 "Irom Sharmila: Born again")
This could be an obituary in anticipation. Ora missing person's report. Irom Chanu Sharmila, after 16 years on hunger strike, has decided to end her life as an icon. She wants to become a politician and be born a woman again. She recently announced she would end her hunger strike, join mainstream politics and fight as an independent candidate in the next assembly elections.
Her life could have been less complicated and less torturous had she been some other person. Sharmila was born in 1972 in Imphal. Her father, Irom Nanda, was an attendant in the state veterinary department and her mother, Irom Sakhi, always the one most aware of her determination. Not great at academics, as a child Sharmila would stay aloof from most in her joint family of 17. Imphal, in those times, gave space for it. The vast rice fields in the valley and the nearby hills would be her playground.
But she sacrificed that life. At the age of 28, shocked by the killing of 10 citizens of her homeland by the armed forces, she decided to go on a hunger strike that would stir a generation and yet not shame a country to repeal the draconian Armed Forces (Special Powers) Acts, or AFSPA.
Sharmila shall soon move on and try to achieve as a person what she failed to convince today's India to do as an icon of peaceful protest - repeal AFSPA. For now, the nation-state can rejoice in the reconfirmation of its omnipotence but India's citizens would have to live with the fact that they collectively failed her.
Her new path would be fraught with greater probability of failure than even her hunger strike. Manipur, home to three large umbrella tribal groups - the Meitei, the Naga and the Kuki-Zomi - is a state mutilated by violence that hides its other complications from the rest of the country. In a society where women can lead social movements but rarely be at the helm of party politics, where people regularly force their lives to halt in protest against the apathy of the state, Sharmila, if elected, would have to deal with more than the loneliness of her confinement. She would have to deal with the narrow confines in which electoral politics has to operate in a province that is treated as a frontier principality by the nation.
The Imphal Free Press's recent editorial said it succinctly that in her epic fight for the repeal of AFSPA, Sharmila increasingly got reduced to a caged icon by both her detractors and supporters. Her support grew on paper but dwindled in real.
In the face of her decision, those who accepted her as an icon, those who doubted her and those who worked as hard against the militarisation aided by the presence of Irom the icon, shall all have to let her go to become a person, a woman and a lover - the existence of a male companion in her life has itself been controversial so far.
Fortunately for those in Manipur who have fought for the repeal of AFSPA and an end to decades of militarisation, the Supreme Court recently gave a verdict that shall keep the fight alive. It asked for a report on more than 1,500 killings after it found several citizens from Manipur, including children, had been murdered in cold blood by state armed forces with little justice or reparations.
One of them was 12-year-old Azad Khan, shot in cold blood in 2009 in front of his parents by state armed forces. A pistol was thrown next to his body to declare the child an armed militant. In a country less willing to accept brutality against its marginalised, Azad's killing would have perhaps become a bigger and more potent icon from the region for protest against AFSPA. But then, it wouldn't have taken till Azad's murder in 2009 for the country to learn its lessons. A country willing to listen would have been warned much earlier from hearing the horror stories of Nagaland before Manipur suffered to tell its.
But India found the apparently peaceful protest of Sharmila more palatable - not requiring us to deal with the immediacy of existing state of brutality in her homeland, yet furtively keeping the society, or at least a section of it, hopefully engaged in preventing a future crime by the country - letting her die.
She failed perhaps in achieving her goal because most others failed to see that her hunger strike was a violent challenge, not a peaceful protest. Bimol Akoijam, a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, puts it sharply when he says Sharmila posed this simple but deadly question at the state, "I know you can kill me, but can you save me?" Akoijam compares it with a tribal woman character in Mahasweta Devi's works, Draupadi, who, standing naked before the policeman, poses a similar question, "I know you can strip me, but can you cloth me?"
In ending her hunger strike unsuccessfully, Sharmila has bared naked the limitations of Indian society's ethical and moral fabric. Hopefully, everyone will now let Irom Chanu Sharmila find her new life. She has done enough for the icon called Irom, the iron lady. She has done enough for homeland Manipur and, therefore, enough for the country.
Her life could have been less complicated and less torturous had she been some other person. Sharmila was born in 1972 in Imphal. Her father, Irom Nanda, was an attendant in the state veterinary department and her mother, Irom Sakhi, always the one most aware of her determination. Not great at academics, as a child Sharmila would stay aloof from most in her joint family of 17. Imphal, in those times, gave space for it. The vast rice fields in the valley and the nearby hills would be her playground.
But she sacrificed that life. At the age of 28, shocked by the killing of 10 citizens of her homeland by the armed forces, she decided to go on a hunger strike that would stir a generation and yet not shame a country to repeal the draconian Armed Forces (Special Powers) Acts, or AFSPA.
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Fearing her suicide would be the most violent attack ever perpetrated against the country's tenuous construct of morality and ethics in a conflict zone, she has ever since been kept incarcerated in a single room of a local hospital - force fed to be kept alive. Her incarceration shall end perhaps. The charges of attempt to suicide too may be dropped eventually.
Sharmila shall soon move on and try to achieve as a person what she failed to convince today's India to do as an icon of peaceful protest - repeal AFSPA. For now, the nation-state can rejoice in the reconfirmation of its omnipotence but India's citizens would have to live with the fact that they collectively failed her.
Her new path would be fraught with greater probability of failure than even her hunger strike. Manipur, home to three large umbrella tribal groups - the Meitei, the Naga and the Kuki-Zomi - is a state mutilated by violence that hides its other complications from the rest of the country. In a society where women can lead social movements but rarely be at the helm of party politics, where people regularly force their lives to halt in protest against the apathy of the state, Sharmila, if elected, would have to deal with more than the loneliness of her confinement. She would have to deal with the narrow confines in which electoral politics has to operate in a province that is treated as a frontier principality by the nation.
The Imphal Free Press's recent editorial said it succinctly that in her epic fight for the repeal of AFSPA, Sharmila increasingly got reduced to a caged icon by both her detractors and supporters. Her support grew on paper but dwindled in real.
In the face of her decision, those who accepted her as an icon, those who doubted her and those who worked as hard against the militarisation aided by the presence of Irom the icon, shall all have to let her go to become a person, a woman and a lover - the existence of a male companion in her life has itself been controversial so far.
Fortunately for those in Manipur who have fought for the repeal of AFSPA and an end to decades of militarisation, the Supreme Court recently gave a verdict that shall keep the fight alive. It asked for a report on more than 1,500 killings after it found several citizens from Manipur, including children, had been murdered in cold blood by state armed forces with little justice or reparations.
One of them was 12-year-old Azad Khan, shot in cold blood in 2009 in front of his parents by state armed forces. A pistol was thrown next to his body to declare the child an armed militant. In a country less willing to accept brutality against its marginalised, Azad's killing would have perhaps become a bigger and more potent icon from the region for protest against AFSPA. But then, it wouldn't have taken till Azad's murder in 2009 for the country to learn its lessons. A country willing to listen would have been warned much earlier from hearing the horror stories of Nagaland before Manipur suffered to tell its.
But India found the apparently peaceful protest of Sharmila more palatable - not requiring us to deal with the immediacy of existing state of brutality in her homeland, yet furtively keeping the society, or at least a section of it, hopefully engaged in preventing a future crime by the country - letting her die.
She failed perhaps in achieving her goal because most others failed to see that her hunger strike was a violent challenge, not a peaceful protest. Bimol Akoijam, a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, puts it sharply when he says Sharmila posed this simple but deadly question at the state, "I know you can kill me, but can you save me?" Akoijam compares it with a tribal woman character in Mahasweta Devi's works, Draupadi, who, standing naked before the policeman, poses a similar question, "I know you can strip me, but can you cloth me?"
In ending her hunger strike unsuccessfully, Sharmila has bared naked the limitations of Indian society's ethical and moral fabric. Hopefully, everyone will now let Irom Chanu Sharmila find her new life. She has done enough for the icon called Irom, the iron lady. She has done enough for homeland Manipur and, therefore, enough for the country.