At least 30 people were injured in fresh clashes on Sunday between demonstrators and security forces in India's troubled Manipur state, where people have taken to the streets against an anti-terror law.
Manipur, a remote north-eastern state known as the Land of Jewels, has been simmering for nearly a month with hundreds of people demanding the withdrawal of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which gives sweeping powers to security forces.
The armed forces say they need the act, giving them special powers to kill and arrest suspected rebels, to fight separatists in the state, one of seven in the revolt-racked north-east.
Anger against the security forces has been running deep in Manipur for months, but things came to a head after soldiers picked up a 30-year-old woman, Thangjam Manorama, from her house.
Activists in the state say she was raped and then shot to death on the night of July 10, because she was a suspected separatist. Security force officials deny that.
"There was growing public anger against security forces since early this year because at least 20 innocent people were killed on mere suspicion of being militants," Laishom Ibomcha, a lawmaker, told Reuters in the state capital, Imphal. After about a month of violent protests, hospitals in Imphal are packed with hundreds of injured people, mostly women and students, with bullet wounds, fractures and burns from skirmishes with police for violating a curfew.
Armoured vehicles patrol city streets while heavily armed soldiers and commandos in black bandanas walk through lush green paddy fields to keep a watch on rebel hideouts inside thick forests in the surrounding cloud-covered hills.
"We always feel Indian politicians deliberately discriminate against us racially, politically, economically and socially," said R.K. Anand, a leading lawyer in Manipur. The anti-terror law is in force in seven north-eastern states, also known as the seven sisters, which have been torn by separatist insurgencies for decades. More than 10,000 people have died in three decades of violence in Manipur alone.
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