There is something innately unverified about political fasting that filmmaker Kundan Shah was not aware of. Bobby Sands died a glorious death during his hunger strike yet he failed to compel British troops to leave Ireland. Mahatma Gandhi is said to have got more political mileage from his periodic fasts. Yet, while he may have succeeded in quelling a communal conflagration that engulfed Bengal by not eating for days, eventually it was a communalist who killed him.
If his fast had any proven merit why would Gandhi’s charm wane and his killer become a celebrated hero among a growing tide of Indians today?
Kundan Shah is a living icon among filmmakers thanks to his 1983 slapstick comedy Jane Bhi Do Yaaro. It was a tart comment on society’s Faustian trade with lucre and gross values. However, Shah’s more serious quest for higher values nearly killed him. In 1985, he was camping in Delhi to push for an extension on Doordarshan of his popular TV serial Nukkad when Saeed Mirza his ideological and creative partner told me that Kundan had gone on a hunger strike against corruption.
Apparently Doordarshan officials had demanded money to push his file. By the time we tracked him the filmmaker was on his second day of fast, emaciated and locked up inside the guest room at a friend’s house. Kundan was promptly rescued from his illusion and made to realise that a fast was something to make a song and dance about and not to suffer silently, worse, angrily. It is evident that Kundan Shah was a victim of a misleading tradition that has spread in India about the magical properties of going without food in protest.
We mocked Mao Zedong as a dangerous rabble-rouser for positing that power flowed from the barrel of the gun. Gandhi’s pacifist methods were projected as more genuinely revolutionary, with Barack Obama quoting the Indian hero in his presidential speeches. When it came to the crunch, however, while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize recently, Obama was quoting Mao, not Gandhi. His country and his allies needed military power to usher peace, he pontificated!
Fasting is lauded by nearly all religions and seems to work well for periodically detoxifying the body. But also like religion, it offers no guarantees of any further material success. The Muslim soldier going to battle Muslim rebels in Waziristan may be armed with a gun and his well-wishers’ prayers but it would be foolish of him to ignore the possibility that the quarry would have invoked the help of the same God and with a better weapon. Jewish troops fighting Muslim Hezbollah probably face similar bouts of uncertainty.
Rightwing politician Narendra Modi and environment activist Medha Patkar both believe in fasting, but they lead opposite sides of the political divide.
Medha Patkar fasted to stop the building of dams on the Narmada River because they would threaten the ecology and dislocate millions of poor people. Modi went on a fast to implement the scheme, which he claimed would generate ample electricity for his vision of Gujarat.
Modi is not the only fascist to have used (abused?) pacifist methods to press a point. The granddaughter of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini went on hunger strike after her party was barred from running in regional polls. What really happened was that a Roman court had ruled that more than 800 signatures collected by her far-right Social Alternative movement were false or forged. Alessandra Mussolini was due to run for president of Italy’s Lazio region.
For the last several days the main story in India’s newspapers has been about the messy politics surrounding an otherwise legitimate-looking demand for the creation of a new Telangana state.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh says the proposed state would be carved out from Andhra Pradesh but added to please the other side that it would take time and consultations.
Much credit is being given to regional politician Chandrashekhar Rao, an ally of Singh’s ruling coalition, who went on an indefinite fast to press his demand for a separate Telangana state. Rao was on his 11th day of fast when the decision was announced and he drank orange juice.
However, his fast was a ruse and not the reason for the decision to break up Andhra Pradesh into two. It also looks ridiculous given the fact that the existing Telangana region has a high incidence of farmers’ suicides and starvation deaths. As someone said people are already too famished to go on a hunger strike.
Actually, there are too many corporate interests eyeing future exclusive economic zones on both sides of the new Telangana-Andhra equation. But all this has little to do with Rao going hungry for 11 days. If fasting or hunger strikes could melt hearts and influence politics, Jammu and Kashmir would be a separate independent state long ago, so many of its leaders have undertaken pacifist protests.
Sharmila Irom’s unending fast since November 2000 for democratic rights in Manipur is possibly the best proof that going hungry may put a halo of defiance on an activist’s head but little more. It has done nothing so far to limit the powers of Indian troops in Sharmila’s Manipur, which is her main demand.
Irom went on her fast in November 2000, after the Assam Rifles, one of the Indian paramilitary forces operating in the state, gunned down 10 innocent people who were waiting for their buses in Malom, a town in the Imphal Valley of Manipur.
The next day’s local newspapers published brutal pictures of the dead bodies, including one of a 62-year old woman, Leisangbam Ibetomi, and 18-year old Sinam Chandramani, a 1988 National Child Bravery Award winner. Soon afterwards, that very day, the people of Manipur, including major civil society organisations and other state institutions, agitated and demanded a magisterial inquiry into the incident.
The army, using the unperturbed authority given to them by the Armed Forces Special Powers’ Act (AFSPA), however, disallowed any inquiry. Sharmila, then only 28, decided, after taking blessings from her mother, to launch her hunger strike against widespread repression she says has been unleashed against the people of Manipur by the Indian military.
The single most determined objective of Sharmila’s protest then was the repeal of the AFSPA from the state of Manipur. However, in due course over the last nine years, she has extended the scope of her demand to all regions of India’s northeast where AFSPA has been imposed. There is no scientific reason to suggest that her fast would work where others have failed.