Examining State Violence in India: Ethnic Conflicts and Insurgencies

When we think about threats to ordinary people, we usually picture criminals, terrorists, or foreign armies. Yet one of the most uncomfortable ideas in the study of human security is that the state itself, the very institution meant to protect citizens, can become a source of harm. State violence refers to the use of force, coercion, and repression by government institutions against their own population, often justified in the name of national security and order. Across the Northeast, Kashmir, and the central tribal belt, this paradox has played out for decades, shaping the lives of millions of citizens who live under exceptional laws and heavy security deployment.

Understanding state violence within human security 🔗

Human security shifts the focus of security from protecting borders to protecting people. From this lens, a citizen tortured in custody or a village displaced by a counter-insurgency operation experiences a failure of security just as real as a terrorist attack. State violence does not always mean tanks on the streets. It includes extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, arbitrary detention, and the legal immunity that allows such acts to go unpunished.

The key legal instrument enabling this in conflict zones is the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958 (AFSPA). Once an area is declared “disturbed,” the Act gives security forces the power to arrest without a warrant, enter and search premises, and use force up to the point of causing death, while shielding personnel from prosecution without sanction from the central government. This combination of broad powers and near-total immunity is what transforms ordinary policing into something far more dangerous for civilians.

The Northeast: insurgency and the politics of force and accommodation 🔗

The Northeast is home to over 200 ethnic groups with overlapping claims to land, identity, and political autonomy. Insurgencies here are not a single movement but dozens of armed groups, each with distinct demands. For long stretches, several of these groups operated with effective impunity in remote areas, challenging the state’s authority and running parallel systems of taxation and justice.

The legal architecture of “disturbed areas” 🔗

AFSPA was first enacted in 1958 to counter the Naga insurgency in what was then a composite Assam. After a 1972 amendment, it was extended across the seven sister states. The law flows from a colonial logic that treats the army and police as complementary tools of control, assuming the “good faith” of forces acting in the line of duty. The problem is that vaguely framed provisions and legal immunity create conditions in which abuse becomes systemic rather than exceptional.

The human rights cost 🔗

The consequences have been severe. The 2004 case of Thangjam Manorama, a Manipuri woman whose body was found bearing signs of torture after she was taken into custody by the Assam Rifles, triggered nationwide outrage and the iconic protest of activist Irom Sharmila, who fasted for sixteen years demanding the law’s repeal. The scale became clearer when the Extra Judicial Execution Victim Families Association of Manipur petitioned the Supreme Court, alleging that 1,528 people were extrajudicially executed by security forces in Manipur between 1979 and 2012. A committee headed by Justice Santosh Hegde later examined a sample of these cases and found most were not genuine encounters, concluding that disproportionate force had been used against people with no criminal record.

Force alongside concessions 🔗

The state’s response has never been purely military. Alongside coercion, the government has offered statehood, autonomous councils under the Sixth Schedule, economic packages, and surrender-and-rehabilitation schemes. The Mizo Peace Accord of 1986 remains the model success, ending a two-decade insurgency through a negotiated settlement that brought the Mizo National Front into mainstream politics. Over time, as violence declined, AFSPA was fully withdrawn from Tripura in 2015 and Meghalaya in 2018, and reduced in Assam, Nagaland, and Manipur. Yet these successes remain exceptions. The ethnic violence that erupted in Manipur in May 2023 between the Meitei and Kuki-Zo communities, leaving over 250 people dead and tens of thousands displaced, shows how quickly fragile peace can collapse when underlying grievances over land and affirmative action go unaddressed.

Kashmir: competing nationalisms and a protracted conflict 🔗

Kashmir is the most visible face of state violence, a conflict spanning more than seven decades and rooted in competing nationalist claims between India and Pakistan. The region’s contested status has made it both a flashpoint for inter-state war and a theatre for sustained internal conflict. Here, the population finds itself caught between militant groups, cross-border tensions, and a heavy security presence.

From armed insurgency to civilian protest 🔗

State violence in Kashmir has moved through distinct phases. The 1990s saw the rise of armed insurgency, massive military deployment, and the imposition of AFSPA in 1990. Counter-insurgency operations were accompanied by documented enforced disappearances, custodial torture, and extrajudicial killings. By the 2010s, the character of resistance shifted toward civilian street protests, often led by young people disillusioned with both armed militancy and conventional politics. The death of teenager Tufail Ahmad Mattoo helped spark the 2010 unrest, in which over a hundred protesters were killed. Scholars describe a population exposed to institutionalised violence and repression, with everyday freedoms of movement, assembly, and expression curtailed under prolonged states of emergency.

The accountability gap 🔗

What sustains this cycle is the absence of accountability. A 2019 report by the UN human rights office documented abuses by both state forces and armed groups, and Human Rights Watch noted that AFSPA remains a key obstacle to accountability because it provides effective immunity for serious violations. When wrongdoing rarely leads to prosecution, alienation deepens and the conditions for renewed conflict persist.

The red corridor: economic roots of the Maoist insurgency 🔗

Not all of India’s internal conflict is about ethnicity or territory. The Naxalite or Maoist insurgency, which a former prime minister once called the country’s gravest internal security challenge, is fundamentally about economic exclusion. It began in 1967 with a peasant uprising in Naxalbari, West Bengal, and grew into a movement claiming to represent the poorest and most marginalised groups, particularly tribal communities and Dalits, through a doctrine of peasant-led armed revolution.

How liberalization deepened the conflict 🔗

The link between economic policy and insurgency is direct. After being largely crushed in the early 1970s, the movement resurfaced in the 1990s as economic liberalization opened the door to private and multinational mining corporations in resource-rich tribal areas. Political scientist G. Haragopal has argued that this intensified resource extraction created direct conflicts between corporate interests and local communities. As tribal populations were displaced from forests and land without adequate rehabilitation, the Maoists found fertile ground for recruitment in regions where the state had delivered exploitation but little development. The security response, including large operations against Maoist strongholds, often deepened the alienation of the very communities caught in between.

The pattern beneath the conflicts 🔗

Three threads connect these very different conflicts. The first is economic disparity, sharpened by post-liberalization policies that widened the gap between booming urban India and neglected peripheries. The second is contested identity, whether ethnic in the Northeast, religious and national in Kashmir, or class-based in the tribal belt. The third, and most damaging for human security, is impunity. When force is deployed without accountability, the line between fighting insurgents and harming citizens blurs.

This is why the reform debate matters. The Justice Jeevan Reddy Committee, set up in 2004, recommended repealing AFSPA, describing it in its report as an object of hate and an instrument of discrimination. The Second Administrative Reforms Commission echoed the call, and in 2016 the Supreme Court ruled that security personnel do not enjoy absolute immunity from trial. Yet the law remains in force, because successive governments have judged the security risks of withdrawal too high. The unresolved tension between order and rights sits at the heart of India’s internal conflicts.

What do you think? If insurgencies are rooted in economic and political grievances, can a primarily military response ever produce lasting peace, or does it risk entrenching the very alienation it aims to defeat? And where should a democracy draw the line between the extraordinary powers it grants for security and the fundamental rights it promises every citizen?

References

1. https://www.icj.org/india-repeal-armed-forces-special-powers-act-immediately/
2. https://scroll.in/article/844249/will-supreme-courts-verdict-on-manipur-fake-encounter-killings-force-the-centre-to-rethink-afspa
3. https://www.eurasiareview.com/02102025-india-afspa-not-a-permanent-crutch-analysis/
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Kashmir_unrest
5. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03068374.2022.2041288
6. https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/07/10/kashmir-un-reports-serious-abuses
7. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Naxalite
8. https://www.efsas.org/publications/study-papers/an-introduction-to-naxalism-in-india/
9. https://spacedaily.com/sd-w-india-declares-victory-over-naxalism-but-the-root-cause-architecture-remains-unresolved/