Satya Sagar

On 2nd November 2009, poet and activist Irom Sharmila, will enter the 10th year of her hunger strike against the widespread repression unleashed against the people of Manipur by the Indian state.

Even in the land of Gandhi Sharmila’s protest, an unbroken nine year long fast, is a stupendous achievement and testimony to her commitment to non-violence in a conflict marked by wanton killings and needless bloodshed.

The specific demand evoked by her protest is for the repeal of one of the world’s most draconian ‘anti-terror’ laws anywhere- the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, introduced in parts of the Indian north-east since 1958.

The AFSPA grants the Indian military special powers to arrest citizens and enter their property without warrant, shoot and kill anyone on mere ‘suspicion’ and enjoy immunity against legal action, amongst other things.

Under the cover of the Act, the Indian armed forces have indulged in killing, torture, enforced disappearances and rape, bringing great shame to India and much misery to the people of Manipur. According to the government-appointed Justice Jeevan Reddy Commission, ‘the Act has become a symbol of oppression, an object of hate and an instrument of discrimination and high-handedness.’

The United Nations Committee on Racial Discrimination too has urged the Indian government to repeal the law. Many groups which have studied the AFSPA and its enforcement closely have called again and again for the repealing of the Act immediately given its tyranny on India’s own citizens.

Like many other antiquated Indian laws the AFSPA too is a slightly modified version of an old British colonial Act imposed to control a nationwide struggle by Indian nationalists for independence. The AFSPA was enacted in 1958 and initially aimed at the Naga insurgent movement for independence from India but amended in 1972 to be applicable to all the seven provinces in the north- eastern region of India. 

Known as the ‘seven sisters’ the provinces of Assam, Manipur, Tripura, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram and Nagaland- are among the most neglected and underdeveloped parts of India. Manipur is 22% behind the national average for infrastructural development, and the entire north-eastern region is 30% behind the rest of India.

In Manipur, the irony of the AFSPA lies in the fact that, of all the seven provinces in the Indian northeast, it was the most peaceful- till it came within the purview of the Act in 1980. There have been separatist insurgencies in other parts of the Indian north-east since the early days of Indian independence, notably that of the Nagas and Mizos, but never among the ethnic Meitei who form the bulk of Manipur’s population. Currently there are reported to be over a dozen insurgent groups operating in the province – a testimony to the AFSPA having achieved exactly the opposite of what it was purported to do. 

Resistance against this repressive law dates back it is very inception, even by  many progressive Members of Parliament when the bill was introduced in the Indian Parliament in 1958. But the then Home Minister Mr. G.P. Pant justified the passing of the Act as an interim measure which will be lifted once the situation in the Naga Hills were under control. However 51 year down the line the act has not only stayed in the statute book but it has spread to all over the North East India today and was also extended to Jammu and Kashmir in 1991.

A public interest litigations was filed against the Act as early as 1980 in the Supreme Court. But after 17 years of slumber the Supreme Court shockingly upheld the constitutionality of the Act in its judgement dated 27 November 2009. In this extremely conservative judgement, the apex Court upheld the Act without looking into the gruesome human rights impact on the civilian population in the ‘disturbed area’.

In October 2000, Independent People’s Commission of Inquiry headed by Justice Suresh, a former Judge of the Bombay High Court, inquired into the human rights impact of the prolonged imposition of AFSPA.

On 2 November, exactly one week after the conclusion of the People’s Commission, the Indian army  massacred ten civilians in Malom, Manipur. It was then that Sharmila, a volunteer of the Commission and an aspiring poet, decided to go on a hunger strike.

On 6 November 2000 she was arrested by the police and charged for attempting to commit suicide under section 307 of the Indian Penal Code. Her health deteriorated gradually and she did not accept even a single drop of water.

On 21 November 2000 a plastic tube was inserted into her nose and liquid nutrient was inserted into her body. She has been surviving on this liquid diet and in solitary confinement as a high security prisoner for the last nine years. The maximum punishment that a person charged under 307 IPC is one year, so she is routinely released after every one year and she continues her fast outside only to be re-arrested again. This ritual has been going on for a decade now.

And yet for all her valiant struggle the sad truth is that it has not really moved  the Indian government or security forces to change their stand on the repeal of the AFSPA or even towards how to manage security in Manipur.

Unlike Kashmir or the fate of the ‘untouchable’ Dalits- whose causes have made it to global platforms in recent years- the dirty little secrets of the Indian State’s predations in its north-eastern provinces are unknown to even rest of India.

Not that rest of ‘Aryan’ India really cares. To them, the populations of the Indian northeast, of largely Tibeto-Burman ethnic origins, are an ‘invisible’ lot- whose territory and resources ‘belong’ to India but whose people don’t. Probably a rung below the ‘visible’ Dalits who ‘belong’ to India but possess no territory.

Over the years successive governments in New Delhi have justified the legislation on the plea that it is required to stop the North East provinces from seceding from the Indian Union. All the mainstream Indian political parties, each trying to be more ‘patriotic’ than the other, agree on the need to keep the AFSPA despite its unpopularity and dubious record.

The simple truth about India is that its elites are still running a 19th century State wrested from British colonialists which always prioritized land and resources over the lives of ordinary people.  For all the glib talk about India being a ‘software superpower’ those who run the Indian State have always displayed a perverse fetish for protecting their ‘national hardware’.  

Successive Indian governments since independence have been been guilty of treating the country’s north-eastern provinces as mere property with little respect for its people’s culture, aspirations and demands. And when the people revolt against such treatment the only solution the Indian elites can think of is a military one. 

Making matters worse of course is the fact that these Indian national elites, essentially drawn from upper caste ‘Aryan’ stock, combine the brute technology of the nation-state with the metaphysics of the ancient caste system thereby asserting a double oppression on all ‘lesser people’ in the land. So the members of the Indian army and police who lord it over the people of the northeastern provinces are armed with not just gun and bayonet but also Brahminical notions of cultural and racial ‘superiority’ over those they so gleefully rape and pillage.

Truth be said the Indian government’s actions in its north-east are not really very different in many ways from what many other countries are doing to their own ethnic and cultural minority people elsewhere in the world. And within India too it is not just the people of the Indian north-east who bear the brunt of such racism but also all the Dalit and tribal people living in other parts of the country- robbed of their resources, dignity and way of life under the ‘patronage’ of the Indian State.

The only real difference though is that the people of the Indian north-east are not willing to take such colonialism lying down and have repeatedly risen up to fight for their rights. 

The rest of India should oppose what is happening to their brethren in the north-east as the Indian State is perpetrating atrocities in their name and because the price of indifference could be their own subjection to such brutalities in the future. In the process,  they could begin to forge nothing less than a new idea of the Indian nation – shorn of racism, casteism and defined in terms of living people with living concerns and not a collection of slaves,  dead property or the abstract perimeters of a paper map. 

Satya Sagar is a journalist, writer, video-maker based in New Delhi. He can be contacted at sagarnama@gmail.com