Opinion The longest fast

The resistance of Irom Sharmila Chanu has entered its 15th year. It began in November 2000 in Malom, a village in Manipur where 10 unarmed civilians were shot dead by the armed forces, as a 28-year-old woman’s decision to protest “with her body” against the endemic violence in her land and the law that stoked it — the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act. She would not eat, she had said, until AFSPA was revoked from Manipur. In that span, more blood has spilt in the state, more mutinies have broken out and been quelled: from the alleged rape and murder of Thangjam Manorama Devi in 2004, when Manipuri women hurled their ageing, naked bodies against the gates of the Assam Rifles headquarters, with banners that read “Indian Army Rape Us” to the protests that followed the cold-blooded shooting of a former militant by the police in a crowded market in 2010. But the law, barring minor changes, has remained what it was.

What has the figure of Irom Sharmila, a frail woman force-fed nasally by state writ for 14 years now come to embody? A story of extraordinary human fortitude and sacrifice. A non-violent protest whose unremitting moral force shames the indifference of the state and the army. But the years Irom Sharmila has spent in solitary confinement in an Imphal hospital also confirm the brute might of the Indian state and show how implacably deaf it can choose to remain to the demands of justice, especially when they emanate from a state in the Northeast.

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When the history of contemporary India is written, its chroniclers will ask of the past: how did Anna Hazare and his five-day fast against corruption end up toppling a government? And how could Sharmila’s years of deprivation have yielded so little? The answers to that question would, perhaps, lie in realpolitik as well as political expediency — and implicate the Indian people as well as the state. While they rallied around the call to end corruption, they found little to support in the heroic struggle of a woman from Manipur.