It is one of those rare, insightful articles that we get to see from the Indian
Press.
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Web| Nov 27, 2006
Opinion
No Look, No See
What accounts for the negligible interest in the six-year long
satyagraha of Irom Sharmila? Why is it that we either never seem to
"look" towards the East, or if and when we do, we "look" but do not
"see"? Perhaps it is time to resurrect Gandhi in these vulgar times
BADRI RAINA
I have before me a national English daily which is much given to
spreading the word about the beauties of "reform" and modern
"development" in India. Never a day passes when it does not remind
us- and the world -how India is just about to breast the tape to
superpowerdom. As in the case of other English dailies (bar one), if
and when it reports on farmer's suicides, atrocities on Dalits, the
wretched state of superstition in India's vast hinterland, or other
such unpleasant details of national life, it does so with a quality
of impatience very reminiscent of that dismissive gesture of
Mr.Podsnaps' forearm in Dickens' Little Dorrit (a novel that Bernard
Shaw recommended over Marx for an understanding of the workings of
finance capital) which says 'do not bring such things to spoil my
appetite.'
Be that as it may, the November 17 issue of this avant-garde daily
announces that the government of the day is all set now to inaugurate
a "Look East" policy. We are informed that a two-day North-Eastern
Council Meet has determined to plough the 'seven sisters' (Arunachal
Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tripura) for
purposes of exploiting their potential for "export".
Be it noted that some six decades after India's independence from
colonial rule, these states remain largely bereft of roads,
electricity, educational institutions, hospitals, not to speak of
industry or other sources of steady employment, regional variations
notwithstanding. Now, however, "access corridors" from these regions
to neighbouring countries are proposed to be opened, as well as "air
connectivity" within the region. Such are the charms of "reform." If
you have no bread, eat cake. The question as to what percentage of
North-Easterners might be equipped to participate in the bounties of
"access corridors" and "air connectivity" hardly needs to be asked.
The observation seems warranted that while our post-Washington
Consensus ruling elites remain mortally opposed to pampering the
"creamy layer" among the downtrodden social groups of India,
everywhere else it is the creamy layer for which now the Indian state
opens its purse strings and, one might add, its system of justice.
Reading this "Look East" news report, it just struck me that after
all we do see only what we wish to see. Looking East, not one worthy
in that two-day conference seemed to see Irom Sharmila of Manipur who
continues to be on her soul-wrenching satyagraha since October, 2000,
refusing food and water, against the draconian Armed Forces (Special
Powers) Act,1958.
Through this six-year long odyssey, unparalleled since the days of
Gandhi-and, in some respects, more heroic than any of the many fasts
he undertook-this "iron lady" has either been in one jail after
another, or one hospital after another, where she continues to be
force-fed through nasal drips. It is doubtful that the British
colonialists would have waited through a six-year long saga of
self-mortification to address a public issue. Indeed, even a Cindy
Sheehan seems to have pulled greater punch with the American media
and public than our own Irom Sharmila Chanu. Such is our
self-absorption in project superpowerdom. Soon this hero of substance
might actually die, and Manipur go up in flames. What will that
matter? After all we do have the AFSPA in place, an Act that allows
all manner of control.
Now this Act empowers not just any commissioned officer but any
warrant or non-commissioned officer operating in a "disturbed area"
to:
* "fire even to the extent of causing death" if in "the
opinion" of such "it is necessary for the maintenance of public
order";
* "destroy any shelter from which armed attacks are.. .
likely to be made";
* "arrest without warrant any person. . . likely to
commit a cognizable offence or against whom a reasonable suspicion
exists";
* "enter and search without warrant any premises to
make an arrest. . . ."
Thus wherever AFSPA is in force, the right to protest, and the right
to legal redress remain rescinded. Many activists who have simply
wanted to document excesses committed by the army have been "picked
up, tortured and killed"(1).
Since all appeals to that package of assurances we call the
Constitution of India seem to have fallen on the deaf ear of a state
that has vowed to keep such noises out of hearing range, Irom
Sharmila's heroism may find resonance from a throwback to an
unforgettably decisive chapter of India's struggle for freedom. There
is of course only the hope that such recall might melt the wax in the
ruling metropolitan ear drum, but no guarantee whatsoever, since
Podsnappery now seems the endorsed religion of the state. Ergo, let
the wretched of the land be made invisible, and the protesting voice
be quelled so that Washington is saved embarrassment, and our
burgeoning breed of CEOs allowed to carry on without guilt or
hindrance. After all, if Singapore is our ideal, why need the absence
of civil liberties be factored into our enterprises?
As the infamous Defence of India Act lapsed with the end of the first
world war, the British, wishing to carry on keeping tabs on civil
liberties in place, notified the Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes
Act (more popularly the Rowlatt Act) in early March of 1919.
This "black act" provided
* for the trial of seditious crimes by benches of three
judges without the right of preliminary commitment or of appeal;
* for relaxation of the rules of evidence;
* for detention without charges;
* for searches without warrants;
and it stipulated that "punishment or acquittal should be speedy."
Now the parallels with our own AFSPA must seem uncanny-with one
exception: as far as I have been able to determine, the Rowlatt Act
fell rather short of our current day AFSPA in failing to authorize
any rummy sergeant major to "fire even to the extent of causing
death." That the niceties of the law did not inhibit an O'Dywer from
causing the massacre at Jallianwala is of course another matter.
After all he was not murdering his own people!
Yet this "black act" seemed to Gandhi the last straw that broke the
obliging back: "the idea of leading a campaign against the Rowlatt
Act. . .possessed me" he wrote in his autobiography (p.201). The call
to an all-India hartal followed, inaugurating the moment from whence
the struggle for complete independence was never really to be turned
back, notwithstanding prevarications and internal dissentions. In
April, the non-cooperation movement-the first truly massive all-India
mass uprising-was unleashed, involving the boycott of offices,
courts, educational institutions, and the burning of foreign cloth.
As Gandhi was arrested, this is how he spoke of the Rowlatt Act in
his Trial: "a law designated to rob the people of all freedom. I felt
called upon to lead an intensive agitation against it."
Thus, Irom Sharmila's six-year long satyagraha which, recalling
Jallianwala, began precisely on the day the Malom massacre took place
wherein, on 2nd October, 2000 the Assam Rifles shot dead ten unarmed
Manipuris at a bus stop in Imphal on suspicion of being insurgents,
invites us not only to revisit the history of March/April,1919 (which
we proudly teach our school children as preciously unique heritage),
but to ponder the thickness of skin and soul that our rulers seem to
have acquired since independence, especially since the beginning of
the Washington Consensus and the era of "Reform".
Indeed, in recent years who is to say that the brutalities of our
own state-apparatus vented on protesting adivasis, workers, dalits,
displaced oustees have in any measure fallen short of those that the
Colonisers reserved for us? It has been made clear time and again
that the chief function that our policing mechanisms now reserve for
themselves is to secure from any form of public discontent the
operations of our ruling economic bosses and, additionally, to
facilitate the exertions of majoritarian goons who, now in Ayodhya,
now in Gujarat, congregate in menacing intention on behalf of
"cultural nationalism" and "national security."
The fact remains that having obtained freedom from colonial rule in
1947, and subsequently promising to all Indian citizens the equitable
fruits of a democratic social order, our indigenous rulers set about
ensuring that those fruits were confined to a "creamy" metropolitan
minority which is increasingly unwilling to "look" beyond what
fattens it further, insatiably. No wonder then that when they "look
East" they do not see Irom Sharmila or the AFSPA, but only an
opportunity to now plough its resources for "export" promotion.
Every government that serves a class-based state must necessarily,
from time to time, resort to tactics that helps to keep in place its
democratic legitimation. Thus, in the aftermath of the protests in
Manipur (which included the shockingly desperate and bold stripping
by women in front of the army personnel, inviting the latter to rape
them), the Prime Minister set up the Justice Jeevan Reddy Committee
to report on the AFSPA.
This Committee submitted its report in June, 2005. To this day the
report has neither been made public nor placed in Parliament. Reason?
Among other things, the Committee opines that the AFSPA has "become a
symbol of oppression, an object of hate, and an instrument of
discrimination and high-handedness."
Irom Sharmila never put it that strongly
There is another rather deeply ironic aspect to the situation to
which attention ought to be drawn.
When Gandhi proposed the hartal against the Rowlatt Act in
March,1919, most moderates were askance; (as luck would have it,
Tilak was in London at the time). Gandhi, sensing the moment to
capture leadership of the Congress, wrote as follows to Dinshaw Wacha
(letter dtd., 25th, Feb.,1919; see Sumit Sarkar, Modern India,
p.188): "Satyagraha is the only way, it seems to me, to stop
terrorism."
Gandhi had in mind what he saw as a dangerously undesirable
development taking place among sections of the intelligentsia,
namely, the willingness to engage in armed resistance to colonial
rule (something that had begun to happen since the partition of
Bengal in 1905). Given that such impulses were largely inspired by
the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, Gandhi and the bulk of the
Congress, given their class character, were understandably alarmed.
Satyagraha was then in no small measure conceived as an alternate
praxis.
Keeping in mind the continuing armed insurgencies in the North East,
one would then have thought that the course adopted by Irom Sharmila
should have received more than a cold shoulder by the government of
the day. The treatment received by her, however, raises doubts that
the state seriously wishes to see the end of insurgency. Just as the
British saw in the Gandhian methods of mobilization a menace more
intractable than the then armed challenge it was receiving, it does
seem that Irom Sharmila spells a threat which the state wishes to
quell, preferring to deal militarily with the insurgents rather than
face a people's democratic revolt.And as a statement put out by the
Human Rights Features Organisation succinctly states, "it is
precisely this contemptuous attitude in the face of suffering which
demeans the world's largest democracy"(2).
Nor is it a surprise that India's prime media channels which have
lately been hotly pleading the cases of some notable victims in
instances of murder should have evinced rather negligible interest in
the six-year long satyagraha of Irom Sharmila. Is it not perhaps time
that these influential channels gave to the North East the same
quality of sustained attention that they have laudably given to
Kashmir in recent years? Why is it that we either never seem to
"look" towards the East, or if and when we do, we "look" but do not
"see."
I may be pardoned for recalling what I had written in an article
titled Sangma Treads Dangerous Ground (Mainstream, April 14, 2001).
The article was occasioned by Mr Sangma's campaign to dub Sonia
Gandhi a "foreigner" who had to be prevented from becoming Prime
Minister even if the Constitution recognized her rights as a "citizen
of India." I had pointed out to Mr Sangma that if the right to
ascribe citizenship was left to the subjective whims of all and
sundry, people of his countenance would have a hard battle on hand,
since, knowing from experience as a teacher in Delhi University, I
knew that students who came from the North East were hardly ever
treated as Indians by "mainstreamers".
Is it possible that Irom Sharmila suffers such disgusting neglect on
account of subliminal impulses from which not even the government of
the day is free? A truly disturbing thought that.
1. Subash Gatade, "Irom Sharmila: Iron Lady of Manipur"
Countercurrents.org, 17/10/2006.
2. Human Rights Features (Voice of the Asia-Pacific Human Rights
Network, B6/6 Safdarjung Enclave Extension, New Delhi 110 029)_______________________________________________
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