In private, with a bunch of friends and over a comforting w&s, as Wooster would say, it’s not that hard to assert your principles. The killer is to stand up for them in public. To get on that soapbox and speak up, that’s an intensely lonely affair, as Irom Sharmila will tell you. As will Julian Assange and Edward Snowden and Teesta Setalvad. After the TV crews go home and the crowds disperse, there’s just you and your maddening conscience for company. And perhaps that w&s.
A few years ago, I did a stint with an NGO, an enjoyable job, until I discovered that the CEO and her coterie were not exactly the epitome of integrity, pecuniary or even just garden-variety. The NGO’s board consisted of stellar figures — bankers, businessmen, former Government officers, and award-winning activists. A board one imagined would actively invite introspection and want to ensure that an entity that was collecting colossal amounts of money on behalf of rural communities stayed on the straight and narrow. But no, the members were happy to attend quarterly meetings where elaborate and imaginative paperwork was presented; happy to drink tea and depart in deafening silence. Remember the illustrious governing council of TERI and their support for Mr. Pachauri?
Only a handful spoke up. One board member, a famous Tamil Nadu industrialist, resigned in angry protest. A colleague, also a former journalist, quit even though she was offered a tempting promotion. Another woman, whose brilliant work in mainstreaming dropout students from rural Government schools was inspiring, spoke up and was duly eased out.
It’s not hard to understand why people would rather stay quiet. When salaries are large and there are families to support, when all it takes for the comfort to continue is to shut up, chances are you will. If the problem doesn’t affect you directly, if you can’t see the damage, it is easy to pretend there isn’t a problem at all. Later you can say, ‘But I didn’t know anything’. That’s what Goebbels’ secretary said. Possibly the last survivor from the Nazi inner circle, she spoke recently of working on Nazi propaganda, of manipulating numbers, and said it was “just another job”. When the horrors happen far away and you are in a sanitised office typing out statistics, it’s easy to shut up and just “do your job”.
That’s why Irom Sharmila is such a magnificent figure. The battle she fights is not her own; it is one she has made hers. She started fasting at the age of 28, to protest the Malom killings, and all she has had for support in these 16 long years are two guinea pigs, her yoga and poetry, her brother, and the ritual once-a-year media attention. And when she broke her fast, when she removed the reflected glory of her halo from the crowd around her, she suddenly became even lonelier. Her supporters withdrew, indignant that she should thus end their cheerleading careers.
Sharmila represents a long tradition of female protest in her State. In 1904, Manipur’s Meira Paibi or torch-bearing women successfully protested the British use of their men as forced labour. In 1939, they fought the export of rice, their staple crop, by shutting down the world’s largest market run entirely by women, Khwairamband Bazaar in Imphal, and paralysing the economy. From the 70s, the Meira Paibi have regularly formed bands to fight alcoholism and drugs and, later, the excesses of paramilitary forces deployed in the State.
Perhaps this lineage gives Sharmila the courage to keep fighting. Perhaps, during the long hours of solitude in hospital, she has conversations with these ancestors and finds the reasons to carry on a little longer. Or perhaps, she has just a little bit more courage than most of us do.
