Irom Sharmila: A Lost Cause And Case?

Manipur’s ‘iron lady’ Irom Chanu Sharmila ended her marathon hunger strike with a dab of honey, but she’ll soon discover that her chosen path to becoming Chief Minister of Manipur will involve many bitter struggles. Sharmila ended her 5757-day hunger strike demanding the withdrawal of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, or AFSPA, from Manipur by announcing that she would join politics and contest against present Chief Minister Okram Ibobi Singh. Her ambition: to become the Chief Minister of Manipur and repeal the AFSPA.

Sharmila’s announcement belies her naivety. Winning an election, leave aside becoming a chief minister, is no easy task. She may have displayed exemplary courage by sustaining her hunger strike for 16 long years, but this protest, no matter how long it was, hardly qualifies her to become the Chief Minister of Manipur.

Manipur is a state that’s infested with many intractable problems, and the AFSPA is just one of them. The sharp divide between the majority Meiteis who inhabit the Imphal Valley and the tribals in the hills surrounding the valley is threatening to tear the state apart and Sharmila, a Meitei herself, has never offered any imaginative solutions to bridge this divide despite being asked many times to offer her opinion on this issue by media persons.

The latest standoff between the Meiteis on the one side and the Nagas and Kukis of the hills on the other is over three bills passed by the Manipur Assembly that the Meiteis claim is to protect the state from ‘outsiders’ and the tribals allege is to undermine their rights. Some lives have been lost in this conflict. But beyond this lies the Nagas’ demand for integration of the Naga-inhabited areas in the hills of Manipur with Nagaland, a demand that the Meiteis are vehemently opposed to. Preserving the territorial integrity of Manipur occupies the topmost slot in the Meitei agenda and is a highly emotional issue.

In June 2001, when Meiteis thought that an extension of the ceasefire with Naga insurgent groups to the Naga-inhabited areas of Manipur was the first step towards the eventual integration of those Naga areas with Nagaland, they erupted in protests and torched the state Assembly building, the Chief Minister’s office, the Speaker’s residence and houses of many ministers and MLAs. Thirteen protesters were killed in police firing and the Meiteis still observe June 18 every year as Martyr’s Day. Sharmila has nothing to say on this burning issue and no solutions to offer as well.

Addressing the media while breaking her fast, Sharmila spoke on rampant corruption in the state and how Manipur’s society has also become corrupt. That is stating an obvious fact, but what will she do to end corruption? Corruption is deeply rooted in Manipur and rooting it out would be an impossible task without first tackling and eliminating insurgency that has also struck deep roots in the state and its polity.

There are numerous militant groups in Manipur, a state with a long history of insurgency. They are riven by petty feuds, but also work in tandem at times to launch attacks on the security forces. But most of them are simply extortionists who demand and get huge sums of money from politicians, businessmen, contractors, traders, government officials (from the chief secretary down to the peon), farmers, professionals and even educational institutions. Manipur’s politicians (most of them anyway), bureaucrats and top businessmen have a deep nexus with insurgents who pocket a substantial segment of central funds provided to the state for its development. Sharmila would be ill-equipped to break this nexus.

As far as AFSPA is concerned, there is no way that this law will be lifted from Manipur as long as insurgency exists in the state. It is an inviolate fact that the Indian army cannot operate without the AFSPA. And the army is in Manipur because the state police failed to tackle insurgency and are still incapable of doing so. Not the least because many police officers, like many in Meitei society, have close links with militants. Repealing the AFSPA from Manipur would lead to withdrawing the army from that state. And that would result in insurgents taking over Manipur. Is Sharmila aware of that and is she prepared for such an eventuality?

Sharmila was also being extremely credulous when she said that after becoming chief minister, she would repeal the AFSPA. It is not in the hands of the chief minister of a state where AFSPA is in force to repeal it. The ball lies with the Union government. Of course, this is not to condone the excesses that have been committed by security forces under the cover of AFSPA. Hundreds have been shot dead in cold blood, raped, molested, tortured and maimed by security forces, and a major reason for the alienation of Manipuris from the Indian ‘mainstream’ is that the perpetrators of such grave crimes have never been brought to book.

However, of late, the army and paramilitary forces have been behaving responsibly and it is the Manipur police, especially its commandos, who are accused of staging encounters and killing innocents or torturing and extorting money from them. Nonetheless, it would be good if the army and paramilitary forces initiate action in the form of court-martials of personnel and officers guilty of such crimes. That would be one way of gaining the confidence of the Manipuris.

Sharmila also faces another major hurdle. Large sections of Meiteis are unhappy with her abandoning the struggle against AFSPA and they say she had betrayed the cause. Some of the Meitei insurgent groups have condemned her abandonment of the hunger strike. Her announcement that she would contest elections has also been construed as a betrayal by many. The common refrain in Imphal now is that she has become power hungry.

The Meiteis, who are quite conservative, also haven’t taken kindly to Sharmila’s announcement that she would wed her Indian-origin British passport holder boyfriend Desmond Coutinho. They are strongly against an iconic Meitei figure like Sharmila marrying an ‘outsider’. Most Meiteis hold him as a bad influence on her and believe he was the one who influenced her decision to break her hunger strike. Sharmila is unfazed by such criticism and says she will go ahead and marry Coutinho soon. That would surely cost her a large number of Meitei votes.

And many are also asking if the Sharmila who wants to become the chief minister of Manipur is the same 28-year-old lady who went on a hunger strike on November 2, 2000, after the gunning down of ten innocent civilians by Assam Rifles troops at Malom, a town in Imphal Valley. Was the 16-year hunger strike staged just to come to power? And what is her vision for Manipur? Is her one-point agenda of ridding Manipur of AFSPA going to cure the myriad ills afflicting the state? These, and many other questions, will have to be faced by Sharmila in the coming days, weeks, and months. And she may find herself ill-equipped to answer them. Simply because she does not have any credible answers to them.