Abstract
This chapter looks at the controversial Armed Forces Special Powers Act 1958 (AFSPA) in Manipur as a concrete context of the politics of torture and pain. The contentious agencies at play at various levels interpret torture in their respective ways, either in support of AFPSA, or against it, by parading the objectified enemy and the tortured bodies of victims. This chapter analyses the manner in which individual torture becomes social and political phenomena. It highlights the socio-political construction of torture as a means of organized protest, and argues that the narratives of torture at various levels not only objectify bodies as victims but also encourage them to fight against torture. In that sense, torture that is being rendered demonstratively visible and audible enters into a framework of schematization. Schematized pain involves such strategies as embracing a certain pain to avert torture, making pain demonstrably visible, hurting the pained and fragmenting the depiction of pain. The chapter concludes with the observation that the dialectics of the AFSPA and the tortured bodies suggests a dialectical unity of the opposites in the political totality.
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