 |
Photo
by Gauri Gill |
| |
Manipur has been a
wasteland of fear and counter-fear for decades. Tell the State
force is no way to deal with such unrest and it is
unimpressed |
An ordinary November
evening in Delhi. A slow halting voice breaks into your consciousness.
“How shall I explain? It is not a punishment, but my bounden duty…”
A haunting phrase in a haunting voice, made slow with pain yet magnetic
in its moral force. “My bounden duty.” What can be bounden
duty in an India bursting with the excitements of its economic boom?
You are tempted
to walk away. You are busy and the voice is not violent in its beckoning.
But then an image starts to take shape. A frail, fair woman on a hospital
bed. A tousled head of jet black curls. A plastic tube thrust into the
nose. Slim, clean hands. Intent, almond eyes. And the halting, haunting
voice. Speaking of bounden duty.
That’s when
the enormous story of Irom Sharmila begins to seep in. You are in the
presence of something historic. Something unparalleled in the history
of political protest anywhere in the world ever. Yet you have been oblivious
of it. A hundred TV channels. An unprecedented age of media. Yet you
are oblivious of it.
Irom Sharmila,
34, has not eaten anything, or drunk a single drop of water for six
years. Six years. She has been forcibly kept alive by a drip thrust
down her nose by the Indian State. For six years, nothing solid has
entered her body. Not a drop of water has touched her lips. She has
not combed her hair. She cleans her teeth with dry cotton and her lips
with dry spirit so she will not sully her fast. Her body is wasted inside.
Her menstrual cycles have stopped. Yet she is resolute. Whenever she
can, she removes the tube from her nose. It is her bounden duty, she
says, to make her voice heard in “the most reasonable and peaceful
way”.
Yet we have remained
oblivious to it. The Indian State has remained oblivious to it.
For six years,
Irom Sharmila has been protesting the indefensible Armed Forces Special
Powers Act (1958) that has been imposed in Manipur and most of the Northeast
since 1980. The Act allows the army to use force, shoot, or arrest anyone
without warrant, on the mere suspicion that someone has committed or
was about to commit a cognisable offence. The Act further prohibits
any legal or judicial proceeding against army personnel without the
previous sanction of the Central Government.
Draconian in letter,
the Act has been even more draconian in spirit. Since it was imposed,
by official admission alone, more than 20,000 people have been killed
in Manipur. Rather than curb insurgent groups, it has engendered a seething
resentment across the land, and fostered new militancies. When the Act
came into force in 1980, there were only four insurgent groups in Manipur.
Today there are 25 on the government’s own watch-list.
A few years ago,
an unedited cd began doing the rounds in civil society circles. It showed
footage of humiliating army brutality and public rage. Images of young
children, students, working-class mothers and grandmothers taking to
the streets, being tear-gassed and shot at. Images of men made to lie
down while the army shot at the ground inches above their heads. Images
of a group of young men in Lamlai rounded up and forced to beat each
other with sticks. With each passing day, the stories gathered fury.
Disappeared boys, raped women. Human life stripped of its most essential
commodity: dignity.
The power of Sharmila’s
story is in her pure,
untutored vulnerability.
If you are looking for the clichéd heat of heroism, you
will be disappointed |
By all accounts,
Manipur has been a wasteland of fear and counter-fear for decades. A
kind of despair runs in its veins. When ordinary people leave their
homes, they are uncertain if they will return. There is no electricity.
The countryside is dark. Everyone is fair game. The army on one side,
rival insurgents on the other. And the crippling disinterest of mainland
India everywhere. Tell the State force is no way to deal with such unrest
and it is unimpressed. Creativity and agility are not attributes governments
understand.
For young Irom Sharmila,
things came to a head on November 2, 2000. A day earlier, an insurgent
group had bombed an army column. Enraged, the 8th Assam Rifles retaliated
by gunning down 10 innocent civilians at a bus-stand in Malom. The local
papers published brutal pictures of the bodies the next day, including
one of a 62-year old woman, Leisangbam Ibetomi, and 18-year old Sinam
Chandramani, a 1988 National Child Bravery Award winner. Extraordinarily
stirred, on November 4, Irom (then 28) began her fast.
Six years later,
sprawled in an icy white hospital corridor in Delhi on a cold November
evening, Singhajit, Irom’s 48-year-old elder brother, says half-laughing,
“How we reach here?” In the echo chambers of that plangent
question lies the incredible story of Irom Sharmila and her journey.
Much of that story must be intuited. Its tensile strength, its intense,
almost preternatural act of imagination is not on easy display. The
faraway hut in Imphal where it began. The capital city now and the might
of the State ranged against them. The sister jailed inside her tiny
hospital room, he outside with nothing but the clothes on his back,
neither well versed in either English or Hindi, and a posse of policemen
at the door.
Menghaobi, the people
of Manipur call her, The Fair One. Youngest daughter of an illiterate
Grade 1V worker in a veterinary hospital in Imphal, Irom was always
a solitary child, the backbencher, the listener. Eight siblings had
come before her. By the time she was born, her mother Irom Shakhi, 44,
was dry. When dusk fell, and Manipur lay in darkness, Irom used to start
to cry. The mother Shakhi had to tend to their tiny provision store,
so Singhajit would cradle his baby sister in his arms and take her to
any mother he could find to suckle her. “She has always had extraordinary
will. Maybe that is what made her different,” Singhajit says.
“Maybe this is her service to all her mothers.”
