THE revelation last fortnight that Irom Sharmila, whose epic hunger-strike is poised to complete 11 years on 2 November, is in love and that she is falling out with her supporters caused a stir amongst human rights workers in Manipur who are campaigning behind her for the repeal of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act. This is understandable but unfortunate. The outlook should be that the movement is what is important and, with or without the iconic Sharmila as the standard-bearer, it can be sustained without any sense of loss or that the wind in its sails has diminished.
Sharmila has done enough to highlight the issue, more than anyone behind the cause can imagine ever doing, but nobody should have expected her to make a martyr of herself. The issue is the draconian AF(SP)A and not Sharmila, however great she may be perceived to be.
However, one cannot help wonder if she is not under psychological stress, now more than ever in the past few months. It is learnt that even members of her own family wanting to meet her do not have things easy because permission now has to be acquired from the state chief secretary.
Journalists and activists know that, in the past, visiting her in her confinement was not so strictly restricted. For whatever reason, her privation is being deepened and surely her loneliness is, too, in equal measure – after all, she is human, too. Imagine 11 years in a “prison” cell all alone, not even in contact with other prisoners as she is in a special ward in the Jawaharlal Nehru Hospital, Porompat, to enable medical care and nose-feeding.
This apart, going without food is not just about tolerating hunger. In fact, in her case hunger may not be much of an issue for she is fed through the nose and kept alive. But her self-denial is more about foregoing the taste and smell of food, some of the most gratifying of all human senses. Any lesser person would have gone mad under the circumstances. Is this additional stress taking a toll on her?
In any case, the campaign against the oppressive AF(SP)A has been allowed to hinge on Sharmila alone for too long. This is not good for her, as she is finding out now, or for the movement, for it deprives individual campaigners, most of whom have simply rallied behind Sharmila instead of making a stand in the manner Eric From described the emergence of dictatorships in Escape from Freedom.
The episode is sad in another way, too. To be a public leader entails a great deal of sacrificing private life. Sharmila, as a selfless crusader against the embodiment of an oppressive law, automatically came to be lifted on to an exalted public pedestal. As a shy, private woman, she has every right to lead a happy individual life and disappear from the public domain. The freedom to aspire for such an eventuality should be left with her to decide. She has contributed enough already. Manipur and its resistance against the AF(SP)A must, however, continue undeterred even if she decides to retire to a peaceful normal life.
But there is more to what this recent development has proven. The fact that a personal decision by Sharmila is now seen somewhat as a threat to the campaign against the AF(SP)A in Manipur is a demonstration of the strategic and structural flimsiness of any protracted struggle to resort to hero worship. It has to be said that her direct followers are guilty of having exactly this. Even if theirs is not hero worship, they built their campaign with her as the major, if not only, prop.
The approach should instead have been to see Sharmila as a star campaigner, but not the heart and soul of the campaign. Unfortunately, for whatever their reasons, this route was not given much importance. And so a single report of Sharmila’s love affair with a hitherto unheard of man, and her reported statement that she is disillusioned with her followers, has caused so much trepidation, even fear that the campaign against the AF(SP)A will lose much of its steam.
The development should also bring back the old debate of whether leaders make situations or the other way round. The Sharmila case should again highlight the need to find the right balance between the two. Leaders with vision give any movement the right focus and charisma, but it is also equally true that it is the peculiarities of a given situation that throw up a leader.
This notwithstanding, it would be wrong to also dismiss human involvement in shaping events and, indeed, history. If everything were to be predetermined by circumstance and leaders, too, were forged only by the impersonal forces of history, as Isaiah Berlin noted in Crooked Timber of Humanity, a difficult ethical situation would arise whereby it would become impossible to hold anybody accountable for history’s many atrocities. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and all the other mass murderers would then appear to be no more than quasi-tragic figures, compelled by historical circumstances to do what they did.
The writer is editor, Imphal Free Press