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One woman's silent quest for peace on India's wild frontier :: The Independent
By Andrew Buncombe, May 5, 2010, Imphal
One woman's silent quest for peace on India's wild frontier
For 50 years Manipur has been riven by a bloody feud between militants and the state. For the last 10, Sharmila Irom has starved herself in a bid to stop it
Sharmila Irom, a young woman from the Indian state of Manipur, has not eaten for almost 10 years. She is too angry to eat, too upset, too disgusted by the violence that surrounds her, too disturbed by her helplessness to do anything about it. She is hungry for justice, not for food......
Sharmila Irom is the world's longest-running hunger striker, and yet both she and the cause for which she is fasting are barely known outside her home state, let alone beyond India's borders. Physically and mentally, her sacrifice is immense. The 38-year-old has not seen her elderly mother since 2000, believing that doing so might weaken her resolve. Yet when I meet her in her room in the secure wing of a hospital in the city of Imphal – her face and hands ghostly pale from her forced incarceration – she says with a smile: "I am standing on the threshold of success."
.....
The Indian government has done what it can to cover up this dirty war, according a "restricted area status" to Manipur and several other north-eastern states, which is strictly enforced. It took a full nine months for The Independent to obtain perm-ission to travel here, and it required the signature of at least seven officials to meet Sharmila. At the very centre of Manipur's turmoil is the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, a draconian piece of legislation which the federal authorities started applying to India's seven "disturbed" north-eastern states back in 1958. The act gives the armed forces the unhindered right to arrest people and enter any building without a warrant and "fire upon or otherwise use force, even to the causing of death, against any person who is acting in contravention of any law". Outside of the North-east, the act has only ever been extended to Kashmir.
You can read the entire article here.
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