Irom Sharmila and the Will to Live a Normal Life

On March 30, 2016 a Delhi trial court acquitted Irom Sharmila on charges of attempting to commit suicide, recognising that hers was a political fight for the right to life, and not a death wish. When a friend and I visited her the previous evening in Manipur house, she expressed satisfaction that she had been able to make her point freely before the judge. Denied the opportunity to talk to friends or political comrades, shut up alone in a hospital room for nearly 16 years with only her minders for company, Sharmila’s fast was always about more than abstinence from food – it was also simultaneously the story of India’s longest serving political prisoner and her singular courage under incarceration.

Chhattisgarh Redux

Now Manipur will copy Salwa Judum

25 June 2008
Hindustan Times

When IRATE villagers from Heirok, Manipur, demanded guns to protect themselves from the ‘UG’ — as the armed groups of Manipur are collectively referred to — they had little idea of what they were in for. frustrated by persistent extortion demands, the last straw came when PREPAK cadres killed three youth and blinded one girl in March. The villagers’ demand was trumpeted around as another instance of a spontaneous ‘local resistance group’, as the Salwa Judum in Chhattisgarh is called in Home Ministry parlance, asking to be armed.

Gandhigiri in Manipur

Farewell To Arms

Irom Sharmila's stir against army repression in north-east

Nandini Sundar

The Times of India, October 10, 2006

When we first heard of Irom Sharmila in 2004, she had already been fasting for four years in protest against the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA). In July that year, a young woman, Manorama, had been killed, and perhaps also raped, by Assam Rifles. Something came unstuck, and a dozen middle-aged women stood stark naked in front of the Kangla fort in Imphal, daring the Indian Army to rape them too. Manipuri civil society organisations came together to form the Apunba Lup. And finally, Manipur and AFSPA made national headlines for a few days.

In the months that followed, some of us visited Imphal. Our first impression was one of shock. We had never seen so many armed personnel — every corner has a military jeep, army posts are set up near villages, there is even a firing range within the university. We had heard of life under military rule, but nothing prepared us for this corner of our own country, a world apart from the democracy that it is supposed to be.