States too distant to remember?

7

MANIPUR: You can never douse a flame by putting a cloth over it, the cloth itself will burn - Manipuri saying On October 17, 2008, I received a phone call from Bijoykrishna Aribam, a freelance journalist in Manipur. In a barely audible voice, he told me that 17 people had been killed in a terror attack in Imphal, Manipur's capital. Very few people in the country got to know about this attack. Over the past five decades, virtually every state in India's Northeast has witnessed the emergence of powerful militias to contest the Indian state's narrative of socio-economic progress and integrating the margins into the "national mainstream." Implementation of measures, such as the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) (1958) which gives security forces the authority to use lethal force and legal immunity from independent investigation of their actions, have done little to improve the situation in....