Give a miss call to Amnesty : Brave campaign
- The Sangai Express Editorial :: June 16 2018 -
Brave campaign. It certainly takes more than mere guts to take on the State police and the security personnel and make them sweat and toss and turn for the brute excesses which the people of Manipur have been subjected to for decades.
Before the Supreme Court of India admitted the alleged extra-judicial executions petition filed by EEVFAM and HRA sometime in 2012, it was routine for the newspapers of Manipur to carry news items under headings such as ‘One killed in shoot out.’
The content of all the stories was somewhat similar, with the police proclaiming that a suspected underground cadre was killed in retaliatory firing by the security personnel.
It was again the same thing when it came to the Central security personnel.
Reporters who had covered such stories regularly knew how to pen down the report in a jiffy and it was not uncommon for some senior crime reporters to say that covering such stories was like an exercise in filling up the blanks.
Just write down the standard lines and fill in the name of the deceased, the police station concerned, and the place of incident and presto a hot news is ready to go to print.
This was how the scenario was like, a grim one, but after the Supreme Court took up the case and thundered, “How can a 14 year old boy be a terrorist ?,” things seemed to improve with such reports diminishing day by day.
However as is the wont of the State police, they were more than willing to feed, hot news to the media and so it was that a story of how the residence of a member of EEVFAM was ransacked by police personnel on trumped up charges hit the newspapers of Imphal some time back.
The widow is a prominent member of EEVFAM, having taken up the fight on behalf of her deceased husband, who was killed in an alleged encounter some years back.
Intimidate them. Frighten them into quiet submission, seems to be the ploy that was adopted, but far from submitting to such a bullying tactic, Amnesty International, India in association with HRA and EEVFAM has taken the crusade against the excesses of the police to a higher plane and this may best be explained by the campaign that has been launched, inviting people to give them a miss call.
The more the number of miss call, the stronger the case of the rights defenders will be.
Time for all to stand up for these brave people and readers are urged to give the miss call, for that would be more than saying that the people do stand by these crusaders-crusaders for human rights.
Tough to say how many security personnel will be nailed by the Supreme Court, but surely the strong stand taken by the apex Court of the country must have surely rattled them.
The case seems to be on track and it is only right that all extend whatever co-operation they can to help Amnesty International, India, EEVFAM and Human Rights Alert build a strong case so that the guilty will be made to face the music.
That swagger, the haughtiness, the devil may care attitude has been reined in to a certain extent after the Supreme Court took up the case, but this is not enough for the last word is yet to be said.
As stated earlier, give the miss call to Amnesty International and help it build a strong case so that bullying tactics do not work.
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