Abstract
Anniversaries are always special. They hold great significance in one’s life. For scribes like us, it is crucial to remember anniversaries, but we remember occurrence of events of a different kind. For example, we revisit the anniversary of IC 814 hijack or Gujarat riots or 26/11 attacks in order to ingeminate stories of the victims and help them get justice.
Of late, a section of the media has added another date to this list, which is November 4. Twelve years back, on this day, Manipur’s Irom Sharmila Chanu sat on an indefinite hunger strike demanding the repeal of the draconian Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA)—the law in force in the northeast and Kashmir that gives sweeping powers to the army, including the right to shoot on suspicion. In 2010, Sharmila’s silent protest completed a decade. Curious to know what makes the Iron Lady of Manipur, as she is popularly known, this resilient, I had sought an appointment with her. Permission, however, was not easily granted. The request moved from one sarkari office to the other for nearly two months. Finally, I was allowed to meet her on 20 December 2010. Knowing well that even celebrated writer and activist Mahasweta Devi had been denied permission, I considered myself lucky.
Before I met her, I had sketched an image about Sharmila in my mind by reading various newspaper reports that featured her struggle, her pain and her plight. They had made her look gloomy and exhausted. But my perception changed the moment I got the first glimpse of her, when I lifted the green curtains of the ward for under-trials needing medical attention at Imphal’s Jawaharlal Nehru Hospital. She looked frail but cheerful and welcomed me with a wide smile as I walked into the room. Her freshly washed hair smelled of a familiar brand of shampoo. The shiny wet curls of her hair were carelessly playing on her forehead. She looked calm and unencumbered, the fairness of her skin heightened by the pink top that she was wearing.
Strange though it may sound, but of all things, we started talking about food. ‘As a child, I loved eating. After finishing my own meal, I used to eat off others’ plates. My mother often scolded me for this. It is an irony that my struggle is related to food—though it’s about not eating’, Sharmila had said. She spoke haltingly in English. Her voice was frail.
Born on 14 March 1972 in Kongpal Kongham Leikei in the east of Imphal, Sharmila loved eating freshly plucked raw vegetables—peas, cabbage and red spinach. Her other love was pastries.
In fact, a night before she started her fast, she bought two packets of pastries and cakes from a local bakery. ‘I ate all of them to fill my stomach, and vowed that it is my last day of eating. I totally surrendered myself to God’, she recalled. Her fast was triggered by the Malom massacre of 2 November 2000, in which 10 people were killed by security forces on the outskirts of Imphal. She consciously chose to fast because all other forms of protest such as demonstrations or strikes would harm others; fasting could harm only her, and not anyone else.
A day after she began fasting, the police had charged her with attempt to suicide under section 309 of Indian Penal Code (IPC) and had put her in Imphal’s Sajiwa jail. Two and a half months later, she was shifted to the hospital, where she has been nose-fed thrice every day—at 10 am, 2 pm and 9 pm—since then. ‘I don’t feel hungry. The liquid diet keeps my stomach full’, she had said. The plastic tube through which she is fed was hanging close to her neck, but that has become a part of her body over the years.
In 2004, Human Rights Alert (HRA), a collective of lawyers, moved the Supreme Court (SC) to remove the charges against her as her intentions were not to commit suicide. The SC had then asked them to file the case in Gauhati High Court in Manipur, which a year later ordered her release. But then the court was silent on whether such charges should be removed or not. Later, in 2006, Irom Sharmila’s supporters brought her to Delhi to pressurise the Centre to repeal AFSPA, but it was all in vain. After being moved from one government hospital to another for six months, she was later forced to go back to Imphal. Every year, she is released for a day in March only to be arrested the next day and sent back to the hospital.
The youngest of nine siblings, Sharmila grew up a lonely child. She raised chickens, sold their eggs and donated the money to a local blind school. In her childhood, she was not that close to her mother but now back home, Sharmila’s mother Shakhi Devi has been eagerly waiting to hear news on AFSPA and on Sharmila’s release. When I met Shakhi Devi, she told me that she had heard on the radio that the Centre plans to amend the Act, but she wanted the government to scrap it. ‘Only if the law is scrapped, Sharmila will stop fasting. And I will get to see my daughter eating’, the ailing mother had said, sitting in the courtyard of her house. In these 12 years, the mother and daughter have met only once. Shakhi Devi had kept herself away for she feared that she may end up eroding Sharmila’s determination if they meet. Two years ago, when Shakhi Devi was admitted to the same hospital after an asthma attack, Sharmila had visited her at midnight. Shakhi Devi told Sharmila that she would live to see her eat one day—and they hugged each other and cried.
Never academically inclined, Sharmila joined a vocational course for shorthand, typing and journalism after school. Before she went on a hunger strike, Sharmila also wrote columns in a local newspaper and worked in a non-governmental organisation. She had often joined demonstrations when protests spilled out on the streets, mostly revolving around army actions against civilians. She was close to her brother, Irom Singhajit, nearest to her in age. With their parents busy running their grocery shop when she was a child, it was Singhajit who took care of her. Their mother’s breast milk had dried up when Sharmila was born, so Singhajit would take his little sister to other mothers in the neighbourhood who breastfed her. In exchange, he did their household work.
Even today, Singhajit is by her side. He left his job as an agricultural officer in an NGO to garner support for his sister’s struggle. ‘He is like a guardian to me’, she told me. Sharmila, who is now seen as a symbol of resistance in India, stressed that she inherited her willpower from her grandmother, Irom Tonsija Devi. Tonsija Devi, who died in 2007, was a part of the 1939 Nupi Lan movement—a war that women waged against the export of rice by the king, Maharaja Churachand, and the British government. ‘My grandmother was illiterate but she had great knowledge of politics and economics’, Sharmila said, sitting on the bed in her hospital room.
Her room was full of gifts—a wind chime, presented by a filmmaker who directed a short film on her, a red and white Assamese gamcha (thin towel), a gift from a photographer and a statue of Meera Bai, given to her by another nurse, were a few among them. She said that most of her time was spent in doing yoga and writing poetry. Two years back, Zubaan had published 12 of her poems in a volume called ‘Fragrance of Peace’. Books were lying heaped on an iron cot in the room. I had spotted a Khushwant Singh, a Kahlil Gibran and a Chetan Bhagat in the pile of books. ‘Most of these books have been gifted to me by my lover’, she said shyly.
This was the first I had heard of a man in her life, as before this, I had never heard or read of any reference to her love relationship. Initially I hesitated to ask more but Sharmila was clearly keen to talk about him. ‘His name is Desmond Coutinho’, she said. A Briton based in Kerala, he got to know about Sharmila after he read Burning Bright, a 2009 book on the Manipuri struggle written by Deepti Priya Mehrotra. ‘He wrote me a letter after he read the book. We have been exchanging letters since then’, she said, smilingly.
Pointing at the plants—Chinese evergreen (hybrid aglaonema) and ponytail palm (beaucarnea recurvata), among others—surrounding her bed, she told me, ‘These are my friends. I water them, and tell them about my feelings for him’. Minutes later, she asked me if I could call him. I was a bit confused about what to say at the moment but could not refuse her. I rang up a number that she remembered by heart. As I got to talk to Coutinho, Sharmila, like a teenager in love, asked me to tell him that she loved him. Coutinho expressed similar emotions for her and said, ‘Please tell her that I want to come and see her, but I am yet to get the permission’.
In another few minutes, we hung up. And then I suddenly noticed Sharmila’s smiling face turning pale. She immediately covered her face with a book. I noticed tears in her eyes. ‘I miss him. I want them to grant him permission soon’, she told me. Two years later, the permission has not yet been granted. But Coutinho had met her in the court in March last year while Sharmila was being produced before the judiciary—an annual ritual before she gets released for a day. However, Sharmila’s supporters beat him up because they do not approve of the idea of Sharmila having a romantic relationship with a Briton.
Despite such hurdles, their love for each other has not faded away. ‘I fully intend to return to Manipur to marry Sharmila and I will live and die for her. I do not see any other end for us’, Desmond told me in a recent conversation. He had gifted her a wooden statue of the two legendary lovers, Krishna and Radha. ‘He says that he’s Lord Krishna, and I am his Radha’, Sharmila said. As a young woman, she used to ride a bike and had never behaved like a ‘stereotyped girl’ in her younger days, her mother told me. But now, she has started talking of desires that any woman of ‘marriageable’ age would do. ‘I want to get married. I want to be free’, she told me. ‘But’, she stressed, ‘after my demand is met’.
Sharmila was born on a stormy night. According to Coutinho, there will be another storm the day she is released. ‘It will be her rebirth that day’, he had once told me. Till then, we continue to revisit her and reiterate her demand on every 4 November. But is the government listening?