DELHI LETTER:The death of an environmentalist failed even to attract the attention of corrupt provincial and federal authorities
RESORTING TO hunger strike as a form of non-violent protest employed effectively by Mahatma Gandhi to free India from British colonial rule more than six decades ago, a 34-year-old Hindu monk starved to death in the country’s northern Uttarakhand province earlier this month for his environmental campaign.
After fasting for 115 days, Swami Nigamananda died on June 13th in a hospital in Haridwar, 200km north of New Delhi. But unlike the mahatma, he failed in his endeavour to persuade the hidebound and corrupt provincial and federal authorities to initiate measures to save the heavily polluted Ganges river, a fast depleting lifeline on which millions depend.
In the same town, TV yoga celebrity Baba Ramdev also resorted to a fast unto death – since called off – to press the federal government to implement action against widespread corruption, as did renowned social activist Anna Hazare on two occasions in Delhi, for a similar objective.
Claiming inspiration from Gandhi, Ramdev and Hazare succeeded in securing attention across India, which has been reeling from numerous high-level corruption scandals.
But like the unfortunate Nigamand, they have so far failed to embarrass the intransigent authorities into acceding to their demands.
Hunger strikes, irrespective of the validity of the causes they support, seem to have lost their potency as an effective protest tool in the cynical, consumer- oriented 21st century.
Ramdev wants the federal government to actively seek the return of billions of dollars illegally stashed abroad by rich Indians and business organisations to avoid paying tax.
The plain-talking and highly regarded Hazare, on the other hand, wants a bigger role for civil society in the government- appointed committee that is drafting stricter legislation for a corruption watchdog. However, she has come up against an official blockade. This anti-corruption Bill has been pending for more than 40 years.
Further afield in India’s northeastern Manipur province bordering Burma (Myanmar), Irom Sharmila, who had her last voluntary meal on November 4th, 2000, has languished since in a secluded government hospital ward in the provincial capital Imphal, where she has been force-fed under police supervision.
The 38-year-old poet, known locally as “The Iron Lady”, is demanding the withdrawal of the draconian Armed Forces Special Powers Act enforced in her insurgency-ridden province after paramilitary personnel shot dead 10 people including a 62-year old woman and an infant, claiming they were militants.
The killers faced neither prosecution nor reprimand because the Act grants immunity from prosecution to India’s security forces, particularly the army, in any region declared as “troubled” by federal authorities.
Under the Act, even a non-commissioned officer has the right to shoot to kill, based on mere suspicion, in order to maintain public order.
And since suicide is a crime, Sharmila was arrested three days after beginning her fast and has been fed forcibly ever since.
She remains confined to a hospital bed surrounded by her family and a handful of sympathisers, staring sightlessly but determined to continue fasting till her demands are met.
Hunger strikers imbibe liquid – mostly water – but not solid food. And in instances where the state takes the person into custody, force-feeding takes place, which can be interminable.
“An increasingly insensitive and harsh administration is indifferent to activists like Irom Sharmila, Nigamand or Hazare undertaking fasts to press valid and legitimate demands,” social activist and journalist Seema Mustafa said.
In the land of Gandhi, hunger strikes have become relatively inconsequential – minor irritants at best to the authorities, she lamented.
Gandhi’s philosophy was to fast for the shortcomings or sins of the person or entity that had wronged him, in order to provoke embarrassment and self- realisation on their part. In this he was influenced by Irish playwright and politician Terence Joseph MacSwiney, who was arrested by the British on sedition charges in the early 20th century.
To protest his arrest and trial by a military court, MacSwiney began a hunger strike in August 1920 that lasted 74 days, resulting in his death, which brought the Irish struggle to international attention.
Gandhi credited MacSwiney for showing that hunger strikes could be a persuasive weapon.
The Mahatma’s fasting highlighted his cause in India and the wider world, eventually discomfiting even the colonial administration into leaving India in August 1947.
Similarly, Bobby Sands (27), who was elected a British MP during his hunger strike, died in May 1981 after 66 days of fasting that attracted global attention to the Irish cause.
While numerous Indian activists have resorted to hunger strikes in more recent decades, many of them dying in the process, they have largely failed to change things to any significant degree.
