Life post force-feeding: Does Irom Sharmila have a reason to start eating?

When Irom Sharmila began her “fast unto death” there was no Facebook and she was not the mascot of resistance against State atrocity she is today. The same State that she protested against spent a lot of money keeping her alive by force-feeding her, and by not resisting, as an argument goes, she has not been keen to end her life in protest. But in the last few years, she has become a national hero with innumerable Facebook posts and media articles featuring her resistance every now and then. She is now unarguably an icon, who has endured so much in the last 14 years during which she refused to eat for a cause that she earnestly believed in. Some, such as the CPI (ML), had the support of an ideology to praise her. She is now in the hall of fame of heroes, sharing space with people such as Gandhi and Nelson Mandela The all important question now is where does she go from here? What shape does her agitation take from this point? Will she eat now that the court has released her? [caption id=“attachment_1672343” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Does Irom Sharmila have reasons to start eating again? PTI[/caption] Most probably not, because her fight has been against the notorious Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), which once the defence minister of India Pranab Mukherjee said couldn’t be repealed because it would be difficult for the armed forces to function without it. Her lawyer’s argument in the court has been that her aim was not to commit suicide, but to protest against the AFSPA. So, the chances are that she will still not eat and her hunger strike will continue. If she eats, will she still retain the allure of a remarkably steely revolutionary that inspired adulation across the country? What happens to her involuntary inconisation? In an article in The Hindu, Irom Sharmila - A simple girl forced into sainthood, Rahul Pandita writes: “Sharmila’s own people put her on display as a mascot of resistance. They beatified her. A saint is not supposed to fall in love, they told her. But she accepted the love of a man called Desmond Coutinho, who professed his love for her in March 2011. It kept her alive; it brought happiness to her in snatches.” The same people, both her followers at home and elsewhere in India, might want the beatification to continue for them to be stay inspired. If there are no extraordinary elements in a fight, what’s so special? Not that staying wilfully away from food has been easy. As Rahul notes in his Hindu article, “it is not easy to commit to an indefinite fast; it is even more difficult to remain committed to it for so long. The body begins to oppose it almost immediately. Ulcers appear on the palate. The knees give up. There are dreams of food cooked by mother. There is giddiness. There are showers of sweat.” In the tenth year of her fast, she had said about her life, in an interview to the Hindustan Times: “It’s simple and boring. I am allowed to walk in the corridors but not out of those collapsible gates. The securitymen are very timid; they don’t allow me outside. Recently, some people came in and warned me that I should stop the hunger strike. I don’t know who they were; they just wanted to break my spirit.” She went on to add: “My struggle is for changing the state of Manipur. In this field of war, I am crying for peace. First, there must be justice for the people, who have suffered so much. Our government wants to weed out insurgents, but that’s impossible; they never try to communicate with the people. Insurgency will go only if the political trend changes from moneymaking to true devotion to welfare.” Has she succeeded in this endeavour? Perhaps yes, to a great extent because because of the dint of her determination, the entire country now knows how draconian the AFPSA is and how rights violations abound in Manipur in the name of anti-insurgency. Her fight has also shed light on the lopsided approach of the state and central governments, which instead of resolving the deep rooted socio-economic factors that fuel insurgency, adopt short-gun methods that only make the situation worse. Irom Sharmila began her fight when she saw the atrocities of the AFPSA firsthand in 2000 and refused to give up all these years. But did she even once think that she wold be a nationwide icon in a country where popular heroes from the north east are hard to come by? “My fast is on behalf of the people of Manipur. This is not a personal battle - this is symbolic. It is a symbol of truth, love and peace,” she had told the BBC in 2006. The situation hasn’t changed much other than the Congress and the AAP offering her election tickets. She has no reason to stop nose feeding and start eating even as the State continues to claim that they spend a lot in keeping an icon alive.