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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Not free to starve

Not free to starve

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published Published on Nov 11, 2009   modified Modified on Nov 11, 2009


IROM CHANU SHARMILA, 37, a poet and aspirant suicide, was this week unable to attend a cultural festival held in her honour in Imphal, capital of India’s north-eastern state of Manipur. She was in hospital, being force-fed lentil soup through a tube inserted into her nose.

The festival and an attendant fast, joined by hundreds of Ms Sharmila’s sympathisers in recent months, were to mark an anniversary. On November 2nd 2000 the poet, known as the “Iron Lady”, embarked on a “fast unto death”—a threat respected as an act of protest in India, often used to great effect by Mohandas Gandhi. Yet Ms Sharmila’s case, like the wretched condition of Manipur, the most violent of seven troubled north-eastern states, is a national embarrassment.

Ms Sharmila began her protest in response to the killing of ten Manipuris by paramilitary troops. To end it, she demands the repeal of a draconian emergency law, the Armed Forces Special Power Act (AFSPA), which has allowed the army to detain, and sometimes kill, north-easterners with impunity. In one possible indication of this, 286 of the 361 people killed in Manipur’s conflict this year were officially reckoned to be militants—a remarkably high number. Only 13 belonged to the security forces. Overall, this death toll makes little Manipur, home to 2.5m people and around 30 ethnically based insurgent groups, India’s most war-ravaged state, deadlier even than better-known Kashmir.

The AFSPA is in force there, too, and similarly hated. It has also stirred concern abroad. In March the UN’s human-rights chief, Navi Pillay, urged India to scrap it. But, despite recent promises to moderate the law, and some moves to limit its application, the government in Delhi shows no enthusiasm for this. With no formal peace process in Manipur, and a sordid nexus between its militants and politicians that has long helped sustain the conflict, it seems resigned to waging an indefinite low-level conflict there. The AFSPA makes this possible.

Formerly an independent kingdom, Manipur was strong-armed into joining India in 1949, Always reluctant Indians, Manipuris are now among the country’s most deprived and resentful people. Ms Sharmila, who has been serially arrested for trying to kill herself—a crime carrying a maximum one-year jail term in India—is an image of their suffering.


The Economist, 5 November, 2009, http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14816712
 

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