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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Justice delayed


-The Times of India

The CBI must prosecute the Pathribal case

The Supreme Court's ruling in the Pathribal case, giving military autho-rities eight weeks to court martial the army officials allegedly responsible for the extrajudicial killings of five Kashmiri civilians 12 years ago, is unfortunate. It would be all too easy for the matter to be quietly swept under the carpet if left in the hands of the military authorities, as has been done before. The Pathribal case, in fact, highlights all that is wrong with the manner in which the Armed Forces Special Forces Act (AFSPA) has been applied in the state. Given the AFSPA, holding security forces in J&K to account for human rights abuses outside the ambit of the military - where there are few observable results - requires government sanction, as in this case. But an RTI application last February revealed that since the Act was instituted in 1990, the government has not granted sanction in even a single instance.

AFSPA is meant to aid our security forces in the difficult task of fighting insurgency. Yet, too often, it is used to target those civilians the state should be protecting. The resentment this breeds then becomes part of the justification for keeping the AFSPA in place, and the vicious cycle continues. The government must make every effort now to break this cycle. It can do so by ensuring that it is the CBI that prosecutes the Pathribal case. It must make it clear that when there's considerable evidence that cold-blooded extrajudicial killings have taken place, it is the civilian legal system that has precedence.