The end of the epic sixteen-year fast by Irom Sharmila Chanu should make the Indian Union government heave a sign of relief. Her repeated arrests through the long years should have embarrassed any government with an iota of shame. But not this one. The relief is elsewhere. The epic fast by Irom Sharmila used to continuously bring about a focus around many of the dark secrets of the brutal practices of the Indian state. Now, though the practices will continue, the focus will end.
If people have missed a certain irony, let me state it. Indian media attention was showered on this one event about Irom Sharmila like never before - not when she started, not when she continued, not when she was tube-fed forcibly, not when she was arrested innumerable times, but only when she ended her fast. The end of the fast signaled to Indians that she had come back to their idea of the “mainstream”, which is another word for business-as-usual and hence this focus and celebration of the status quo. What will happen to her? One doesn’t know. And India hardly cares.
India hopes and thinks that Irom Sharmila Chanu has been 'tamed'
How do we know India doesn’t care? For one, Irom Sharmila’s fast pointed to a deeper disease. If drawing attention to that underlying disease didn’t get as much Indian press as the end of the fast, it gives us a good idea about what the priorities are and which narratives are considered acceptable. It is not that the putrid disease has gone away, but now with the end of the fast, India thinks that the stench is manageable and any uncomfortable discussion about the disease that Irom Sharmila’s fast symbolised can be obliterated.
Now Irom Sharmila can be refurbished and reinvented in Delhi’s eyes on a comeback path to normalcy, may be a “Northeastern” Kejriwal of sorts! This failure of imagination is deliberate. It is designed to obfuscate rather than to delve deeper.
Those ‘Idea of India’ folks who think Irom Sharmila Chanu’s struggle is only against the inhuman and degrading Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) - and not against that which causes AFSPA to be imposed on Manipur - want to conveniently brand her as a “human rights” activist as opposed to a campaigner for the rights of Manipuri people. That not-so-subtle move places Irom Sharmila and her epic fast in a pantheon that stretches from the Lokpal fast to corporate ‘Save Tiger, Plant Tree’-type campaigns and to ‘One Rank One Pay’ fasts in Jantar Mantar. This is a necessary first step towards the de-fanging and domestication of the ‘wayward’ elements. A discourse centered around ‘human rights’ implicates no one. But Manipur implicates Delhi as a quasi-imperial formation. Manipur implicates the idea of India. So, for those who ‘stand with Irom Sharmila’ (but not with Manipur, their stance and their vacuous, self-congratulatory idea of being Indian) in actual fact do not stand with Irom Sharmila and Manipur. In fact, it could be argued that they stand in the way of Irom Sharmila and Manipur. Thangjam Manorama Debi saw through that. Everyone except those with tricolour blinders sees through that. Manipur sees through such ‘solidarity’. And it is for this reason that her fast is one of resistance, not an M.K. Gandhi-style blackmail of BabaSaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar before the Poona Pact or Gandhi’s later repeated public relation stunts - when others in the subcontinent were trying other things to topple British imperialism and more, by any means necessary, without obeisance to the Congress-imposed patriarch.
Manipuri activist Irom Sharmila underwent forced feeding, among other ordeals
There is a reason why it is important to focus on the cause - irrespective of whether one agrees with the cause or not - and not the high-decibel aura that a powerful media and government network can instantly create. What did Irom Sharmila Chanu demand through her fast? She demanded that AFPSA be withdrawn from Manipur. She is aware as in any other person living in an AFSPA-affected area that the kind of atrocities that it gives a clean chit to - or worse - are committed even without AFSPA in operation. Few of the khaki-clad perpetrators have ever been brought to justice. So while AFSPA is an issue, it is shorthand for the daily indignity of Manipur.
What triggered this fast? The atrocities by Indian Armed forces in general in Manipur. One can imagine that the gang rape and killing of Thangjam Manorama Debi by state forces in 2004 only strengthened her resolve to continue the fast. Thangjam Manorama Debi was picked up from her home in in Bamon Kampu Mayai Leikai by Indian security forces of the 17th Assam Rifles, from her home, on the 10th of July, 2004. Her body, covered in sperm and bullets, was found the next day in Laipharok Maring of Imphal East district of Manipur. 30 Manipuri mothers stripped themselves in protest outside an armed forces outpost with the banner ‘Indian Army, Rape Us’. No one has been prosecuted for this atrocity to this day.
As the Irom Sharmila story spread around the world, Manipur got relegated to the background and India came to the foreground. Both the US-based Wall Street Journal and the UK-based Guardian and their Indian-origin correspondents described Irom Sharmila primarily as an Indian human rights activist. That is true for her citizenship. Whether that is her primary identity to her and her Manipur-based supporters is an altogether different matter. But this game of foregrounding and backgrounding, underlining and deleting, represents the politics of power in media, representations and narratives.
The Government of India wants such narratives. It wants Irom Sharmila to not be just Manipuri for that puts the focus on Manupur. ‘India’ dilutes it and that is helpful. And that is why the Indian Union government, its media and various wings of its official and unofficial establishment took to Mary Kom like a godsent PR opportunity. Then came the Bollywood packaging of Mary Kom.
In Mary Kom, the heavily pregnant heroine is going towards the hospital with her husband. She is nearing labour. There is a curfew on the streets. The husband tells her to wait and advances a bit. He is in the middle of a group of khaki-clad Indian security men trying to weed out ‘trouble-makers’. He tells them about his wife. A jawan finds her. The story matches. They arrive safely at the hospital. Many such images of an agitated Manipur break into Mary Kom. I use the word ‘images’ very deliberately here, for some realities are somewhat different. In July 2009, Mary Kom was selected for the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna award, the Indian Union’s highest sporting award. It was in the same July of 2009 that khaki-clad government forces surrounded an unarmed Chongkham Sanjit in a busy bazaar at Imphal, the capital of Manipur. Sanjit did not resist. He was whisked away to a dark area beside a roadside medicine shop. A few minutes later, the khakis come out with Sanjit’s bullet-ridden dead body and throw it onto a truck. Wait. There is another corpse on the truck. It belongs to Rabina Devi, a pregnant bystander killed by police a short while ago. This whole sequence gets captured on camera, just like a film. A little Googling will do. Not all pregnant women and young men on Imphal streets get the ‘Mary Kom’ treatment. There is no market for these images of Manipur.
While the hunger strike was on, the story of Irom Sharmila Chanu was no formula to Bollywood success. The picture of Irom Sharmila Chanu with the force-feeding tubes stuck to her nose is sure to take the pop out of popcorn. And if nothing else, the censor board will happily oblige in its mission of providing fairy-tales to citizens and protecting impressionable minds from such naked images. Sports are a better bet. The “army kid” Bollywood and now Hollywood heroine Priyanka Chopra has described Mary Kom in Hindi as ‘Junglee Baccha’, the most charitable translation of which can be ‘wild and aggressive child’. The ‘jungle’ pejorative and ‘baccha’ paternalism are both useful terms as they have in them the idea of what is to be aspired to. The aspiration is to tame the child. India hopes and thinks that Irom Sharmila Chanu has been ‘tamed’. The taming will be complete when Irom Sharmila is Mary Kom-ised. As Sameirang Laikhuram of Manipur perceptively puts it, “And now to the next important question: Who should play Irom Sharmila in a Bollywood blockbuster?”
Garga Chatterjee is a Kolkata-based commentator on South Asian politics and culture. He received his PhD from Harvard and is a member of faculty at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. He blogs at hajarduari.wordpress.com
