AFSPA Rollback: Centre Plans Near-Complete Withdrawal from the Northeast by Next Year

Why in News?

Union Home Minister Amit Shah announced in New Delhi on June 11, 2026 that the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958 — AFSPA — will be withdrawn from the entire Northeast, barring one or two states, by next year.

• The setting was deliberate: he spoke at the signing of a tripartite memorandum of understanding (MoU) between the Centre, Assam and Nagaland that unlocks oil and gas exploration along their disputed border after a freeze of more than three decades.
• More than 80% of the region is already outside AFSPA’s ambit, per the Home Minister.
• Around 12 peace accords signed since 2019 have cut violent incidents across the region by roughly 80%.
• The disturbed-area map has shrunk for a decade: Tripura exited in 2015, Meghalaya in 2018, and the first major district-level rollback in Assam, Manipur and Nagaland took effect on April 1, 2022.

The development matters in the context of:

• GS3 internal security — insurgency in the Northeast and security legislation.
• GS2 polity and governance — centre-state relations, special laws and federal bargaining.
• The essay paper’s recurring peace-and-development theme.

UPSC Relevance

Prelims Relevance

• AFSPA enacted September 11, 1958 as the Armed Forces (Assam and Manipur) Special Powers Act; a 1972 amendment extended it to all northeastern states and gave the Centre concurrent power to declare disturbed areas.
• It descends from the colonial Armed Forces (Special Powers) Ordinance, 1942, promulgated during the Quit India movement.
• Section 3: the Governor, a UT Administrator or the Central Government can declare an area “disturbed”.
• Section 4: in a disturbed area, personnel may fire upon persons even to the causing of death, arrest without warrant, search without warrant, and destroy arms dumps and fortified shelters.
• Section 5: an arrested person must be handed to the nearest police station with the least possible delay.
• Section 6: no prosecution of personnel without prior sanction of the Central Government — the immunity clause.
• Naga People’s Movement of Human Rights v Union of India (1998): Supreme Court upheld AFSPA but required six-monthly review of disturbed-area declarations.
• Extra Judicial Execution Victim Families Association v Union of India (2016): no absolute immunity; every alleged extra-judicial killing must be investigated.
• Justice B.P. Jeevan Reddy Committee (2005) recommended repeal, moving essential provisions into the UAPA; the Second ARC also favoured repeal.
• Justice Verma Committee (2013) wanted sexual offences by personnel tried under ordinary criminal law.
• Current footprint (mid-2026): most of Manipur (except 13 valley police-station areas), nine Nagaland districts plus 21 police stations, three Arunachal districts (Tirap, Changlang, Longding) plus parts of Namsai, and three Assam districts (Tinsukia, Sivasagar, Charaideo).
• Article 371A gives the Nagaland Legislative Assembly decisive say over ownership and transfer of land and its resources — why a negotiated MoU was needed for the border oil fields.

Mains Relevance

GS Paper 3 (Internal security):

• The textbook case study of insurgency management — peace accords, surrender-and-rehabilitation, development incentives and calibrated legal withdrawal as one strategy.
• Security legislation: provisions, the committees that wanted repeal, the Supreme Court’s guardrails, and the conditions under which withdrawal sticks.

GS Paper 2 (Polity and federalism):

• The Assam–Nagaland oil MoU, with 50:50 revenue sharing brokered by the Centre, is a live example of cooperative federalism resolving a boundary-linked resource conflict.
• Engages Nagaland’s special position under Article 371A and asymmetric federalism and the Sixth Schedule’s autonomous councils.

Essay and Ethics

• Liberty versus security, the moral cost of legal immunity, and the peace dividend as a development argument; Irom Sharmila’s protest and the Oting incident supply ready case-study material.

Background and Context

For a law that has shaped life in the Northeast since 1958 and anchored one of India’s longest-running civil-liberties debates, a near-complete exit timeline is an inflection point.

What Just Happened

• Shah said he was “fully confident that, except for one or two states, we will be able to completely remove AFSPA from the entire Northeast next year.”
• He credited the roughly 12 accords since 2019 between militant groups, state governments and the Centre for the ~80% drop in violent incidents, and noted PM Modi’s frequent visits to the Northeast.
• The Centre, Assam and Nagaland signed a tripartite MoU to restart oil and gas exploration in the Disputed Area Belt (DAB) along the Assam–Nagaland boundary — frozen for over 30 years over overlapping claims in sectors labelled A to E.
• Petroleum Minister Hardeep Singh Puri, Assam CM Himanta Biswa Sarma and Nagaland CM Neiphiu Rio attended; the framework covers more than 1,000 sq km and six disputed oil fields, with 50:50 sharing of proceeds including royalties.
• Extraction could rise tenfold from the current 1,000–1,500 barrels per day; a single field could yield recoveries above Rs 15,000 crore. Shah called it a historic moment with “neither a winner nor a loser”.

Where AFSPA Stands Today

• Manipur: the whole state except areas under 13 police stations in five valley districts — Imphal West, Imphal East, Thoubal, Bishnupur and Kakching.
• Nagaland: nine districts and 21 police stations spread across five more districts.
• Arunachal Pradesh: Tirap, Changlang and Longding districts plus areas under three police stations of Namsai district.
• Assam: shrunk to three districts — Tinsukia, Sivasagar and Charaideo — after the Act was lifted from Dibrugarh.
• Tripura, Meghalaya and Mizoram are entirely outside the regime; Shah did not name the “one or two states” that may stay under AFSPA.

Statutory Lineage and Provisions

• AFSPA’s lineage runs to the colonial Ordinance of 1942 (to crush Quit India); revived in September 1958 for the Naga insurgency, then renamed and extended across the Northeast by the 1972 amendment.
• Section 3 (disturbed-area declaration) is the trigger for everything else; the Supreme Court requires review every six months.
• Section 4 grants the special powers; Section 5 mandates custody handover with least delay; Section 6 is the central-sanction immunity clause at the heart of the controversy.
• A fuller breakdown is in the standing note on AFSPA: provisions and controversies.

The Long Criticism Arc

• NPMHR (1998): upheld the Act but bound it with periodic review and the army’s “dos and don’ts”.
• The 2004 custodial death of Thangjam Manorama and Irom Sharmila’s 16-year hunger strike (2000–2016) pushed the Centre to set up the Justice B.P. Jeevan Reddy Committee (2005), which recommended outright repeal.
• The Justice Santosh Hegde Commission (2013), appointed by the Supreme Court, examined six alleged encounter killings in Manipur and found none genuine.
• EEVFAM (2016): no absolute immunity; every alleged extra-judicial killing in a disturbed area must be investigated.
• The December 2021 killing of civilians at Oting, Mon district, Nagaland reignited the debate and triggered the April 2022 rollback.

The Withdrawal Story: Accords and Notifications

• Mizoram was the original template — the 1986 Mizo Accord turned an insurgent outfit into a governing party; the state was recently declared insurgency-free.
• Tripura revoked AFSPA in 2015 after counter-insurgency success; Meghalaya followed in 2018.
• Post-2019 accords include the NLFT agreement in Tripura (2019), the Bru–Reang settlement and the Bodo Peace Accord (both January 2020), the Karbi Anglong agreement (2021), the Assam–Meghalaya boundary agreement (2022), the DNLA pact (2023), the UNLF agreement (November 2023, the first with a valley-based Meitei insurgent group), and the ULFA pro-talks faction accord (December 2023).
• Thousands of cadres surrendered and entered rehabilitation; each accord made it possible to thin the disturbed-area notifications — the mechanism behind the “80% AFSPA-free” figure.

Internal Security Lens

• Peace as the precondition for capital: accords end the shooting, ended shooting lets notifications lapse, lapsed notifications signal normalcy, and normalcy convinces investors to sink capital into exploration and infrastructure.
• The DAB is the cleanest illustration — oil worth thousands of crores sat untouched because two states could not agree on whose writ ran, and Article 371A meant no settlement could be imposed from Delhi; the 50:50 formula is a negotiated federal bargain, not a directive.
• De-notification is not repeal: what is phased out is the set of Section 3 notifications, not the Act, which stays on the statute book and can be re-imposed in six-month cycles; the Jeevan Reddy recommendation to repeal has never been implemented.
• Withdrawal transfers the security function from the army to civil administration, demanding investigation capacity, intelligence grids and honoured rehabilitation promises.
• The Manipur-shaped caveat: Manipur is the only state where AFSPA still covers nearly the whole territory, owing to the Meitei–Kuki-Zo conflict since May 2023; notifications even expanded again after the violence — proof the rollback is reversible.
• Structural lesson: the legal map follows the political settlement, never the other way round. Where accords created stakeholders in peace, withdrawal has held; where disputes over land, identity and power remain open, no notification calendar is credible.

Challenges and Concerns

• Manipur’s unresolved ethnic conflict makes a uniform timeline uncertain — notifications have already expanded once since 2023, showing the rollback can reverse.
• De-notification is not repeal: the Act, its Section 6 immunity and the entire legal architecture survive intact, so the civil-liberties debate continues even after withdrawal.
• State police capacity in former AFSPA areas is uneven; intelligence networks and counter-insurgency grids built around the army cannot be replicated overnight.
• Accountability is incomplete — EEVFAM-mandated probes moved slowly, and prosecution in the Oting case was foreclosed when the Centre declined sanction under Section 6.
• Residual insurgent factions retain cross-border sanctuaries in Myanmar, where post-2021 instability keeps arms, cadres and safe havens within reach.

Way Forward

• Close the remaining political questions — a settlement of the Meitei–Kuki-Zo conflict in Manipur and conclusion of the long-pending Naga peace process — so de-notification rests on resolved disputes rather than lulls in violence.
• Invest visibly in the civilian security apparatus that must inherit the ground: trained state police, functioning criminal-justice delivery in former disturbed areas, and honoured rehabilitation packages for surrendered cadres.
• Treat accountability as part of the exit — acting on the spirit of the Jeevan Reddy report, whether through repeal, amendment of Section 6, or time-bound completion of pending probes, to convert a tactical withdrawal into a settled constitutional normal.
• Channel oil revenue from the DAB into schools, roads and jobs in the districts that lived longest under the Act, making the transition from security frontier to growth frontier self-reinforcing.

Conclusion

The June 11 choreography was the message: the AFSPA timeline was announced not at a security review but while unfreezing an oil belt locked by jurisdictional conflict for 30 years — peace converting directly into investible territory.

Students must keep the distinction between de-notification and repeal sharp: the law stays on the statute book and can return, as parts of Manipur saw after 2023. A durable exit needs settled political disputes, not just quarters of lower violence statistics.

The strongest position treats the announcement as a milestone inside a process, not the end of the AFSPA question — accountability for past abuses remains unfinished, and a withdrawal that buries grievances without addressing them risks leaving the embers warm.

UPSC Practice Questions

Prelims MCQ 1

With reference to the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958, consider the following statements:

1. Section 3 empowers the Governor, a Union Territory’s Administrator or the Central Government to declare an area “disturbed”.
2. Section 6 bars prosecution of personnel acting under the Act without prior sanction of the Central Government.
3. In Naga People’s Movement of Human Rights v Union of India (1998), the Supreme Court struck down the Act as unconstitutional.
4. The Justice B.P. Jeevan Reddy Committee (2005) recommended outright repeal of the Act.

How many of the above statements are correct?

(a) Only one (b) Only two (c) Only three (d) All four

Answer: (c)

Explanation:

• Statement 3 is wrong: the Court upheld the Act’s constitutionality in NPMHR (1998), while requiring six-monthly review of disturbed-area declarations.
• Statements 1, 2 and 4 are correct — the Section 3 power, the Section 6 sanction bar, and the Jeevan Reddy Committee’s repeal recommendation.

Prelims MCQ 2

The 2026 tripartite MoU on oil and gas exploration in the Disputed Area Belt was signed between the Centre and which two states, with proceeds shared on a 50:50 basis?

(a) Assam and Manipur (b) Assam and Nagaland (c) Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh (d) Assam and Meghalaya

Answer: (b)

The Centre, Assam and Nagaland signed the MoU to restart exploration across 1,000+ sq km of the Assam–Nagaland Disputed Area Belt, with the two states sharing proceeds 50:50. Nagaland’s say over its land and resources flows from Article 371A.

UPSC Mains Questions

“The shrinking footprint of AFSPA in the Northeast reflects a shift from a security-centric to a development-centric approach to insurgency.” Critically examine this statement in the light of the peace accords signed since 2019 and the announced near-complete withdrawal. (GS3, 15 marks)

The 2026 Assam–Nagaland agreement on oil exploration in disputed border areas has been described as a template of cooperative federalism. Examine how negotiated revenue-sharing can resolve inter-state resource conflicts in India. (GS2, 15 marks)

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