New Delhi: The Union home ministry has declared the jurisdictions of six police stations in Manipur’s Imphal valley and Jiribam as ‘disturbed areas’ under the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act or AFSPA on Thursday (November 14).
Its announcement comes days after Manipur witnessed a spike in violence starting Monday, when security forces said they killed ten militants in retaliatory fire in Jiribam.
The Hindu cited a senior government official as saying the suspected militants also allegedly abducted six people and fatally burned two others during the incident on Monday. It reported on Thursday that the six remained missing.
PTI reported on Tuesday that following the violence in Jiribam, incidents of armed groups firing at each other were reported from multiple places in the Imphal valley, as per police.
The six jurisdictions named by the home ministry on Thursday were denotified as disturbed areas starting in 2022. But the ministry said that the need to carry out coordinated security operations and “contain the activities of insurgent groups” here warranted the reimposition of disturbed area status.
In its notification, the ministry said that the “situation continues to remain volatile amidst ongoing ethnic violence in Manipur and intermittent firing in violence-prone areas continues in the fringe areas” of the districts where the six police stations are located.
There were also “several instances of active participation of insurgent groups in heinous acts of violence” in these areas, it added.
The six police stations are Sekmai and Lamsang in the Imphal West district, Lamlai in Imphal East, Jiribam in the district of the same name, Leimakhong in Kangpokpi and Moirang in Bishnupur.
In areas declared disturbed under the AFSPA, the armed forces can conduct searches and arrest people without warrant, as well as shoot people dead if deemed necessary. The Union government’s sanction is needed to prosecute soldiers operating in these areas.
A total of 19 police station jurisdictions in the Imphal valley and Jiribam saw the removal of disturbed area status by April 2023, a month before violence between the state’s Meitei and Kuki-Zo ethnic groups erupted.
The state’s hill regions have remained under disturbed area status.
The Hindu has previously noted that while both the Union and state governments can issue disturbed area notifications under the AFSPA, the practice has been that only the Manipur government issued these notifications as far as the state was concerned.
Thursday’s disturbed area notification was issued by the Union home ministry and not the state government.
Over 220 people have been killed during the ethnic violence in Manipur since May last year and 60,000 people rendered displaced.
Segregation between the Meiteis and Kukis reached near-complete levels after the violence and the two communities are physically separated by buffer zones patrolled by security forces.
The Kuki-Zo Council body claimed the suspected militants in the Jiribam incident were ‘village volunteers’ and enforced a shutdown in Kuki-dominated hill districts in the state on Tuesday. Meitei organisations called for a separate shutdown in the valley in response to the alleged abductions.
According to PTI, the number of suspected militants killed in Jiribam on Monday is 11.
