Defence minister Rajnath Singh on Saturday said all three defence services wanted the removal of Armed Forces Special Powers Act from Jammu and Kashmir soon, news agency ANI reported.
The defence minister was speaking during the felicitation of 1971 war veterans at Guwahati in Assam. This is not the first time when Rajnath Singh has spoken on the removal of the AFSPA in the Kashmir valley. During his visit to J&K as the home minister way back in 2015, Singh had said that the armed forces act can be removed with the situation is conducive. The AFSPA was imposed in July 1990 in the Kashmir Valley and in August 2000 in the Jammu region to curb insurgency.
“AFSPA was removed from 15 police stations in Manipur and Nagaland. That in itself means a lot. This is the result of durable peace and stability in this area,” the minister added.
“It’s no small thing that for the last 3-4 years, the work of removing AFSPA is being done in the northeastern states. Recently AFSPA was completely removed from 23 districts of Assam,” the minister recalled the recent developments on the AFSPA in the north eastern states.
