Special: Iron Lady of a lost cause

UNDAUNTED SPIRIT: Irom Sharmila hasn't eaten a morsel of food or taken a drop of water for six years.

        

Featured Blog

Rajdeep Sardesai

Maharaj or Dada, Ganguly's legacy lives on

Featured Slideshows

New Delhi: Irom Sharmila Chanu's story is magnetic in its moral force, yet not violent or binding. It's heroic, yet rooted. It's self-sacrificing. Irom's struggle talks about human life when it's robbed one of its most essential commodity -dignity.

Irom hasn't eaten a morsel of food or taken a drop of water for the past six years.

Synonymous with the agitation against the Armed Forced Special Powers Act (AFSPA), Irom Sharmila demands that the draconian act 'must go' to restore peace in the state.

"I can't tolerate the atrocities on my contemporaries and on my people. This is God's will and I will carry on. It's intolerable," she says.

Today, she weighs just 37 kgs and most of her body organs are wasted. For the past six years, the Indian state has kept her alive on a cocktail of vitamins and nutrients and she is forcibly fed twice a day through her nose.

Charged with attempt to suicide, Sharmila has been in the custody of the Delhi Police for the past one year and five police personnel guard her round the clock.

Irom Sharmila, a poet, a Gandhian on a modern-day satygraha, is today a high security prisoner.

Those who come to visit her at Room No 8 in the Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital in the Capital—where is is currently lodged—are searched, their gifts opened, and conversations overheard.

In a nation that reveres the principles of Ahimsa and Satyagraha one of Gandhi's greatest followers has been forgotten.

What is AFSPA?
	The Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) gives the Army and the paramilitary forces the power to use force, shoot or arrest anyone on a mere suspicion.
	The Act allows no judicial proceedings against Army personnel without the sanction of the Central Government.
	The Act has been in place in Manipur and most of the Northeast since 1980, when Sharmila was just eight-years-old.

The story of Irom—the 'Iron Lady'

Far away in a hut in Imphal is where the her story began. Sharmila is the youngest of eight siblings and by the time she was born, her mother Irom Sakhi was dry.