No Freedom, it is AFSPA all over.Irom Sharmila is arrested again!
Palash Biswas
Human rights activist Irom Sharmila speaks to the media outside a prison hospital in Imphal August 20, 2014.
CREDIT: REUTERS/STRINGER
Imphal: Manipur activist Irom Sharmila has yet again been arrested while she was protesting against the Armed Forces Special Powers Act in Imphal. When the police arrived at the protest venue on Friday morning, Irom and her mother resisted arrest, following which the police forcibly picked her up and took her away in a police van.
Irom has been taken away to the Jawaharlal Nehru hospital for a check-up. She will be kept under observation. The police cannot hold her for more than 24 hours without taking her to court. The police is expected to bring back charges of attempted suicide.
Soon after her release, Irom refused a medical examination. The court order on her release had said that the state will be responsible for her health and must feed her through a nasal tube if necessary.
There was heavy police presence at the protest site in Imphal where she continued her hunger strike.
Irom Sharmila was released on Wednesday after a Manipur court decriminalised her protest, dismissing the attempted suicide charge against her. Irom Sharmila was in custody for over 14 years and force fed through a tube to deter her hunger strike.
No freedom.The racially discriminated geography of our democratic India has virtually become an infinite gas chamber of Hitler.
We Indians flying high on the wings of UAVs to destroy ourselves and the death incidentally is shafron these days.
As free citizens of India,we the free people of the greatest democracy boasted should stand in support of Irom Sharmila as rock solid.Nay,we may not afford.As we all have become fanatically religously nationalist blind and fail to feel the plight of other India whom New Delhi chose to lynch time to time.Whom New Delhi brand antnational and all of us echo,Sedition!
We rather did enjoy the scenes of running Guahati tribal girl stripped as we enjoy Gxxx,Gxxxx,Gxxxxx super mall under bull run.It is the growth sexology inwhich we indulged and have sacrificed humanity for luxury in quest of dollars.
We rather discount Kashmir,Tamilnadu,Central India and North East India supporting the military fascist nazi regime in the centre.
I rather forgot the naked mothers of Manipur and our eyes are blind while we see genocide in Gujarat,Punjab,UP or Assam.
Yes,it is our democracy.
It is not the democracy of the outcaste geography of India which have so many Palestines we may not count.
Thus,Human rights activist Irom Sharmila, on hunger strike for the last 14 years in protest against army atrocities, was arrested again on Friday two days after being released from hospital detention.
"Sharmila has been re-arrested. It is clear that she is attempting suicide and we cannot allow her to do so," said M.C. Singh, a police official in Imphal, capital of Manipur.
Sharmila, 42, went on hunger strike in 2000 in protest against a law originating in the British colonial era that gives security forces wide powers to search, enter property and shoot on sight. During her detention, she was force-fed by doctors through a tube going into her nose to keep her alive.
Singh told Reuters that doctors had been ordered to force-feed her again and the police would produce her before a judge to press suicide charges against her. Under Indian law attempting suicide is a punishable offence.
The activist was released from a state hospital on Wednesday after a trial judge found no evidence to support earlier charges filed by state prosecutors that she was trying to commit suicide by refusing food.
After her release, she vowed to continue her hunger strike and refused to return home.
"The government is scared of Sharmila. The authorities do not want her to fight for our rights but nothing can break her determination," said her lawyer, Babloo Loitongbam.
Sharmila, known as the Iron Lady of Manipur, began her fast in November 2000 after 10 people were killed in a shooting at a bus stop near her home in Manipur. Activists blame the army for the killings but no arrests have been made in case.
Despite calls from judicial inquiries and human rights groups, the federal government has kept in force the anti-terror law in parts of northeast India and mainly-Muslim Kashmir to allow the military to contain insurgencies.
Aug 22 2014 : The Economic Times (Mumbai)
Folk Theorem - Out of Jail, But No Freedom in Sight
| ABHEEK BARMAN |
As Irom Sharmila's deification grows in Manipur and elsewhere, there are fissures among the faithful who are questioning her human-like behaviour in matters of love and life
Imphal, the capital of Manipur, is India's most militarised city . Turn anywhere and there are posses of armoured trucks, commandos and men in various shades of khaki.And in this city , dominated by primarily-Hindu Meiteis, there is only one deity , worshipped by all: Irom Sharmila Chanu.
For 14 years, Sharmila has fasted, asking only for the repeal of the brutal Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA). This colonialera law, dusted out when Naga militancy began in the 1950s, allows the military to do practically whatever it wants at gunpoint. Worse, once the law is imposed on an area declared disturbed, the armed forces become unaccountable to anyone for whatever brutalities they heap on people.
One such incident, called the massacre in Malom, just outside Imphal, ended up with 10 victims, including women and children in 2000. This triggered Sharmila's fast for justice, her imprisonment, and force feeding through a tube through her left nostril to her stomach, for 14 years.
On Tuesday , when a court freed her, Sharmila appeared outside her cell, in a hospital named after Jawaharlal Nehru, a free woman. But how free is she? For the entire duration of Sharmila's captivity , groups of Meitei women, called Meira Paibis, have maintained a vigil in a shack outside the hospital's walls. It was to this shack that they took Sharmila after her release.
Around three dozen groups who agitate for human rights in Manipur are also Sharmila's supporters. International rights groups, activists and non governmental agencies will, doubtless, make a beeline to Imphal, now that Sharmila is free free to talk and express herself about the AFSPA and other things that will begin to engage her now that she can access news, the internet and other media.
In her confinement, she was allowed to read letters and books that had been scanned by a prison censor, but not allowed to watch news on TV or look at the internet. There is much that has passed her by in 14 years. But as her deification has grown in Manipur and elsewhere, there are fis sures among the faithful.
For example, few in Imphal were amused when they learnt that Sharmila had fallen in love with Desmond Coutinho, a British citizen of Goan descent. They had started corresponding in 2011 and Coutinho had wooed her with letters, books and the occasional visit to her cell.
Why is this a problem? Perhaps because nobody wants their deity to be in love with a mere mortal; perhaps because in the early days, Coutinho spoke of taking Sharmila back with him to Britain, away from her adulatory flock.
These disputes, impossible to understand from a distance, eventually led to Sharmila drifting apart from her brother, Irom Singhajit, himself an advocate of peace, human rights and repeal of AFSPA.
Out of captivity , Sharmila faces many risks. If she continues to fast and refuses force feeding, she will starve to death. Even if she agrees to eat, it is unlikely that she will be able to digest normal food for a long time. Her stomach and intestines are likely to have atrophied after 14 years on a liquid diet. Her immune system could also have been damaged by her years in prison.
Despite her remarkable courage and fortitude in the past, Sharmila will face her biggest predicament in freedom: how to stay independent of the giant forces that seek to appropriate and mould her in their own shape.
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