The Movement Against AFSPA: Manipur Women’s Struggle for Justice

In July 2004, a black-and-white image travelled across newspapers and television screens around the world. A dozen elderly women stood unclothed outside an army headquarters in Imphal, holding a single banner that read “Indian Army Rape Us.” It was one of the most powerful acts of protest in modern Indian history, and it was born out of grief, rage, and decades of living under a law that gave soldiers extraordinary power over ordinary people. To understand how a group of mothers came to stage such a protest, we need to understand the law they were fighting and the long struggle of Manipur’s women against it.

What is AFSPA and why is it so contested?
The women who fought before the fight became famous
From Nupi Lan to the Meira Paibi
The killing that became a flashpoint
The naked protest of July 2004
What the protest achieved
Irom Sharmila and the longest hunger strike in the world
A Gandhian method of resistance
The wider campaign and its limited gains
Why these protests still matter

What is AFSPA and why is it so contested?

The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958 grants special powers to the armed forces to maintain public order in areas declared “disturbed.” It was first enacted in September 1958 to deal with the Naga insurgency in what were then Assam and Manipur. Its roots go back even further to a British colonial ordinance used during the Quit India movement of 1942, which independent India chose to retain and expand.

The most controversial provisions sit in Sections 3, 4, and 6 of the Act. Section 3 allows the central government, a Governor, or a Union Territory administrator to declare any region a “disturbed area” through a Gazette notification. Once that happens, Section 4 empowers the armed forces to open fire, even to the point of causing death, against any person breaking the law, and to arrest and search premises without a warrant. The provision that draws the deepest criticism is Section 6, which states that no prosecution can be initiated against armed forces personnel without prior sanction from the central government.

This last clause is the heart of the problem. Critics argue it creates near-total impunity. Over the decades, AFSPA has been associated with allegations of extrajudicial executions, enforced disappearances, torture, and sexual violence, with very few cases ever reaching a courtroom. Supporters of the Act counter that the armed forces need legal protection to operate in regions facing armed insurgency, and that without such powers, counter-insurgency operations would become impossible.

The women who fought before the fight became famous

The struggle against AFSPA did not begin in 2004, and it was not started by a single person. To understand it properly, we need to look at the women’s movements that had been a force in Manipuri public life for over a century.

From Nupi Lan to the Meira Paibi

Manipuri women have a long history of collective political action. In 1904 they protested against forced labour imposed on Manipuri men by the colonial administration, and in 1939 they rose again in what became known as the Nupi Lan or “Women’s War” against British economic policies that drained the local economy of rice and other goods. These uprisings established a tradition of women as guardians of their community’s welfare.

That tradition continued after independence through the Meira Paibi, meaning “women torchbearers.” The movement took shape in the late 1970s, around 1977, beginning as a campaign against alcoholism and drug abuse before expanding into a wider defence of human rights. These women, often called “imas” or mothers, would march through city streets at night carrying flaming torches, keeping watch over their neighbourhoods. They stopped army vehicles, rescued young men picked up on false charges, and negotiated their transfer to police custody. Over time they became known as the guardians of civil society in Manipur.

The killing that became a flashpoint

On the night of 10-11 July 2004, Thangjam Manorama, a 32-year-old woman, was taken from her home in Imphal by personnel of the 17th Battalion of the Assam Rifles. The forces alleged she was a member of the banned People’s Liberation Army; her family and neighbours described her as an ordinary woman. According to the arrest memo, no incriminating items were found on her at the time, though the forces later claimed weapons had been recovered.

Hours later, her bullet-riddled body was found near a paddy field some distance from her home. She had been shot several times, with wounds to her thighs and genitals, and forensic examination reportedly found evidence suggesting she had been raped before being killed. The Assam Rifles claimed she had been shot while trying to escape, but no blood was found near the body despite the multiple gunshot wounds. For the people of Manipur, who had endured similar incidents for decades, this case became the breaking point.

The naked protest of July 2004

On 15 July 2004, a group of Meira Paibi women walked to the historic Kangla Fort in the heart of Imphal, then the headquarters of the Assam Rifles. There they removed their clothes and stood before the gate holding a banner reading “Indian Army Rape Us.” Eyewitness accounts describe the women beating their chests and shouting, “We are all Manorama’s mothers. Rape us, kill us”, deliberately in English so that the army and the wider world would understand.

The protest was not a long-planned event. It had been decided just a day earlier, on the sidelines of a meeting of civil society organisations that some of the women felt was producing too much talk and too little action. The number of women is variously reported as twelve who disrobed at the fort gate, with around thirty taking part in the wider march through Imphal. The twelve who led the act are remembered by name within the movement.

The power of the protest lay in its symbolism. These were not young activists but elderly mothers, women whose age and status commanded deep respect in Manipuri society. By stripping away the dignity that society afforded them and offering their own bodies in place of Manorama’s, they confronted the soldiers with the human cost of the law in a way that words never could.

What the protest achieved

The response was immediate and dramatic. An indefinite curfew was imposed across Imphal, and the case became a national and international story. Within months, the Assam Rifles were forced to vacate the Kangla Fort, which they had occupied since the colonial era, and AFSPA was lifted from seven assembly constituencies covering the Imphal municipal area. The state government also ordered a judicial inquiry under retired district judge C. Upendra Singh.

Yet justice for Manorama herself proved elusive. The Assam Rifles approached the higher courts arguing that no inquiry could proceed without central government sanction under AFSPA. The legal battle dragged on for years. A decade after the killing, the Supreme Court ordered the government to pay ten lakh rupees in compensation to Manorama’s mother, which remains, to this day, the only formal acknowledgement by the institutions of justice that she was wronged. No individual has been held criminally responsible.

Irom Sharmila and the longest hunger strike in the world

While the naked protest seized the headlines in 2004, another form of resistance had already been quietly continuing for nearly four years. Its symbol was Irom Chanu Sharmila, a young poet from Imphal East.

Her protest began with another massacre. On 2 November 2000, personnel of the Assam Rifles opened fire at a bus stop in Malom, near Imphal, killing ten civilians, reportedly in retaliation for an insurgent attack on a patrol. Among the dead were a teenage boy who had received a national bravery award and an elderly woman. The incident, which came to be known as the Malom Massacre, shocked Manipur.

Days later, Sharmila began a hunger strike demanding the repeal of AFSPA. What followed was extraordinary. She refused food and water and was arrested by the police, who charged her repeatedly with attempting suicide. For most of the next sixteen years she was held in judicial custody at a hospital in Imphal, where she was kept alive by being force-fed through a tube in her nose. Courts in Manipur consistently ruled that her fast was a peaceful protest rather than a suicide attempt.

A Gandhian method of resistance

Sharmila’s chosen weapon, the fast unto death, places her squarely within a tradition that Mahatma Gandhi made central to India’s freedom struggle. The hunger strike as a tool of moral pressure, in which the protester accepts suffering rather than inflicting it, is one of the most distinctly Gandhian forms of non-violent resistance. Her sustained sacrifice earned her the title “Iron Lady of Manipur” and led to comparisons with figures like Nelson Mandela.

In 2016, after sixteen years, Sharmila ended her fast. She announced that fasting alone had not achieved her goal and that she would change her strategy, choosing instead to contest the 2017 Manipur Assembly elections. As she told reporters, she had fasted for sixteen years without getting what she wanted and now wished to try a different form of agitation. Her decision divided opinion, with some seeing it as a betrayal and others as a pragmatic shift. She fared poorly at the polls, but her years of sacrifice had already made AFSPA a national conversation.

The wider campaign and its limited gains

Manorama’s killing also gave fresh urgency to the institutional campaign for repeal. After her death, thirty-two organisations came together to form a network called the Apunba Lup to press for the Act’s removal. Responding to mounting pressure, the central government appointed a five-member committee headed by Justice B. P. Jeevan Reddy in November 2004 to review the Act in the northeastern states.

The committee’s findings were striking. It recommended that AFSPA be repealed altogether, describing it as a symbol of hate and oppression, and suggested that necessary provisions be folded into the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act instead. The 2012 Justice Verma Committee, set up to examine laws on sexual violence, similarly recommended that sexual offences by armed forces personnel be tried under ordinary criminal law. Successive governments, however, have not acted on the core recommendation to repeal the Act.

There have been partial withdrawals. AFSPA has been completely removed from Tripura and Meghalaya, and from 2022 onwards it was lifted from several police station areas across parts of Manipur, Nagaland, and Assam, citing improved law and order. The Supreme Court, in a 2016 judgment on alleged fake encounters in Manipur, also held that the use of excessive or retaliatory force is not permitted even in disturbed areas. Yet the Act remains in force in large parts of the Northeast and in Jammu and Kashmir, and the impunity that the women of Manipur protested against has not disappeared.

Why these protests still matter

The movement against AFSPA in Manipur represents a remarkable convergence of two strands of non-violent resistance. On one side stood the spectacular, single act of the naked protest, drawing on the women’s identity as mothers to confront state power directly. On the other stood Sharmila’s quiet, sustained Gandhian fast, testing the conscience of the nation through years of personal suffering. Both were rooted in the long tradition of women’s political action in Manipur, stretching from the Nupi Lan uprisings to the torchbearing Meira Paibi.

Neither achieved its ultimate goal of repealing AFSPA. But together they transformed a regional grievance into a national debate about the balance between security and human dignity, and they demonstrated that ordinary women, acting collectively and without weapons, can shake the foundations of even the most powerful institutions.

What do you think? Can a single dramatic act of protest achieve more than years of sustained resistance, or does lasting change require both? And how should a democracy weigh the security powers it grants its armed forces against the constitutional rights of its own citizens?

How useful was this post?

Click on a star to rate it!

Average rating 4 / 5. Vote count: 1

No votes so far! Be the first to rate this post.

References

PDF 📄

Table of Contents

What is AFSPA and why is it so contested? 🔗

The women who fought before the fight became famous 🔗

From Nupi Lan to the Meira Paibi 🔗

The killing that became a flashpoint 🔗

The naked protest of July 2004 🔗

What the protest achieved 🔗

Irom Sharmila and the longest hunger strike in the world 🔗

A Gandhian method of resistance 🔗

The wider campaign and its limited gains 🔗

Why these protests still matter 🔗