We are the land of Gandhi, and his murderer. We are a country that, officially, celebrates the idea that non-violent protest can lead to peaceful change. In practice, however, the opposite prevails. We have just handed off large parts of the Kashmir Valley to military rule. This is after more than a month of curfew, after dozens have been killed, and thousands have been wounded. And in Manipur, another part of our world, Irom Sharmila ended her fast and will contest elections instead. For 16 years, her fast against the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, and the impunity and violence that continue under its umbrella, have been overlooked.

To break her spirit, she was charged with attempted suicide. She was force-fed through her nose after being imprisoned in a hospital. Year after year, the annual lie by the government was repeated. She was released for a day, and then re-arrested, for the same false charge, and caged in a hospital with a tube up her nose to keep her alive.

In the land of Gandhi, under government servants who sit under his portrait, we imprisoned a peaceful protester for years, called her satyagraha “attempted suicide”, and dismissed her plea. Gandhi may have been assassinated in 1948, but we carried out the ritual killing of his message and his method in Manipur for 16 years, until the protester gave up. We are not the British Raj, we do not listen to non-violent protest. For such methods to work requires a sense of shame and humanity among those who govern. We have neither.

It would be easy to blame the government and let it rest. Except it is not that easy. Gandhi’s methods were not directed merely at the British government. The Empire had little problem dealing with protesters. Lathis, pistols, hangings and the Gatling machine gun were efficient tools of murder, and had silenced many opponents. Gandhi appealed to the law, and the people behind the law, to question their government. When Sharmila did the same, the public — we (you and I) — ignored her.

As a free democratic republic, we have acted in ways far worse than the citizens of a brutal, racist empire, and that should be hard to bear, except it is not. People seem to be happy that Sharmila has given up, that she is going to contest elections — which, with their use of riots, is hardly a victory for non-violence.

Sharmila’s defeat is the defeat of every member of civil society who argues for protesters to take the non-violent path. When young men in Kashmir throw stones, when the Naxals take up guns, there are countless people who will sigh and say, “If only they protested peacefully, we would listen.”

This is a lie. We have proved that it is a lie. India does not listen to non-violent protesters. It calls them potential suicides. It straps them to hospital beds and sticks ryle tubes up their noses, indefinitely, year upon year, until we break their will. It is yet another form of illegal incarceration, yet another form of torture, our very own, personal Guantanamo Bay.

And yet, it was not Sharmila who was really imprisoned on that bed, but our republic. As long as she continued her protest, there was hope that our government, our civil society, would redeem itself, would acknowledge its wrongs, and change. That chance is now gone. By ending her fast, Sharmila has also ended the illusion that we are capable of peaceful change, that the republic has a conscience.

It is wrong to invest such massive hopes in one person, and yet, when Sharmila took up her fast, she declared she believed in Gandhian tactics, in the myth we tell ourselves about the moral power of non-violent protests to change the world. That hope is gone. We no longer live in the land of Gandhi, but in the land of his murderer.

It may be best, then, to finally cremate the words of Gandhi as we cremated his body. And as they burn, may be we will read in the light of the flames the words of another man, another leader who was assassinated: the American president John F Kennedy, who, in a speech in 1962, said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

Who knew that he was talking to us?

Omair Ahmad is the Asia Editor for The Third Pole, reporting on water issues in the Himalayas; @OmairTAhmad

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