BackFreed Sharmila, fettered India
If the government of Manipur chooses to appeal Sharmila's release, it will be folly. Manipur will eruptagain
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Where does Irom Sharmila, India’s poster lady of fasting and steadfastness, go from here, now that a sessions court in Imphal has dismissed the case against her for attempting to commit suicide, and ordered on 19 August that she be released?
Sharmila 1.0, born in 1972, grew into a gentle, if passionate, civil rights activist, and avid student of Manipur’s history.
Sharmila 2.0 was born on 2 November 2000 when, just south of the airport at Imphal, troopers of Assam Rifles in a cold-blooded reprisal killed 10 civilians to avenge an attack by rebels. Three days later Sharmila began fasting to protest that latest outrage in a state numbed by outrage; and to demand the removal of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958 (AFSPA) from Manipur.
AFSPA provides India’s Armed Forces and adjuncts such as Assam Rifles—a version of AFSPA also exists in Jammu and Kashmir—to arrest and kill at will anyone in vast stretches of north-east India on the merest suspicion of being a rebel sympathizer. This writ extends to “Any commissioned officer, warrant officer, non-commissioned officer or any other person of equivalent rank in the armed forces…"
Sharmila refused to eat until AFSPA was repealed. Arrested on the charge of attempting to commit suicide under section 309 of the Indian Penal Code, she has for these past 14 years been force fed through a nasal drip under the supervision of Manipur’s prison authorities. Significantly, she didn’t resist being fed thus, a point in her favour.
It will be folly to speak on behalf of Sharmila 3.0, now 42. Her family, friends, those who have used her to feather personal nests, even those who have abused her for placing the idea of civil rights over the idea of India, know this well: she possesses singular, obsessive will.
Sharmila will likely continue her iconic protest against AFSPA. She could continue to fast—nasal drip intact—till the law is repealed (or even, diluted). She could even settle down, after a fashion, as a family person.
That is her business.
What should be that of the government?
If the government of Manipur (on its own, or pressured by myopic colleagues in government of India) chooses to appeal Sharmila’s release, it will be folly. Manipur will erupt—again.
The Indian government and its agencies have generally employed arrogant, obtuse and knee-jerk reactions over aspects of identity and aspiration across India. Such behaviour led to the birth of rebel groups in Manipur. It has sustained near-continuous protests. It has led to fiery poetry, like that of Arambam Samarendra, co-founder of the United National Liberation Front: “…Your heavens above are filled with smoke/rising ceaselessly from the smouldering pyres/of your dead sons…"
Incidents such as the one that prompted Sharmila’s fast aren’t rare. It took massive public protest in 2004—including several naked women carrying a banner declaring “Indian Army Rape Us", and cases of self-immolation—over the rape and custodial killing of Thangjam Manorama by Assam Rifles personnel for the prime minister at the time, Manmohan Singh to hand back Kangla Fort to “the people of Manipur".
Kangla, in the heart of Imphal, is also the symbolic heart of Manipur: where its royalty lived; where the sacred grounds of the earliest clans are. The British took it over after defeating Manipuri forces. Later Assam Rifles barracked in it, this symbol of pride preserved as one of prejudice.
Little has happened since 2004, either through words or gestures.
Any resident of Manipur and its capital Imphal, or a regular visitor, will vouch that in the scant patches of the municipal limits of the state capital, there has been no attitudinal difference since the removal of AFSPA in such places in the mid-2000s. Operations to flush out rebels—as collateral damage they inflict civilians with harassment, arrest, extrajudicial killings—have since continued at such places, let alone where AFSPA is fully enforced.
Rebels have been diminished by coordinated operations, numerical strength and diplomatic initiatives in Bangladesh and Myanmar. Not AFSPA, which protects security forces, not citizens they are supposed to protect.
The repeal of AFSPA—suggested by top security professionals, parliamentarians and jurists since at least 2005—or even its dilution, will be a good second, emotionally palliative step to the creditable first that ordered Sharmila’s release. The necessary step of reducing human rights violations, of dragging Manipur and India’s intertwined constitutional dignities out of the morass can follow along a parallel track. As can other surefooted steps to talk peace with rebels.
Sudeep Chakravarti’s latest book is Clear-Hold-Build: Hard Lessons of Business and Human Rights in India. His previous books include Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country and Highway 39: Journeys through a Fractured Land. This column, which focuses on conflict situations in South Asia that directly affect business, runs on Fridays.
Respond to this column at rootcause@livemint.com
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