THE IROM EFFECT October 2, 2006
seek clarifications and always privately.” She was born on March 14, 1972, in Kongpal Kongkham Leikai in Imphal East, not far, incidentally, from JNIMS. The youngest of nine children, Sharmila was, her brother Singhajit says, adored, the apple of the family’s collective eye. After finishing school, at Ibotonsona Girls Higher Secondary, she became a committed volunteer, attending public meetings and working for social causes throughout the 1990s. In 2000, 0Sharmila was volunteering with Loitongbam’s human rights organisation, riding her bicycle from house to house helping to collect and document stories of gangrape, torture, beatings, and killings.
She began her fast after the indiscriminate shooting, in November that year, of 10 people waiting for a bus in Malom. The wild gunfire was in response to an Assam Rifles convoy being hit by an IED, though only one truck suffered any lasting damage. Yambem Laba was on the State Human Rights Commission at the time and he remembers being told by a doctor at JNIMS that he could keep Sharmila alive only for another day. It was a few days into her fast and the police had already arrested her under section 309 of the Indian penal code for attempting suicide. According to Laba, a fit 61-year-old with a rakish goatee who punctuates every anecdote with elaborate swearing and high-pitched hoots of laughter, he came up with the suggestion to feed Sharmila through a nasal drip. “I told the doctor,” Laba says, a huge moth-eaten Alsatian at his feet, “that if he were to allow Sharmila to die, Manipur would burn and he would be the first to be set alight. That got the bugger’s attention.”
The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act came into force in 1958; by 1980, all of Manipur, which became a full-fledged state in 1972, had been declared a “disturbed area”. The act is an update of a British colonial exigency intended to control the Quit India movement. AFSPA allowed army officers to essentially act with impunity. Soldiers stopped and searched as Sharmila visits Raj Ghat to pay tribute to Gandhi they liked, entered homes without warrants, shot people on the basis that it was necessary “for the maintenance of public order”. It was initially used to control insurgency in the Naga hills, gradually being extended to cover the entire northeast. AFSPA was used in Punjab between 1983 and 1997 and has been in use in Jammu and Kashmir since 1990. Late in the evening, at his desk in the threadbare offices of the Imphal Free Press, where reporters and subeditors work till midnight to put the next day’s edition together, Pradip Phanjoubam, the paper’s highly-regarded editor, wonders rhetorically “what it says about India that it trusts, after seven decades of Independence, neither its people nor its police”. Raj Kadyan, a retired lieutenant general who was the AAP Lok Sabha candidate from Jhunjhunu in Rajasthan, has asserted in interviews that “without AFSPA insurgencies cannot be controlled, the ceasefire between the government of India and Naga separatists in 1997 could never have been negotiated”. Three panels, Phanjoubam counters, set up by the central government, including the Justice Jeevan Reddy Commission, have had their recommendations ignored: “There is, it appears, a powerful lobby that includes both the military and members of the Indian intelligentsia that believes the country cannot hold together without the use of its military on its own people.”
Sharmila’s fortitude, her cussedness, has made her the face of the movement to rid Manipur of AFSPA. Despite her stature and the public nature of her protest, there seems little political will to repeal AFSPA in Manipur. Okrom Ibobi Singh has led the Congress to three election victories in the state; in 2012, the party won 42 out of 60 seats. Each year, Singh extends AFSPA and his electoral prospects appear to suffer no damage. He says that AFSPA has already been removed from the seven assembly segments in Imphal and that there are other more pressing issues that affect the state. Both the BJP and Aam Aadmi Party
AFTER FINISHING SCHOOL, AT IBOTONSONA GIRLS HIGHER SECONDARY, SHE BECAME A VOLUNTEER, ATTENDING PUBLIC MEETINGS AND WORKING FOR SOCIAL CAUSES THROUGHOUT THE 1990s