Force-Fed Sharmila Fights On for Freedom From Armed Oppression
    By J. Sri Raman
    t r u t h o u t | Columnist

    Thursday 30 November 2006

    It was a small, double-column story tucked away into an inside page of a newspaper that came as a sharp, stinging reminder of a saga. Visiting Iranian human-rights activist Shirin Ebadi, said the story, on Tuesday called on the much less known Irom Chanu Sharmila, a woman from India's State of Manipur, on a hunger strike in a New Delhi hospital.

    Hunger strikes, which Mahatma Gandhi popularized as a form of protest, are common enough in India. This, however, is a different case. Sharmila, a 34-year-old woman, has been on a hunger strike for over six years. Or, more correctly, she has been force-fed, as she has fought on since 2000 for freedom from armed oppression.

    Sharmila's single, specific demand has been for the scrapping of a draconian law titled the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958, or the AFSPA. The law has posed a dire threat to the liberty, life, and dignity of the people in Manipur, one of the insurgency-prone tribal states in India's northeast.

    Sharmila's epic fast started on November 6, 2000, four days after men of the Indian armed forces reportedly opened fire on ten youths waiting at a bus stand in Malom, near the airport of Imphal, capital of Manipur, and killed all of them. The AFSPA empowered the men in uniform to kill those merely suspected to be the country's separatist enemies.

    To Sharmila and to other Manipuris, the atrocity did not come as a shock. The AFSPA did not only give even officers of the lowest rank in a "disturbed area" such a license to kill for the sake of law and order, it also authorized what functioned as an occupation army "to destroy any shelter, from which armed attacks are ... likely to be made." On "reasonable suspicion," any person could be arrested without a warrant, and so could any premises be entered and searched. Obviously, these provisions made a host of human rights abuses possible, and the hapless people of the state had not been spared any of them.

    While the victims of the Act belong mostly to weaker sections, women have been particularly vulnerable to its abuse. By all local accounts, rape-and-murder sequences had been made to look like part of routine anti-insurgency investigations even earlier.

    The Malom incident, however, created the psychological moment for a major popular movement against the Act. And it made Sharmila join the struggle. When she sat in a public place and declared her resolve not to "drink a drop of water" until the AFSPA was withdrawn, she encountered some ridicule. It turned into respect, and something like reverence, as she continued the fast through days, weeks, and months.

    Over the years, she has become a living legend. Or a legend kept alive by force-feeding on behalf of armed forces. Nose-fed and tube-fed, she has continued to emulate the example of the founder of India's freedom from colonial rule, whom a nuclear-proud New Delhi hails as the Father of the Nation with despicable hypocrisy. Arrested and re-arrested, moved from prison to prison and from hospital to hospital, she has refused to call off her fast, making November 6 an anniversary of Manipur's struggle.

    The fast has continued despite the fluctuations in the movement. Sharmila returns like a painful memory whenever the movement shows resurgence, but her struggle does not cease when the media turns its attention to other matters.

    I wrote of her last in these columns over two years ago ("Manipur's Magnificent Struggle," August 22, 2004). The main focus then was on another woman activist, Thangjam Manorama Devi, who had been raped and murdered. As I reported, a unit of the armed forces had taken 32-year-old Manorama "into custody as a suspected separatist," and she never returned to tell what had transpired. According to reports that call for an inquiry into what might have remained one of many such cases and complaints on record, "the soldiers had pumped bullets into Manorama's genitals to cover up the gender part of their crime."

    This led to a protest by nude Manipuri women against naked militarism outside the camp of the unit Assam Rifles, with the demonstrators daring the soldiers to rape them en masse. The protest drew countrywide attention, but so did Sharmila's continued and dignified fast against the crimes of many years against the Manoramas of Manipur.

    The mandarins of New Delhi , of course, have managed bigger crises. They got over this one simply by setting up an inquiry by a retired judge of India's Supreme Court. But, the contents of the Justice Jeevan Reddy Commission, submitted in June 2005 and stated to contain strictures on the armed forces, have been neither divulged nor discussed in public.

    The mainstream media outside Manipur might have forgotten about Sharmila forever, but for her success in smuggling herself out of Manipur and into New Delhi last month. The first thing she did in the country's capital was to visit the Mahatma's tomb, and then she proceeded to continue her fast at a public spot. The official response was predictable. In a midnight swoop, the police arrested her and put her in the prestigious All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS).

    Meanwhile, in Manipur, they registered a police case against her under section 125 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). This provision deals with a threat to the security of the president and the prime minister of India (which this fasting, fragile woman's presence in the capital is supposed to represent)!

    In the high-profile hospital, she continued to be force-fed, under heavy armed security. Neither the AIIMS nor any other authority has seen fit to issue a bulletin on her health, though sources close to her say that she feels weak and that her bones have become brittle. A medical manual I consulted says that "long-term use of nasal steroids may cause fungal infections of the nose or throat." It also warns that nose-fed intakes may enter one's bloodstream and adds: "This may have undesirable consequences that may require additional corticosteroid treatment. This is especially true for children and for those who have used this for an extended period of time."

    Also relevant to Sharmila's case is a recent statement by 250 medical leaders on force-feeding in remote Guantanamo Bay. The March 11 issue of British medical journal The Lancet carries a letter by these leaders, condemning the practice of force-feeding detainees, "strapped into restraint chairs in uncomfortably cold isolation cells, to force them off their hunger strike." Attorneys for the detainees are said to have reported extreme suffering among their clients as a result of painful force-feeding methods via nasal tubes and prolonged shackling in the restraint chairs.

    A report on the statement notes that US military officials have acknowledged the use of such aggressive tactics in order to break hunger strikes at the detention facility. The Indian authorities have not denied force-feeding their detainee, either.

    Sharmila is more than a Manipuri activist. She and her struggle, for freedom and against armed occupation and oppression, are metaphors with a larger meaning.