evidence: The existence of neighbouring adversaries and their involvement in proxy wars in India through support to anarchists causes major concern for the nation’s integrity and unity. Such threats, which are proliferating through emerging technologies and new generations of warfare, cannot be countered by the police forces alone. The AFSPA is simply the empowerment of the military to assume the lead role in countering these trends through legislated authority to conduct operations without reference to civil administration. There are two modes by which the military comes in to support the civil authority. The first is for assistance to the local police to conduct flag marches, quell mobs and protect public property in law-and-order situations—during a reservation-based agitation, for example. [...] There appears some kind of awkward belief in civil society that the military uses its empowerment under the AFSPA to maximise violence, never realising that ‘minimum force’ is its mantra. The very unfortunate recent incident in Mon district of Nagaland, leading to the mistaken identity killing of six innocent citizens by an Army ambush and eight more after the local people responded in anger, has added to the clamour to rescind the Act. The government has taken a call to extend the AFSPA for six months in Nagaland even as a high-power committee is examining its further validity in the light of the existing situation.