Nagaland civilian killings | A Christmas of grief in Mon
The Hindu
Following a tip-off about a possible movement of insurgents, trigger-happy armed forces shot dead 13 innocent civilians in Mon district of Nagaland on December 4. Rahul Karmakar reconstructs the events of that tragic day which have soured relations between the villagers and the armed forces and led to protests against the AFSPA
Seven minutes before all hell broke loose, Kepwang Wangsa Konyak recalled handing over his phone to a soldier on the passenger seat of one of the three SUVs parked midway on the steep kutcha road between the hilltop Oting village and the coal mines of Tiru Valley close to Assam. The soldier, his face barely visible in the dark, appeared to be in command. He was the only one who spoke but in monosyllables.
Kepwang, the president of the Oting Students’ Union, was among scores of villagers who had converged past 10 p.m. on December 4 at the spot from where they had heard a volley of gunshots about six hours earlier. Some had come down from Oting village about 4 km uphill and some from Upper Tiru and the adjoining Lower Tiru villages a couple of kilometres downhill.
The former BJP MLA of Udupi K. Raghupathi Bhat claimed on Saturday that he contesting the Legislative Council elections from South West Graduates’ Constituency as rebel candidate made the saffron party field its party leader C. T. Ravi in the biennial elections to the Legislative Council from the Legislative Assembly.