Irom Sharmila: Indian activist ends world’s longest hunger strike - but continues fight for justice

The 44-year-old from the Indian state of Manipur said she planned to enter politics

Irom Sharmila may have ended her record-breaking hunger strike. But she has not ended the struggle for justice.

On Tuesday, the 44-year-old activist announced she was ending the hunger strike she began 16 years ago to draw attention to abuses by the military in the Indian state of Manipur. She was granted bail by a court and symbolically tasted honey - the first food to pass her lips since 2000 - in front of journalists gathered to ask her questions.

Ms Sharmila said she was ending her protest in order to participate in local elections, a clear shift in tactics that she recognised that some may not approve of. She also threw down a challenge to India’s Prime Mininster, Narendra Modi.

Ms Sharmila symbolically broke her fast by eating honey (AP)

“I have to change my strategy. Some people are seeing me as a strange woman because I want to join politics. They say politics is a dirty, but so is society. I want to stand in the elections against the government,” she said, according to the Hindustan Times.

She said she had decided to “try a different [form of] agitation because I have been fasting for 16 years and I have not got anything from it yet”.

Her brother, Irom Singhajit, told the Press Trust of India: “We don't know where she will go after her release. If she wants to come home and stay with us, we are ready to welcome her. But it is her desire.”

Ms Sharmila - quiet, shy, utterly defiant - began her protest in 2000 in order to bring attention to the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), a law that activist says allows troops and paramilitaries to behave with impunity.

The act is only in force in Jammu and Kashmir, and India’s seven north eastern states, of which Manipur - Ms Sharmila’s home - is one. In the north east, the law was introduced in 1958.

The military says it needs the protection to permit soldiers to effectively tackle militants who were once active in the area. Yet campaigners say it has created an effective police state, where young men are rounded up on the merest suspicions, where heavily troops and paramilitaries patrol the streets, and where ordinary people have little redress to justice. Drug abuse is rife.

Ms Sharmila's protest continued a tradition of female activism in Manipur (AP)

Ms Sharmila had not eaten any food voluntarily since November 5 2000. Three days earlier, 10 civilians were killed by paramilitary troops in Malom, a small town on the outskirts of Imphal, the Manipur state capital.

The night before, she ate a final meal with her mother. Throughout her campaign, the pair barely met, out of concern that the emotion of doing so would lead her to terminate her protest.

She Indian state responded by charging her with attempted suicide, an offence that carried a penalty of one year’s imprisonment. Every year, police would bring her before a local magistrate to be resentenced.

She spent her days in the secure wing of a local hospital, in a scruffy room where she wrote and read.

Her determination to stick by her protest was remarkable. She was force fed, three times a day, by nurses who poured a liquified mixture of vitamins, carbohydrates, proteins and laxatives into a plastic feeding-tube, which entered her nose. She refused to drink, and brushed her teeth only with a piece of dry cotton.

Ms Sharmila said she wants to continue her struggle through politics (AP)

In an interview in her room with The Independent in 2010, she said; “Everything is such a mess in Manipur right now. The politicians depend entirely on power, on physical power. They are power-hungry.”

She added: “[My struggle] is in the name of justice, peace and love. I am a very simple symbol of those things. My struggle is a very simple matter, it depends on spirit, sufferance.”

Her actions placed her in the latest in a line of defiant women from Manipur. Traditionally, women there enjoyed a collective right of appeal to the ruling monarch and when the British seized control in 1891 – it was the last territory to be incorporated into the Raj – it was women who led the protests, as they also did in 1904.

In 1939 – when the authorities continued to transport rice out of Manipur despite widespread shortages – women launched a massive protest. In 2004, when a 32-year-old woman was dragged from her house by troops and then raped and murdered, those same torch bearers marched to the troops' barracks, stripped naked and raised a banner that read: “Indian Army Rape Us”

Over the years, there have been accusations that activists have sought to control Ms Sharmila. Several years ago there was controversy when she revealed she was involved in a relationship with a man from Goa, Desmod Coutinho. On Tuesday, at the 40-minute court hearing where she was granted bail, she said she was aware that people referred to her as the Iron lady of Manipur and that she wanted to live up to her name.

Yet in a comment that suggested she was also looking forward to life outside a prisn cell, she said she hoped she could challenge to become the chief mininster of Manipur and remove AFSPA.

She also set out a challenge to the Indian prime minister, Mr Modi.

“Mr Prime Minister, you indulge in violence,” she said.

“In civilisation, we need non-violence. Our father of the nation is the father of non-violence. You can connect with us, you can govern us with fatherly affection, without discrimination.”