Guwahati/New Delhi, Sep 11 (ANI): The Asian Centre for Human Rights (ACHR) while releasing its report, ‘Assam Riots: Preventable but not prevented’, today demanded that Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh order an inquiry “into the refusal by the army to be deployed in the riot affected areas, fix the responsibility and take necessary measures including disciplinary action for criminal dereliction of duty by the army.
The ACHR recommended development of the Standard Operating Procedure to establish the supremacy of the Chief Minister as the Chairman of the Unified Command and deployment of the army on the Chief Minister’s instruction without any sanction from the Ministry of Defence in cases of riots or natural calamities.
“The Assam Government failed to deploy its 27,595 State Armed Police in the riot-affected areas. The Assam Government did not deploy the Central para-military forces at its command and instead waited for the Central Government to instruct West Bengal and Meghalaya to send para-military forces,” said Suhas Chakma, Director of Asian Centre for Human Rights.
“The refusal of the army to be deployed directly led to increased loss of lives, displacement and consequent spread of hatred in the country. Both under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, 1958 wherein the Army operates in aid of civil power and the Sections 130 and 131 of the Criminal Procedure Code, the army is legally bound to obey the orders of the civilian authorities. By the time the army moved in on 25 July 2012, about 44 persons were killed and over 200,000 were displaced. There must be accountability for such criminal dereliction of duty,” added Chakma.
The ACHR’s report has been prepared following visit by researchers of the Asian Centre for Human Rights in the affected areas on 27-28 July 2012, followed by further visits on 11-12 August 2012 and 27-29 August 2012.
The ACHR stated that a number of anti-tribal secular activists from mainland India and the National Commission for Minorities (NCM) have been distorting and misinterpreting facts that caused the riots and further interpret the riots along the communal lines.
The National Commission for Minorities (NCM) in its report accused the Bodos of engineering the riots by stating that, “The Bodos need to be told firmly that they cannot under any circumstances engineer a mass exodus of non-Bodos. Nor would they ever get statehood this way.”
This statement of the NCM is self-contradictory as the NCM further stated, “Had prompt action been taken after two Muslims were killed on 6th July, or after four Bodos were snatched away from the hands of the police and killed by Muslims, this conflict could have been avoided.”
The ACHR lamented that a number of anti-tribal secular activists have described the riots as ethnic cleansing and the autonomous councils of the tribals as ‘incentivising ethnic cleansing’ when both the communities were affected in the riots and each time the riots started and spread because of the abysmal failure of the State to enforce the law.
The ACHR stated that communal tension has been building up in Assam since the controversial marriage of Congress MLA Rumi Nath to a Muslim in May 2012. A section of political leaders of the ruling Congress who have been leading ‘Oust Tarun Gogoi’ campaign exploited the situation to show the CM as an incapable administrator after the CM inducted his son as a member of the Congress Party in May 2012.
Read more / Original news source: http://manipur-mail.com/achr-demands-inquiry-into-armys-role-during-assam-riots/
