How do you recognise heroism?
Is it a noble brow, etched with lines of bulletproof convictions?
Does it pour fire and thunder into rapt audiences? Is it untouchable, larger-than-life; half-phantom, half-legend?
Is it always masculine? Always in service of nationalism?
On 9 August 2016, Irom Chanu Sharmila, the ‘Iron Lady’ of Manipur ended her 16-year-long fast, the world’s longest, in protest of Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), and declared that she will continue this fight by running for the chief ministerial post in her beloved state.
That Irom Sharmila is a hero, especially to the people of conflict-ridden Manipur, is beyond doubt. The brutalised land, riven by state-sponsored violence and insurgency, marked indelibly by violence and loss, is the womb that nurtured her heroism, with its amniotic fluid of blood, sweat and tears. Some might see her protest as passive and ineffective but no one can doubt her grit and determination.
What we don’t realise, however, is just how unique Sharmila’s model of political defiance is.
When a 28-year-old Sharmila, jolted by Malom massacre, pledged herself to this desperate course of action, she couldn’t have known what a long exile it would turn out to be. An exile not just from family, friends, love and the world at large but her own body as well. For 16 long years, Sharmila has been fed through a tube that is, in popular imagination, practically a part of her. Food — sustenance, memory, taste — has been an empty, invasive, humiliating ritual.
The route of protest, stretching in time from Manipur to Delhi and back, has been a solitary one, only occasionally punctuated by mainstream media’s interest.
Both print journalists and celebrated news anchors, notorious for their studio-based, Delhi-centric perspectives, have treated Sharmila’s long fast as white noise, with the marked exception of her 2006 protest at Jantar Mantar.
Sharmila’s express requests for meetings with Prime Ministers have also been systematically ignored.
Sharmila herself has stubbornly refused to fit into the popular idea of a political rebel: A frail woman with unkempt hair, photographed often with eyes full of unshed tears. In the odd interview she grants the media, she speaks with hesitation and pauses, often avoiding eye contact.
To see what an unlikely icon of political resistance she makes, one need only look either at the towering historical figures who led the fight for independence from colonial rule, or more recently, the glamorous cult figures like JNUSU President and rising political star Kanhaiya Kumar and the late Kashmiri insurgent commander Burhan Wani. The word used repeatedly for the latter two is charisma, that all-important quality in a world of relentless image building.
Wani, Kanhaiya and Sharmila are united by their fight against the country’s repressive state apparatus, branded as rebels and traitors because their political demands don’t fall in line with the central government’s diktat. But where both Wani and Kanhaiya have used the cult of personality to mobilise support, either through social media propaganda or oratory, Sharmila has effaced herself in service of her cause, letting it consume her quite literally.
Sharmila’s detractors forget that her sacrifice has not been in vain. In 2004, following the rape and killing of Manorama, a 34-year-old Manipuri woman in a fake encounter by the Assam Rifles in Imphal, 30 Imas (Manipuri mothers) protested naked in support of Sharmila and Manorama, shouting “Indian army rape us”.
In a country which puts a very high premium on motherhood, and where the nation state is understood and loved in those terms, the image of their naked fury is seared forever into cultural memory.
The protest led to the withdrawal of AFSPA from 7 assembly constituencies in Imphal. Similarly, the shocking case of “encounter cop” Herojit Singh, a Manipuri head constable, who confessed to killing innocents, must be seen in context of Sharmila’s long fight against AFSPA, the law that has enabled gross human rights violation by giving the army special powers with zero accountability in “disturbed areas”. The Supreme Court has now ordered a probe into a number of such incidents.
Sharmila’s most enduring legacy will be her model of political resistance, one based on neither gun-wielding machismo nor the easily swayed passions aroused by oratory; one wherein the sight of a woman touching honey with her tongue after 16 long years is enough to move otherwise apathetic mainlanders.
If, at the end of it all, Sharmila’s struggle isn’t enough to repeal the draconian law, it won’t be her failure, it will be ours.
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