SHARMILA CHANU BEING “MARYKOMISED”
By Garga Chatterjee
The end of the epic 16 year fast by Irom Sharmila Chanu should make the Indian Union government heave a sigh of relief. Her repeated arrests through the long years should have embarrassed any government with an iota of shame. But clearly the government has no shame. The relief is elsewhere. The epic fast by Irom Sharmila used to continuously put focus on many of the dark secrets of the brutal practices of the Indian state. Now, though the practices will continue, the focus will end.
If people have missed a certain irony, let me state it. Indian Union media attention was showered on this one event about Irom Sharmila like never before – not when she started, not when she continued, not when she was tube-fed forcibly, not when she was arrested innumerable times but when she ended. The end of the fast signaled to Indians that she had come back to their idea of the “mainstream”, which is another word for business as usual and hence this focus and celebration of business as usual. What will happen to her one doesn’t know. And India hardly cares.
How do we know India doesn’t care? For Irom Sharmila’s fast pointed to a deeper disease. If putting focus on that underlying disease didn’t get as much Indian press as the end of the fast, that gives a good idea about the priorities and what is the narrative that is acceptable. It is not that the putrid disease has gone away but now, with the end of the fast, India thinks that the stench is manageable and uncomfortable discussion about the disease that Irom Sharmila’s fast symbolized can be obliterated. Not the disease but its discussion. Now Irom Sharmila can be refurbished and reinvented in Delhi’s eyes on a comeback path to normalcy, may be a “Northeastern” Kejriwal of sorts, whatever that means. This failure of imagination is deliberate. It is designed to obfuscate rather than to delve deeper. India has failed Irom Sharmila not because it never wanted her to succeed.
Those Idea of India folks who think Irom Sharmila Chanu’s struggle is only against the inhuman and degrading Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) and not for what causes AFSPA to be imposed on Manipur want to conveniently brand her as a “human rights” activist as opposed to a campaigner for rights of Manipur. That not-so-subtle move places Irom Sharmila and her epic fast in a pantheon that stretches from Lokpal fast to corporate Save Tiger, Plant Tree type of campaigns to One Rank One Pay fasts in Jantar Mantar . This is a necessary first step towards defanging and domestication of the wayward. Human rights implicate no one. Manipur implicates Delhi as a quasi-imperial formation. Manipur implicates the idea of India. So, for those who “stand with Irom Sharmila” but not with Manipur, their stance and their vacuous, self-congratulating idea of Indianisms, in reality don’t stand with Irom Sharmila and Manipur but stand in the way of Irom Sharmila and Manipur. Thangjam Manorama Debi saw through that. Everyone except those with tri-colour blinders see through that. Manipur sees through such “solidarity”. Which is why her fast is one of resistance, not a M.K. Gandhi style blackmail of Baba Saheb Bhimrao Ambedkar before the Poona Pact.
There is a reason why its important to focus on the cause, irrespective of whether one agrees with the cause or not, and not the high decibel aura that a powerful media and government network can instantly create. What did Irom Sharmila Chanu demand through her fast? She demanded that AFPSA be withdrawn from Manipur. She is aware as any other person living in an AFSPA imposed area that the kind of atrocities that AFSPA gives a clean chit to or worse are committed even without AFSPA and even then few of the Khaki-clad perpetrators have ever been brought to justice. So while AFSPA is an issue, it is shorthand for the daily indignity of Manipur. What triggered this fast? The atrocities by Indian Armed forces in general in Manipur. One can imagine that the gang rape and killing of Thangjam Manorama Debi by Khaki forces in 2004 only strengthened her resolve to continue the fast. Thangjam Manorama Debi was picked up from her home in in Bamon Kampu Mayai Leikai by Indian security forces, the 17th Assam Rifles, on 10th July 2004. Her body, covered in sperm and bullets, was found the next day in Laipharok Maring of Imphal East district of Manipur. 30 Manipuri mothers stripped themselves in protest outside an armed forces outpost with the banner ‘Indian Army, Rape Us’. No one has been prosecuted for this act to this day.
As the Irom Sharmila story spread around the world, Manipur got relegated to the background and India came to the foreground. Both USA based Wall Street Journal and UK based Guardian and their Indian origin correspondents described Irom Sharmila primarily as an Indian human rights activist, an act on gate-keeing that has consequences. That is true for her citizenship. Whether that is her primary identity to her and her Manipur based support is an altogether different matter. But this game of fore-grounding and back-grounding, underlining and deletion, represents the politics of power in media, representations and narratives. Such narratives are powerful, especially when they serve power.
The Government of India wants such narratives. It wants Irom Sharmila to not be just Manipuri for that puts the focus on Manupur. “India” dilutes it and that is helpful. “India” undercuts it and that is even more helpful. Which is why Indian Union government, its media and various wings of its official and unofficial establishment took to Mary Kom like a godsend PR opportunity. Then comes the Bollywood packaging of Mary Kom.
In Mary Kom, the heavily pregnant heroine is going towards the hospital with her husband. She is nearing labour. There is curfew on the streets. The husband tells her to wait and advances a bit. He is in the middle of a group of khaki-clad Indian security force men out to weed out trouble-makers. He tells them about his wife. A jawan finds her. The story matches. They arrive safely at the hospital. Many such images of an agitated Manipur break into ‘Mary Kom’. I use the word ‘images’ very deliberately here, for some realities are somewhat different. In July 2009, Mary Kom was selected for the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna award, the Indian Union’s highest sporting award. It was in the same July of 2009 that khaki-clad government forces surrounded an unarmed Chongkham Sanjit in a busy bazaar at Imphal, the capital of Manipur. Sanjit does not resist. He is whisked away to a dark area beside a roadside medicine shop. A few minutes later, the Khakis come out with Sanjit’s bullet-ridden dead body and throw it onto a truck. Wait. There is another corpse on the truck. It belongs to Rabina Devi, a pregnant bystander killed by police a short while ago. This whole sequence gets captured on camera, just like a film. A little Googling will do. Not all pregnant women and young men on Imphal streets get the ‘Mary Kom’ treatment. There is no market for these pictures of Manipur.
While the hunger strike was on, the story of Irom Sharmila Chanu was no formula to Bollywood success. The picture of Irom Sharmila Chanu with the force-feeding tubes stuck to her nose is sure to take the pop out of popcorn. And if nothing else, the censor board will happily oblige in its mission of catering fairy-tales to citizens and protecting impressionable minds from such naked images. Sports are a better bet. The “army kid” Bollywood and now Hollywood heroine Priyanka Chopra has described Mary Kom in Hindi as “Junglee Baccha”, the most charitable translation of which can be wild and aggressive child. The “jungle” pejorative and “baccha” paternalism are both useful terms as they have in them the idea of what is to be aspired to. The aspiration is to tame the child. India hopes and thinks that Irom Sharmila Chanu has been “tamed”. The taming will be complete when Irom Sharmila is Mary Komized. As Sameirang Laikhuram of Manipur perceptively puts it, “And now to the next important question: Who should play Irom Sharmila in a Bollywood blockbuster?” (IPA Service)