Taha Amin Mazumder,
Manipur’s “Iron Lady” Irom Chanu Sharmila ended her 16-year-long fast on 9 August amid a huge lot of media fanfare, clamour and controversy surrounding her decision to end the fast, to get married to a Goa-born British national Desmond Coutinho and to enter the mainstream politics – with some bits of naivety invoked by expressing her desire to become the Chief Minister of the turmoiled Northeastern state, which has hardly any place now to reckon her bravery or individual freedom of choice.
Irom Sharmila’s epic fasting started on 2 November 2000, demanding repeal of the contentious Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958. Commonly known by its acronym AFSPA, the law gives the armed forces almost absolute impunity from trial by a court against any criminal act carried out by the army personnel in the so-called disturbed areas of India where the act is operational, such as Manipur and Jammu & Kashmir.
According to an Indian Express report published on 10 August 2016, the day after she had broken the epic fast, “From her family to close friends and even neighbours, no one wants to even shake hands with a feisty woman who went without food and water these long years, earning the sobriquet ‘Iron Lady'”.
Since she made the decision public on 26 July, Irom Sharmila has already drawn ire from almost all quarters of the greater Manipuri society. Sharmila’s elder brother Irom Singhajit blamed her fiancé Coutinho for the decision. Singhajit told The New Indian Express, “Possibly, he (Coutinho) influenced her decision, but we can be conclusive only after talking to her. I have been trying to meet her for the past three days, but haven’t got permission.”
The Manipuri women’s Save Sharmila Group, who launched a relay hunger strike in solidarity with Irom, are also now saying that Sharmila must have been “brainwashed” by someone who gave her a mobile and laptop in jail. Evidently, a puritan Manipuri society is resentful more against her decision to get married to a non-Manipuri NRI than her decision to end fasting.
Coutniho himself said he had been threatened to be beaten by Intelligence Bureau (IB) officials in Manipur’s capital town Imphal. In a Times of Assam article, the Goanese-orgin NRI wrote that “in March 2011, it started with 3 IB officers threatening to beat me unconscious and ended with a officer sent from his Uncle’s personal Jeep to roust the Imphal Classic Hotel where I had been staying. On that occasion the Calcutta Telegraph was burnt and banned for several weeks even though they did not mention him by name merely for reporting what happened.”
By “him,” in the article, Coutinho referred to Babloo Loitongbam, an Imphal-based human rights activist and the founder and chief of Human Rights Alert, an umbrella of NGOs surrounding Irom’s struggle.
The brave lady, who fasted for 16 years against a draconian law for a society divided between crony politicians and a dissent population, is no more loved by her own people – a tragedy in its own merit. May anyone ask: why the change of heart of the same people who supported her for all these years?
The answer is simple: people need a symbol of protest, even though they cannot participate in the endless capital sufferings a hero can endure to reach the goal meant to free the people. The people of Manipur have seen her all those years as a symbol, an embodiment of courage that is missing among the commoners, and that’s why they loved her, without realising the truth that individual or personal acts of courage can give a battle heroic grandeur but may not win one. What Irom needed right from the beginning is people’s participation in her journey towards the goal and not their apparent support. Although her struggle has been rooted deep within the Gandhian philosophy of Ahimsa, she did not quite receive the anticipated participation by her own people very much unlike Gandhi himself in his glory days, apart from a few women who decided to hold a relay fasting in solidarity with her epic one, which failed to find justice even after a long passage of 16 years.
She fasted for more than a decade, and what all she actually got was a lot media exposure and not any popular verdict across Indian states as well as politicians against the draconian AFSPA. This happened solely because in a complex polity divided between crony politicians and morally compromised population, a mere personal act of struggle cannot win; rather, it should be a political and participatory struggle to change things from within.
She stood all these years somewhere in the vacuum of a divided Manipur between corrupt politicians and a dissent population. A vacuum-filling struggle can meet its goal only if either side of the battle gives in. In this case, neither of the side gave in. While Manipuri politicians sticked to their path of corruption, dissent voices found alienation as a means to muzzle the mainstream politics, eventually gagging the people and forcing them to flee the state in flocks to suffer in Delhi or Bangalore streets. Diktats imposed by the insurgent groups ban Bollywood songs to the mainland cousine in Manipur, thus alienate the state more from the mainland – creating a wide rift between Irom’s vision of a Gandhian struggle and the non-violent imposition of decrees. Irom realised this rift was taking her nowhere near the goal and that her fasting had rather become a tool to be exploited by both sides of the coin – the politicians and the insurgents. Therefore, she finally had to choose joining politics to clear the mess from within, maybe more or less even realising that it will not be welcomed by her own people. Maybe it’s her choice to marry a non-Manipuri man, maybe it’s the feeling of the end of a symbolic struggle that was solely Manipuri or maybe it’s the typical Manipuri feeling of isolation of living in a buffer state that forces people to denounce not only the mainstream politics but also the culture – but for sure, people are not welcoming Irom’s decision.
Every struggle takes its own time to realisation or to realise the futility of its existence. It took 16 years for Irom to realise that with her personal glory, she cannot do much for the people for whom she is fighting. She has been courageous during the 16-year-long epic fasting. She is brave enough even now to bear with all the criticism she is facing. But then, she is extraordinary, and most people are not that brave to endure all good, bad and the ugly days with equal courage.
So when she decides to trudge through the difficult path of politics, maybe people are not ready yet – because they are under tremendous shock. This shock is sure to wane with time, and people will probably someday realise it soon that whatever just like her epic fasting was for the people’s benefit, her decision to end the fasting and join the mainstream politics also deserves equal salutation because all her moves are for the same people again. She has merely altered the tactics, but not her goal, because her previous tactics failed. People are probably of the opinion that she has stooped from her heroic valor but in actuality, she might have just “stooped to conquer”. She has apparently made her intentions clear when she said, “I need power. In Manipur, politics is so dirty and everyone knows it. But people don’t realise that the people are also involved in this dirtiness.”
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