On Friday, Union Home Minister Shivraj Patil declined to make public the report of a high-level official panel tasked with reviewing the provisions of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA).
He had good reasons. The 147-page report of the Justice B.P. Jeevan Reddy Committee — a copy of which is now with The Hindu — unambiguously recommends the repeal of the controversial law against which people in Manipur and elsewhere in the North-East have been agitating for several years.
“The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958, should be repealed,” it notes in its recommendations. “The Act is too sketchy, too bald and quite inadequate in several particulars”.
The report adds that the impression gathered by the Committee during the course of its work is that “the Act, for whatever reason, has become a symbol of oppression, an object of hate and an instrument of discrimination and high-handedness.”
