Post # 19 # Anna Wanna Fast!

But I'm so hungry.

I'm not the typical gannet-next-door. I'm hungry to live my life as I want it to be. The mainland India is all gaga about Anna Hazare going to fast, while back in my hometown, we are fighting for our survival.

For 11 years, our Iron Lady, Irom Sharmila has been on a fast to protest against the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA). A droconian law which might be suitable in a land of dictator, but which has been imposed on us, making a mockery of democracy -- while India shouts about being the largest democratic country. Beware! This superlative is only by virtue of its unstoppable population.

First, the mainstream media of the mainland is not interested. We have no sponsors for the crony capitalists. Secondly, there is a mistaken belief that AFSPA affects only a part of the Great India, while this military law shams the democratic principles that India is boasting of.

This is not victimisation. Though we are used to it.

I do feel pity for the old man with his unaffected simplicity. But I have no polite words for his followers. Simple as that.

Arundhati Roy puts it aptly in The South Reports:

"... The right to protest of the people in Posco, Kalinganagar, Dandakaranya were taken away a long time ago. Even in Delhi, at the Jantar Mantar, people from Bhopal or the Narmada Valley cannot stay overnight. The Right to Protest is only for the middleclass...

When you talk of the 'Fast', you only mean Anna Hazare's fast. Right now, 10,000 villagers in Koodankulam are on a relay hunger-fast against a nuclear plant. Sharmila Irom has been on a fast for 10 years against an Act that allows soldiers to kill on mere suspicion. But we are not talking about these fasts.

Deep inside the forest in a tribal village, when 500 policemen surround and burn your village and there is no TV camera, you can't go on a hunger-strike. You can only fight back. In any case, can the hungry go on a hunger-strike?"

Post # Ten # From the Election Camp

I feel pity for myself and for my folks. General election is round the corner, scheduled to be held early 2012. This is one of the major votings we have, among the several smaller ones that we have, in the name of democracy. Many of us are drunk with the free drinks, many of us playing caroms as if life is a game, and many of us are participating in chalking out the plans and strategies for tomorrow. As a part of the election campaign. But...

For more than sixty years, we have been living under the cloak of democracy. Let's not go back to the beginning of time when Manipur was forcibly inserted into the union of India in 1949. Let's know something about neo-colonialism. The textbook defines the term in several ways. But back on the ground reality, it is a totally new thing what the term neo-colonialism implies. It can manifest in a single country, regardless of its long winding explanation of the developed-undeveloped-countries' phenomenon in 1,000-page academic books. As a metaphor, the issue is as boring as a textbook. But the issue is eating into fabrics of our society that we cannot simply ignore.

We have an adopted religion, Hinduism, which we have followed reluctantly after it was forcibly imposed on us during the 19th century. We have came a long way from those times. Now the gods are dead. And now, in a new incarnation, in political and economical matters, we are surviving on borrowed ideals of election and democracy. We don't have any revenue but the freebies from New Delhi, the national capital. This is a reality, howsoever we try to lose ourselves in a fantasy for a better tomorrow, even inside this election camp.

But we are not wise. It is simple as that. The only thing we are waiting for is to bitch about our representatives, who will disappear from the public eyes as soon as the election results are declared. We can find them in whorehouses and gambling places but we are too naive to visit them in those places. More bitching when we return back after they refused to listen to our grievances.

But the question is why we are not wise. I want to burn down this camp. But I'm too tipsy. And I will not ever resort to violence to meet the ends. I would cry for collective, common consciousness. I want to persuade the people about the truth. We are living in a frontier area, which in military jargon, means a region that needs to be guarded with guns and bombs and barb wires. How do you define this kind of democracy in the 1,000-page textbook? When are we going to wake up from this nightmare?

This election is just a side-show. How long are we going to tolerate this intolerable injustice towards humanity? I doubt I will ever find the answer inside this camp.

Post # Eight # Trigger Happy

Anyone with a gun can go out and commit an act of terrorism,
even without a political affiliation.
Aaron McGruder 

"Ideas pull the trigger,
but instinct loads the gun"

Policemen must be hanged if they are found guilty of a fake encounter incident. The Supreme Court (SC) of India has said. A bench of Justices Markandey Katju and Chandramouli Kumar Prasad observed in court that encounter killings can be classified as a rarest of rare crime because the protectors of law become murderers.

That's the fact. The news. And what's the reality? For the record, Uttar Pradesh and Manipur top the list of fake encounters, involving high-handedness of the men in khaki. Utter indiscipline. By ratio to its population, my state, Manipur already affected by insurgent movements and ethnic conflicts, will be the notorious numero uno. The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) recorded 32 cases of fake encounters in 2009-10, 12 cases in 2010-11 in the trouble-torn state.

But what does all this mean? For a long time, Manipur has been up in arms against the draconian Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which has been supposedly imposed to curb the militant menace but the fire of resistance and insurgency has only spread like wild fires, in the last three decades after the act has been put into place. More unfortunately, so many innocents have lost their lives, so many maimed, so many raped, so many abused, so many depressed and Irom Chanu Sharmila has entered the eleventh year into her fast. In this context, an observation in the court that the law-enforcers should be punished means next to nothing.

There's something so wrong in the Indian democracy. If not for the election, the image of things like sovereign and republic is fading from the people residing in its peripheral regions. The crisis in Manipur is just the perfect case study. What is needed is a complete overhaul of the system: policy intervention, help the affected people and persuade them to bring to the table, strengthen democratic mechanism, understand the issue completely and not to go by the interests of other things like defence strategy only, et cetera. So finally, the observation is appreciated but it should come out of the books and courtrooms.