supreme Court questioned its silence over judicial enquiry commission reports accusing its personnel of committing atrocities in Manipur during insurgency, the Army on Wednesday said its job was not to kill “our own country’s people”.

The Army accused that the findings of the judicial probes may have been inadvertently “biased” as the judges who headed the inquiry commissions were locals. “The Army’s job is not to kill our own people,” Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi said in defence of the Army in the Supreme Court.

Appearing before a Bench of Justices Madan B. Lokur and U.U. Lalit, Mr. Rohatgi submitted that the court should not shut its eye to the possibility that the judicial officers, who headed these commissions of enquiry, were local people and may have been guided by local apprehensions and factors.

“This is our own country. If the Army is disbelieved, then the whole system will go haywire and cannot work. The inquiry officers may have been biased due to their local considerations,” he argued in a hearing that went on the whole day.

Rues trust deficit

He rued the trust deficit apparent when insinuations are made that the Army is stage-managing deaths of innocents as armed encounters with insurgents.

“The Army is operating in insurgency-prone areas of Manipur in difficult circumstances and it cannot be disbelieved. It cannot be said that I have stage-managed to kill my own people,” Mr. Rohatgi submitted.

The arguments come in the backdrop of a curative petition filed by the Centre in the Supreme Court to urgently re-consider a July 2016 verdict, which ripped open the cloak of immunity and secrecy provided by the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act of 1958 (AFSPA) to security forces for deaths caused during encounters in disturbed areas.

The SC had held that “there is no concept of absolute immunity from trial by a criminal court” if an Army man has committed an offence. The curative petition argues that the judgment has become a fetter against security forces involved in anti-militancy operations in sensitive and border areas of the country.