Last month, a Delhi court framed charges against Irom Sharmila Chanu, the ‘iron lady’ of Manipur, for allegedly attempting to commit suicide with her ‘fast unto death’ during a sit-in at Jantar Mantar in June 2006. It was all cut-and-dry, except that Chanu has been ‘fasting’ for nearly 12 years now, demanding revocation of the controversial Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA).

The court indulgently advised Sharmila’s counsel to explain to her that since the maximum punishment for attempted suicide is one year, and she has been in custody for more than six years, she has already done time six times over: if she pleaded guilty, the case would be done and dusted and closed forever, and she wouldn’t spend a minute in jail. What the court didn’t say was the next time she refused a glass of water handed to her by a cop in mufti at a protest gathering, she would’ve been charged again with attempted suicide.

Not to panegyrise her — aside from the fact that the length of her hunger strike would earn her a place in the Guinness Book of Records, her personal distress isn’t rare — but she carries the torch of what the murdered Czech dissident-philosopher Jan Pato?ka (1907-77) called “solidarita ot?eseným”, the solidarity of the shaken.

If this is obvious to us, it is obvious to a justice system that has been ostensibly empowered by “judicial activism”, as KG Balakrishnan, former CJI and now chairperson of the national human rights commission, wrote in 2009. But what magistrate Akash Jain told Sharmila — “We respect you but the law of land does not permit you to take your life” — doesn’t fit in with the picture Balakrishnan painted. If anything, Jain seemed to be falling back on the legal doctrine of respondeat superior (superior orders) that formed the basis of the responsibility-shucking ‘Nuremberg Defence’ used by Nazis on trial in 1945-46. In effect, Jain told her: “I respect what you are doing. But I am a servant of the law. The law doesn’t permit what you’re doing.”

The judiciary is supposed, by oath, to “uphold the constitution and the laws”, and to recoil from politics. But a hermetic apoliticality, however desirable among judges, is utopian bunk. It would be interesting to know how the Indian judiciary would deal with Franco Berardi’s truism (2009): “Suicide is the decisive political act of our times.”

Given India’s profit from Gandhi’s moral deification of hunger strikes — he stopped eating whenever he was jailed, in 1922, 1930, 1933 and 1942 — it is uncaring, or uninformed, or historically unengaged of the Indian judiciary to throw the book at Irom Sharmila.

Or maybe it’s the copycat methodology that has set the Congress government off. The term ‘fast-unto-death’ has been attributed to Gandhi of 1932, on his first jailing for protesting the British support for a new Indian constitution that gave “the Untouchables” a 70-year right to their own separate political representation. It was his only unpopular fast (and would probably have got him a hiding in parliament today and a charge-sheet for hate speech), but he explained that separate representation for any community would permanently alienate the social classes from one another. And history has proven him right.

The greater irony is that, since independence, only two fasters-unto-death have gone all the way — Swami Nigamanand, who died on June 13, 2011 after 115 days of protesting illegal mining on the banks of the Ganga in Uttarakhand; and Pottu Sreeramulu, who died in December 1952 after 82 days for separation of Andhra region from the Madras Presidency.

On the other hand, the number of ‘bh?k-hart?li’ who couldn’t beat their hunger pangs is impressive. The better known among them — Anna Hazare, Baba Ramdev and Mamata Banerjee — had better health indicators upon exit than they had upon embarkation: Hazare broke his fast on the 12th day trusting a vague governmental anticorruption promise that was never kept; Baba Ramdev broke it on day 7; Mamata Banerjee claimed she took no solids or liquids for 26 days, but a report in the Outlook magazine said, “On Day 7, she spat fire for 70 long minutes and on Day 18, she spoke without a pause for 40 minutes. These ‘feats’ have raised eyebrows and many doctors are now wondering if the lady is really on a total fast.”

None of them was charged with attempted suicide. So what made a usually hyperactive Congress strategician sit up bolt upright — six years after Sharmila’s alleged offence — to the sound of a ‘wake-up-and-smell-the-coffee’ alarm? And why begin at the very bottom of the judicial pile if the tactic is voter-related, as it must be? Especially considering that the general elections, in end-2013 or anytime in 2014, are too close for the ruling coalition to expect any payoffs?

Government’s drama built on,and around, words

It’s been 12 years that Sharmila has had a feeding tube up a nostril that has left her nasal septum, oesophagus and lungs constantly irritated, and she hasn’t done what a ‘normal’ patient would do — rip it out, throw tantrums, end the unpleasantness. It is a procedure so invasive that British suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928), who used hunger strikes to force the British government’s gauntleted hand, likened it to “rape”.

But whether or not it is the government that is keeping her alive, against her will, is moot — her threat has never been put to the test; she has never arrived at the point of imperative medical intervention. This entire drama is built on, and around, words — promises, threats and counter-threats.

What is not a matter of confusion, though, is that the government’s imposition of gavage is illegal according to international law. Force-feeding was prohibited as long back as 1975 in the ‘WMA (World Medical Association) Declaration of Tokyo — Guidelines for Physicians Concerning Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment in Relation to Detention and Imprisonment’ (Clause 6). “Where a prisoner refuses nourishment and is considered by the physician as capable of forming an unimpaired and rational judgment concerning the consequences of such a voluntary refusal of nourishment, he or she shall not be fed artificially,” it says.

The Indian Medical Association (IMA) is one of the 27 national-level founder member associations of WMA and has long had two office-bearers in Manipur. But on the issue of medical human rights violations by the state, IMA hasn’t uttered a word about the patent illegality of the charge of ‘attempted suicide’.

Only a sorry fistful of fasters-unto-death have been arrested on charges of attempted suicide — all governmental grandstanding farces. One of them was the volatile Telangana Rashtra Samithi president K Chandrasekhara Rao, who was taken into custody in November 2009 a few hours before he was to begin a fast-unto-death. In August 2011, Anna Hazare was arrested just before he was about to leave his host’s flat to begin a fast at Jantar Mantar — he was taken into preventive custody.

These instances recontextualise the term ‘governmental proactivity’. Irom Sharmila has obviously got what in government circles is known as “special treatment”. The mere fact a charge has been instituted against her raises the spectre of the centre deciding to pull out all plugs: recent events are reminders of the concept of felo de se (Latin for “felon of himself”), a fundamentalist religious doctrine in which even attempted suicides deserved the treatment reserved for suicides that worked.

A will of her own

Not that it should have mattered. Last year, the supreme court told parliament to delete Section 309 of Indian Penal Code, as it has become “anachronistic though... constitutionally valid”, and 25 of 29 states have already conceded that it is an uncivilised law. In mid-2012, the union health ministry had written to the union home ministry about the need to push through the mental health care bill-2012, which it expected to table in the winter session of parliament. It hasn’t heard back from the home ministry yet.

Only through a brazen manipulation of behavioural evidence — and this is a worrying possibility — can a case be made that Irom Sharmila is incapable of understanding her situation, despite common suspicion that she is saner than most parliamentarians slugging it out in the Well of the House. Only a prisoner of conscience would have the strength and the motive to stick out what is by any standards of human endurance a living hell. She has a will of her own, and it shows in her stoicism and her desire to chart her own course.

When Human Rights Alert, which had been with her from her early days, demanded complete loyalty, she told her HRA’s minder to go take a hike. On her recent visit to Delhi, she defied Manipur’s deep conservatism and made it a point to bring along her non-Meitei Goan boyfriend, the 49-year-old Desmond Coutinho.

Her sequelae of distress have not led to a single pain-induced psychotic episode — which is remarkable considering the mucosal and nerve damage that inserting and extracting a polyurethane/silicone tube three times a day every day for 12 years four months — almost 14,000 times up to the day of writing this article — has done to her nasal septum, epiglottis, trachea and oesophagus; or, for that matter, subsisting on a liquid nutrient cocktail that smells of no decent food on earth, leave aside the familiar one of her Meitei community; or engaging with the cops, who would nip around after every 364 days, and release her from custody only in order to ask her if she would break her fast; and when she refused, would rearrest her.

This might be (inhumanely) legal but it contravenes an international covenant.

The 1975 Tokyo Declaration had a hole in it that mandated a second opinion by an independent physician. For 16 years, governments used the hole to insert their own secondary physician into the proceedings, undoing the mandate. The 1991 WMA Declaration of Malta on Hunger Strikers plugged the hole, even while recognising exactly how difficult it is for doctors to distinguish a genuine political drive behind self-destructiveness and otherwise disturbed behaviour.

In India, medical intervention follows the path of least philosophical resistance: doctors in attendance upon a faster-unto-death are quick to spot signs of facies Hippocratica (the Hippocratic face), and even quicker to see cachexia — the dreaded “condition” known as the Wasting Syndrome.

But under the state’s watch, Irom Sharmila just got worse: she went on to develop vitamin C (ascorbic acid) deficiency, which made her hair dry and brittle; her electrolyte levels hit rock-bottom; the osteoporosis that is leaching her bones today began as they watched. Ever jittery, the doctors began feeding her an unbalanced cocktail of electrolytes, minerals and vitamins, with the force of a concern whose main component was extreme nervousness.

Her life, her death, her business

The dilemma that Sharmila’s hunger strike poses for observers — sympathisers, detractors and fence-sitters alike — can be gauged from the reactions to another hunger striker about 4,000 km to the west of India. In February 2012, Palestinian activist Khader Adnan was arrested, relocated quietly to Tel Aviv, and force-fed.

A comment in on his incarceration on CommonDreams.org went, “A hunger strike is the moral equivalent of ‘I’m going to hold my breath until I turn blue and die, and then you’ll be sorry.’” The next commentator snappily reposted, “Sort of like Gandhi...no one paid any attention to him.”
 
This brought out the informed erudition of the final commentator. He wrote, lazily, “Yeah, I’ve heard that before … A hunger strike is one of the most potent ways of reminding people of our basic connection which we mainly forget or do not feel in today’s world. An awakened conscience could be a powerful force, and this conscience needs to be awakened in many, many people. At some point, it should become clear that inaction in the face of injustice is just as wrong as committing an act of injustice. Not many have the strength, though. Not even the suicide bombers, IMO.”

There is something to the first comment. Irom Sharmila’s case, for instance, stands out because she hasn’t protested being force-fed. Bobby Sands, a member of the British parliament imprisoned for his activism in the Provisional Irish Republican Army, and one of the most controversial — and respected — protestors to die for any cause in the history of international hunger strikes, resisted every form of force and inducement to break his fast, and died in 66 days. It was 1981; he was 27.

In contrast, there is no resistance from Sharmila to being fed. There is no protest without resistance. What she is doing is marking out a very personal — not ideological — space. As Dr Philip Nitschke — who was, in 1996, the first physician in the world to euthanasise four terminally ill patients — wrote in an essay in December 2012: “It is my life. It is my death. It is my business.”

This column first appeared in the March 16-31 issue of Governance Now.