How love and a taste of honey brought one Indian woman’s 16-year hunger strike to an end
Journalists from around the world watched expectantly. Irom Sharmila peered at the smear of honey in her hand. Her face was twisted in anguish. She wept. Then, with a glance at the sky, she scooped a finger of honey on to her tongue.
And that was how it ended. On a cloudy morning in August 2016, in Imphal, the capital of the northeastern Indian state of Manipur, the world’s longest hunger strike was over. Sharmila had eaten for the first time in nearly 16 years.
A martyr had come back to life.
A slight, pale woman with unruly dark hair, Sharmila had last voluntarily eaten on 4 November 2000. That afternoon she had settled by a pond, in a meadow of banyan and bamboo, with two packets of pastries, “filling my stomach to my heart’s content”, she says.
The state around was seething. Manipur, a violent, divided former kingdom on the border with Myanmar, is riven by ethnic and anti-Indian insurgencies. It is one of a handful of Indian states subject to a colonial-era law known as the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, or Afspa, which grants virtual immunity from prosecution to Indian military stationed there.
The results are predictable. “It has created a new category of Indian citizens who are killable people, rape-able women,” says Babloo Loitongbam, a human rights activist and lawyer. “We have concrete records of at least 1,528 extrajudicial executions of civilians over the space of 33 years. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.”
Over the 5,574 days she fasted to demand
