The phased withdrawal of AFSPA from the Northeast is both a security imperative and a human rights necessity. Critically examine.

The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958 lets a government declare a "disturbed area" under Section 3 and arms the forces with powers of arrest, search and lethal force under Section 4 [1]. Its calibrated rollback since 2022 rests on twin logics — a normalised security landscape and the restoration of citizens' rights — though the process remains incomplete and reversible.

Withdrawal as a security imperative

• Falling insurgency: disturbed areas were reduced in Nagaland, Assam and Manipur in 2022 [2] and again in 2023, after full withdrawal from Tripura (2015) and Meghalaya (2018) [3].
• Negotiated settlements have replaced coercion; the June 2026 Centre–Assam–Nagaland tripartite MoU on oil and gas in the disputed border belt marks a shift from conflict management to development [4], with near-complete rollback promised by 2027 [5].
• Population-centric security: consent of local communities is a force multiplier on a frontier abutting five countries, and station-level demarcation returns primacy to the state police.

Withdrawal as a human rights necessity

• Section 6 bars prosecution without prior Central sanction, creating a structural accountability gap [1].
• In EEVFAM v. Union of India (2016) the Supreme Court rejected blanket immunity and ordered inquiry into alleged fake encounters in Manipur [6].
• The Jeevan Reddy Committee (2005) recommended repeal; Irom Sharmila's 16-year fast reflected the alienation the Act generated.

A critical caveat

• Rollback is an executive notification, not statutory repeal — it can be reversed, as Manipur's ethnic violence shows.
• Sustaining it demands police modernisation and intelligence capacity, plus redressal of past grievances; otherwise withdrawal is procedural, not transformative.

Thus the two rationales converge rather than compete: security gains make withdrawal feasible, while rights concerns make it necessary. The way forward lies in pairing rollback with capacity-building, time-bound accountability for pending cases and continued peace accords — anchoring Northeast policy in the constitutional promise of dignity and equal protection.