A forgotten Northeastern corner

We are on the outskirts of Imphal when we are accosted. Our interceptors, a group of girls and boys not more than 10 years old, have stopped our vehicle by yanking a rope across NH 39. Some of the boys dangle China-made black plastic toy guns. They demand money. It’s the done thing, our driver informs us. During the five-day Yaoshang (Holi) festival in Manipur young children, usually girls, in traditional finery are permitted to visit neighbourhood houses and appeal for money for the festivities. The driver doles out Rs10; our ‘honest’ young extortionists return Rs5 as change. This is the second day of the festival and on our journey out of the city this happens many times.

In any other place, you’d laugh at the audacity of those children. In Imphal where daily life is a cycle of killings, extortion, insurgency, curfew and shortages of all kinds, you’d take a more grim view. Imphal, closer to Mandalay than New Delhi, is a dusty capital town in the northeast corner of India. When remembered by the mainland — usually in a headline on boxing, weightlifting or bloodshed — the mention is so fleeting that it barely registers. As an editor in Imphal said  bluntly, “We are not treated as full participants of the Indian state, we’re more like appendages which if removed will not affect the rest of India.”     

The feeling of not belonging to India runs deep. The endemic violence — the army, police commandos and several underground militia groups have the run of the place and almost everyday people are killed — doesn’t make things easier.  The people also make do with much less — less water, erratic power supply, expensive gas, a ban on Hindi films (imposed by an underground outfit), hardly any entertainment channels, except for news and sports, on cable TV, no night life (thanks to chronic curfews), no chocolate cakes (this was a Manipuri friend’s chief lament, so on work trips to Guwahati or Shillong she picks up cakes for her chocoholic son, all of 4.)    

But Imphal, from where the Japanese forces once retreated thus ending the Second World War in Southeast Asia, has admirable resilience. People are tired of the violence. But that has not made them abandon all civilising creative activities; instead they pursue them more avidly. The traditional — the graceful ras lila of Manipuri dance — is as valued as the contemporary — a world-class theatre movement spearheaded by Ratan Thiyam, a growing Manipuri film industry, poetry, and an amazingly active sports field with several boxing, judo, weightlifting and hockey Olympic champions.  

But it is the Manipuri women who are the state’s enduring asset.
Weaving, teaching, mothering, protesting. Mothers sell bundles of bright cloth and knives in the chaotic Ima Keithel, a market run by about 3000 ‘Imas’ (mothers). Grandmothers strip, as they did in 2004 in front of the Kangla palace gates, to protest abuse by the armed forces. The Meira Paibis (women’s groups) quietly undertake a 88-day relay fast in a pandal at Porompat. A young woman at JN Hospital enters her ninth year of indefinite fasting. It’s the ultimate act of protest against a State that has no ears. Irom Sharmila and the Meira Paibis are demanding the repeal of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (1958), which gives the army inordinate powers leading to human rights abuses.

I am in Imphal, with several journalist colleagues, the evening Sharmila is released. It’s a farcical ritual enacted every spring around  Holi and International Women’s Day. She is released for a day, then re-arrested and force-fed through a nasal tube as she continues her  fast. But that moment of her release is magical. Old and young women embraced her with arms and blankets. Some shed a quiet tear. Most just wore tired, sad faces. In her unwavering voice and poetic tongue, Sharmila asked the older women: “Tomorrow when they take me away, Mothers, will you be able to hold me back in your embrace?” No one had an answer. The light had long faded but the collective spirit was strong. Imphal was certainly the place to be that evening even though the curfew was imminent and the night would be spent as usual indoors.