I Am Indian Too. Manipur Diary!

I am an Indian, but I never felt like one. Alienated and violated, I am just a dark shadow, on myself and on my countrymen. But I am an Indian too.(excerpts from a conversation with a Manipuri friend.)

For the last ten years, never raising one angry voice, but quietly putting-up a struggle against the state, against the country, Irom Sharmila- an Iron of a woman today has come to represent a true Satyagrahi. 

Excerpts from an article:

The year is 2006. An ordinary November evening in Delhi. A slow, halting voice breaks into your consciousness. “How shall I explain? It is not a punishment, but my bounden duty…” A haunting phrase in a haunting voice, made slow with pain yet magnetic in its moral force. “My bounden duty.” What could be “bounden duty” in an India bursting with the excitements of its economic boom?...

...That’s when the enormous story of Irom Sharmila first begins to seep in. You are in the presence of someone historic. Someone absolutely unparalleled in the history of political protest anywhere in the world, ever. Yet you have been oblivious of her. A hundred TV channels. An unprecedented age of media. Yet you have been oblivious of her.

For young Irom Sharmila, things came to a head on November 2, 2000. A day earlier, an insurgent group had bombed an Assam Rifles column. The enraged battalion retaliated by gunning down 10 innocent civilians at a bus-stand in Malom. The local papers published brutal pictures of the bodies the next day, including one of a 62-year old woman, Leisangbam Ibetomi, and 18-year old Sinam Chandramani, a 1988 National Child Bravery Award winner. Extraordinarily stirred, on November 4, Sharmila, then only 28, began her fast.

“Menghaobi”, the people of Manipur call her, “The Fair One”.

I wonder if there is still democracy?I wonder if people still really care? I wonder... if things will ever change?