Rule of Law, Violence and Exception: Deciphering the Indian State in the Thangjam Manorama Inquiry Report

Abstract

In this article, I draw on Nasser Hussain’s conceptualizations on rule of law, violence, and exception to read the Inquiry Commission Report on the torture and murder of Thangjam Manorama in 2004. While clearly the Commission strongly condemns the torture and murder of Manorama, it continues to represent one of the most serious tensions that exist in the context of the rule of law and emergency that Hussain mentions in British colonial times. The Commission report attempts to resolve the tension between political exigencies and rule of law by restricting itself to being a procedural effort to deal with what is essentially a political and national security regime that ends up being curiously reminiscent of colonial reports. In other words, rather than recognizing the role of extraordinary laws such as AFSPA (Armed Forces Special Powers Act) in creating such situations, the report primarily recognizes procedural violations as responsible for the violence against Manorama. The report then ends up being a paternalistic symbolic act that fails to acknowledge the political authority of the state in conflict areas and the regime of impunity created by the very existence of the laws such as the AFSPA. However, I note that in the postcolonial context, the contestations of hyperlegality also reflect a tension between a rejection of emergency provisions for the Northeast and an inability to embrace excessive violence that the Constitution otherwise prohibits. I argue that the postcolonial state is unable to contain this tension successfully between political exigencies and the rule of law in the Thangjam Manorama case due to the continued demands for accountability by those resisting this law and protesting her and other deaths. Regardless of the intent of the author, the report following this particular death appears to have generated a fissure in the postcolonial legal narrative that reveals the excessive violence embedded in the AFSPA regime that cannot be easily embraced and yet cannot be denied and becoming increasingly difficult to contain and legitimize.