Appetite for the system - 16 years on, Irom keento join Establishment

Sankarshan Thakur, TT, Imphal, Aug. 9: Over a riveting few hours this afternoon, a dogged 16-year dare to the Establishment essayed a dramatic volte face and began auditioning to become the Establishment itself. 

 One moment, Irom Sharmila stood erect in a musty Imphal West courtroom, the portrait of an unbending heroine, that rubber tube pinned to her nostril swinging in defiance of the State. The next, she had filed a swift submission and declared aspirations to helm the very order that had kept her chained all these years. 
With a lick of honey and a Rs 10,000 surety bond, Sharmila closed her celebrated offensive and opened a controversial ambition: "I wish to become chief minister," she coldly announced soon after an anti-climactic buckling to the court's conditions and securing bail.

"Please help me become the chief minister, I promise I will change things if you make me chief minister, I will abrogate the draconian AFSPA (Armed Forces Special Powers Act)."

The voice of resolute protest had turned to repetitive pleading. Such was Sharmila's morphing into a new avatar - the agit-prop demeanour was gone, the political was taking over. She spelt out an appeal to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to shun "violent methods" and "turn fatherly"; she spoke of contesting the Assembly polls, a mere few months away, from Thoubal, the seat of Manipur chief minister Okram Ibobi Singh.

"I want to become chief minister," Sharmila said again. "And so I will contest the chief minister's seat."

Sixteen years of hunger had fed an appetite that many instantly labelled unseemly. "This is a conspiracy, a betrayal, Sharmila has been tricked into this by those who wish our struggle to dissipate," cried an outraged S. Mormon Leima, a 70-year-old who has stood by Sharmila and the anti-AFSPA campaign all these years. "Let Sharmila decide what she wants to do, our struggle will not cease."

As Sharmila was hustled off in an ambulance amid a frenetic, near-violent, scrum between media and security personnel, Leima and a clutch of elderly women took the courthouse stairway and launched into vociferous outcry: "This is not the last of our battle against AFSPA, we are here, we shall wage this campaign, we the people of Manipur... AFSPA, go!"

Sharmila's activist brother Irom Singhajit and human rights lawyer Babloo Loitangbam - both lead actors of the push for the AFSPA's abrogation - stood silent to one side, neither willing to speak, both visibly stunned by the turn of events.

Had they lost in the course of less than a quarter of a day heft accumulated over more than a decade and a half? Had the spearhead of their movement suddenly self-decapitated? Sharmila not so much as turned to engage their glance in court today; they were left to their hushed whispers at the back as she proceeded, unbothered, with the unveiling of plans she'd not bothered consulting anybody with.

Could it be a measure of Manipur's altered mood on Sharmila that she was turned away from her first chosen shelter post-release this evening?

Residents of Keisamthong in Imphal West, where Sharmila was to spend her first night of freedom on the premises of an NGO for women, begged her away, saying they didn't want to host the commotion she'd bring along. She had to be ferried by her security detail to another location and finally back to hospital.

She arrived from her hospital ward a little past 11, in a fanfare of lady guards of the India Reserve Battalion and a posse of armed commandos. She wore a sarong of sky blue silk and a white cotton tunic with flowery inlay. Round her mussed curls, she had wrapped a colourful scarf with Tibetan thanka motifs. She wore her feeder tube, the frill of her long standoff, and she wore extraordinarily long nails.

A little past 11am, when she rose to speak before the magistrate, she did so feebly but fervently for close to 15 minutes. The sum of it: "I have decided to end my hunger strike because it has brought no results. I need to change my tactics. I have been cut off from the people, I need to resume touch with them. I am aware many people are opposed to this, but I see no other option open to me. I know many people think politics is dirty, but my struggle will have to be waged politically henceforth. So set me free."

But till fairly late in the court proceedings, Sharmila had offered no clue she had prepared to abort her fabled reign as rebel and conceive a career in politics, no matter what the cost. When she pleaded she be freed because she was committed to ending her hunger strike, chief judicial magistrate Lamkhanpau Tonsing wagged his forefinger at Sharmila in caution.

"You submit a personal bond and I will grant you bail, but that you aren't willing to do. There is a law, it's taking its course. We have to prosecute the case."

Sharmila retreated to her seat, apparently unwilling to furnish a bond that would have meant conceding she was wrong to have waged her hunger protest and the government right to prosecute her.

That is a concession neither she nor her movement has hitherto been willing to make. "But I am doing nothing wrong now," she argued back presently. "I am saying I will end my strike, what is the case now, why this trial? End it now, I am unwilling to remain wrongly detained by your judicial system."

But when she found the magistrate unmoved, and proceeding with the long-winded hearing, Sharmila quickly gave in to the rules of the same system she was protesting minutes back. The bond was filled and the bail granted. Thereon, she went her way, and far too many of her followers quite another.