Irom Sharmila's voice is at first, barely a whimper. She had felt numb, she says, when she came across the visuals of two women in Manipur, paraded naked and pushed around ruthlessly by strange men onto a field. One of them, a 21-year-old, would be gang-raped, the other left lying on the field after several threats of abuse. It happened in May, the early days of the ongoing ethnic violence in Manipur, Sharmila's home state. She was not unaccustomed to brutality. She had famously waged a single-woman protest for 16 long years in Manipur, asking the government to repeal the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA).
Irom had spent the best years of her life fasting, her pleas falling on deaf ears, till one day, she walked away and began her life with Desmond, a British Indian, in a quiet corner of Bengaluru.
"Even before my hunger strike, the army had gang-raped a young tribal woman. There has been no punishment for the rapists. It is really worse this time, really inhuman. The Prime Minister has been silent, and when he finally spoke, there was nothing about a solution, nothing about bringing normalcy back in Manipur," Sharmila tells TNM during an interview, her voice now loud with concern.
The government, she says, has failed to maintain law and order, and they have denied the Right To Information by shutting down the internet. "He [the Prime Minister] is avoiding his responsibility as a Union leader of all these federal states. He needs to call all the 60 MLAs of the Manipur government and take a call on how to deal with their respective constituencies. It is too late already," Sharmila warns.
The widely circulated visuals and blurred images of the two Kuki women, who were abused in public view, have brought new attention to the two-and-a-half-month-long strife between the Meitei and Kuki communities of Manipur. For Sharmila, it is also a stark reminder of society's apathy to the lives of women. She says her long hunger strike remained unfruitful because people looked down upon it, "thinking, it is only a woman."
In 2016, Sharmila ended her strike and a year later, married Desmond and relocated to Bengaluru. She has a peaceful life, she says, living in an environment full of birds that calms her. As she is busy giving media interviews, Desmond takes care of their twin girls, who are, as we speak, learning self-defence in their Karate classes.