Justice still eludes the 13 victims of the Oting massacre in Mon district, after the Ministry of Defence(MoD) on April 14,2023 refused sanction for prosecution of all 31 personnel of the Alpha unit of the 21 Paras on December 4, 2021. The victims were returning home for Christmas from Tiru when they were ambushed . The Centre\u2019s legal sanction is required to initiate any proceeding against security forces personnel for their actions while discharging duties under section 197(2) of CrPC and section 6 of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA). The Alpha team of the 21 Paras, based at Jorhat under 4 Corps, included the officer in-charge identified as one Major Ankush Gupta, two Subedars, eight Havildars, four Naiks, six Lance Naiks and nine paratroopers. The government of Nagaland instituted a Special Investigation Team(SIT) under the supervision of an ADG and headed by an IGP along with four other senior police officers and later to 21 members. After exhaustive investigation and forensic reports, the SIT on March 24, 2022 had sought sanction for prosecution from the department of military affairs against the accused army personnel U\/S 197(2)CrPC and Section 6 of AFSPA. Even the Army had admitted that the killing was a case of mistaken identity and promised to take \u201cappropriate action\u201d against those found violating the laws. However, the Supreme Court on a plea by the wives of the accused security personnel, issued an interim order on July 19,2022 staying the proceedings of the case. The SIT had concluded that the 21 Paras had not ensured positive identification of the civilians travelling in an open Bolero and also had not followed the SoP and Rules of Engagement before resorting to indiscriminate and disproportionate firing. None of the victims had any prior criminal history or connections to any illegal or prohibited groups. They were not armed nor could they be considered even remotely as \u201cenemies\u201d under Section 3(x) of the Army Act, 1950.The Centre\u2019s refusal to grant sanction for prosecution of the accused amounts to the state sanctioning heinous acts of violence against its own people. It may be also pointed out that merely trying the accused in a civilian court does not conclude that the accused are guilty. In this regard, it may be recalled that the Supreme Court ruled in 2016 that if an offence is committed by army personnel, there is no concept of absolute immunity from trial by the criminal court constituted under ordinary law. (para 163, Extra Judicial Execution Victim Families Association v Union of India). The Court held that every instance of the use of excessive or retaliatory force by army personnel needs to be probed. If there is a prima facie case against army personnel, strict penal action needs to follow, it said. AFSPA 1958 was enacted for Naga hills and till today no security personnel has been convicted for alleged heinous crimes. State-sponsored terrorism is what happens when men in uniform kill defenceless, innocent civilians while leaving the victims with no way to seek justice from the criminal justice system. Sadly even the recommendation of the Jeevan Reddy commission set up in 2005 which recommended review of AFSPA was rejected in 2015. In the case of Oting massacre, the act of providing employment and ex-gratia cannot substitute justice but ensuring that the guilty is\/are punished as per the law of the land.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Justice still eludes the 13 victims of the Oting massacre in Mon district, after the Ministry of Defence(MoD) on April 14,2023 refused sanction for prosecution of all 31 personnel of the Alpha unit of the 21 Paras on December 4, 2021. The victims were returning home for Christmas from Tiru when they were ambushed . […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[685],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-340402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=340402"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340402\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=340402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=340402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=340402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}