The July 16, incident in which two little children of class-7 standard, a boy and a girl, were shot dead point-blank and a woman sustained bullet injury in a reckless firing on the street of Wuzu village under Meluri administrative division of Phek district, is a self explanatory account of the wild atrocity and blatant violation of Human Rights committed by the Indian army under the benefaction of AFSPA.
To express our solidarity with bereaved families and to console them my colleagues and I drove our way to Wuzu early the following morning. Bullet marks on the house wall and fresh blood on the ground at the spot of the incident were nerve-jangling testimonies of the crime. A small village of less than a hundred families with three separate funeral programs in a day in three different locations, including one NSCN-K cadre of the same village killed from Avakhung, comes like a bolt from the blue.Scuttling from one burial ground to another the whole day in an inclement weather, even before we could realised,the sun had almost set by the time the last funeral got over. Having to stand the sight of their parents and siblings weeping and agonising over the loss of their loved one, particularly the two innocent children for no reason of their fault, one is left speechless and helpless. Like the proverbial Biblical story at Ramah, following the massacre of children by the despotic King Herod, howling and wailing of the families soaked the atmosphere of the whole village in anguish that nightmarish day at Wuzu and its adjoining villages. Nearly everyone present in those funerals was literally reduced to tears.
One human being killing another human being is never good, but the killing of unarmed children and women without any provocation is a crime of the highest degree by any measure.This story is definitely a blot on the face of India in the international record of human rights violation. Such act of depravity is beyond tolerance in a civilised society.In a context such as this, can India be a signatory to the UN Declaration of Human Rights? Going by its track record, time and again, security forces in our land has betrayed our confidence in them.
Trust is a valuable but fragile human virtue which when tarnished once is hard to varnish. No amount of justification can redeem the trust and good faith of the people when deadly weapons designed for defence of the nation is turned back on the defenceless and harmless children and women of its own citizens. What a dastardly and gutless act of the so-called security force who instilfear psychosis and insecurity on the public mind! A tragedy of this magnitude demands justice of equal proportion.
The central government’s recent tag on Nagaland as a highly dangerous and disturbed area is a misnomer. When interpreted from the perspective of the innocent victims, the cause and source of danger is the man who has drawn the first blood from an unsuspecting civilian. Such a coldblooded murderer should be put in the dock and an unbiased trial should be allowed to take its own course of action in the court of law. As the voice of the voiceless, the district and state administration should leave no stone unturned in their effort tobook perpetrators of the heinous crime and full justice should be delivered to the innocent victims. Life will remain dangerous and disturbed so long as the wolves in sheep’s clothing remain at large.
