Torchbearers For Victims in a Violent Land

By NILANJANA S. ROY

Whenever Ojas Suniti Vijay performs the one-woman play “Le Mashale” (The Torchbearer), whether at a recent conference on peace in the insurgency-racked states of northeast India or at colleges in Delhi, the audience flinches at exactly the same point. This is where Ms. Ojas intones the line that declares how women have been treated by the security forces in Manipur State through a decades-long conflict marked by incidents of sexual abuse and rape: “Just a piece of flesh with two round breasts and a vagina.”

“Le Mashale” has gained a cult following over the past two years on India’s independent theater circuit, in large part for the woman it celebrates, Irom Sharmila — the Torchbearer whose story testifies to the courage women have shown in the face of the armed struggle for greater autonomy for the ethnically distinct northeast and an often controversial military occupation.

This month, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh celebrated what he called the “trend of declining violence and casualties” in the northeast. Several months earlier, another milestone was observed. Nov. 4, 2010, was the 10th anniversary of the start of Ms. Sharmila’s hunger strike in response to the killings of civilians by the military in the region. What was intended to be a fast to the death has continued through a decade of forced feedings.

Ms. Sharmila was 28 in November 2000, when the shooting of 10 civilians in the village of Malom rocked Manipur, a state with a long history of clashes between military forces and insurgents. A group of rebels had attacked a convoy of the Assam Rifles; the soldiers retaliated by opening fire on people at a bus stop.

Ms. Sharmila began her fast, a form of protest made popular in India by Gandhi during the struggle for independence from British rule. Her main demand was the repeal of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act of 1958, which had often been used to detain local residents on the suspicion that they were aiding rebel groups. Reports of torture, disappearances and deaths were common, with women often being caught in the cross-fire between insurgents and the military. Long criticized by human rights groups, the act grants expanded powers to the armed forces to search, arrest and, under some circumstances, use lethal force, against civilians.

Ms. Sharmila’s hunger strike to garner support for the act’s repeal put her in direct conflict with the Indian state. She spent much of the next decade in judicial custody for “attempt to suicide,” detained at hospitals in Delhi or Imphal and force-fed through nasal tubes.

Although her campaign at first attracted little attention, she has since become an emblem of resistance, her name invoked by authors like Mamang Dai and Arupa Kalita Patangia whenever the question of the insurgency, women’s rights or the repeal of the act comes up.

It was in 2004, after the killing and apparent rape of Thangjam Manorama by security forces, that Manipur saw its most startling protests — and that Ms. Sharmila emerged as an icon of public resistance. In July 2004, Ms. Manorama’s bullet-ridden body was found in a field near her village, after she had been picked up for questioning by members of the Assam Rifles.

That discovery was followed by one of the most remarkable demonstrations in the recent history of the northeast. Several elderly women stripped in front of the Assam Rifles headquarters, while carrying a banner that read: “Indian Army, Rape Us.”

One of the women, L. Gyaneshori, was quoted as saying, “The women of Manipur have been disrobed by the A.F.S.P.A.,” using the initials for the special powers act. “We are still naked.”

Last month, Ms. Sharmila announced that she would persist in her hunger strike until the government repeals the act.

Around the same time that women’s rights and peace advocates were observing the 10th anniversary of Ms. Sharmila’s fast, Binalakshmi Nepram was assessing other aspects of the damage inflicted by decades of strife.

“Violence against women has been on the rise due to the ongoing conflict,” said Ms. Nepram, who has lived and worked in Manipur and Delhi for the past decade. In 2007, she founded the Manipur Women Gun Survivors Network to assist victims of the violence against women that she says is routinely committed by the state and insurgency groups, or that arises from the proliferation of firearms that has accompanied the turmoil.

The impetus for Ms. Nepram was an incident in 2004. A 27-year-old man was dragged out of his car-battery workshop and killed by three unidentified gunmen. Ms. Nepram and others helped his 24-year-old widow rebuild her livelihood and life with the donation of a sewing machine, and the idea for the Survivors Network was born.

Through her work she has concluded that the involvement of women, in effecting social change and peace, is key.

“There can be no peace and no peace process without the active involvement of women, in villages as well as at the negotiating table,” she said.

Temsula Ao, who has written about the effects of violence in the northeast in a collection of short stories titled “These Hills Called Home,” agrees. “No one will give us peace,” she said. “We women have to take it for ourselves.”

Between the figure of a woman in a hospital bed, kept forcibly alive, and women like Ms. Nepram, seeking ways to counteract the violence, the women of this generation from the northeast are ready to fight for the peace they so badly want.

A version of this article appeared in print on February 9, 2011, in The International Herald Tribune.

via The New Yorks Times