Binalakshmi Nepram | Imagine there’s no gun

Posted on September 9, 2014 0 Comments74
India’s leading expert on the impact of small arms on human life also rehabilitates Manipuri women who have survived the violence in the state

Freedom from small arms | Binalakshmi Nepram In the summer of 2012, when thousands of young workers and students of north-eastern origin returned en masse to their hometowns and villages from New Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore, fearing persecution and attack, Binalakshmi Nepram emerged as one of the region’s most eloquent ambassadors. Her advocacy for the North-East had started much earlier, but in those months, she burst on to the social media firmament as a voice of the region. But her core work, which connects the infiltration of small arms into the North-East with the plight of women who have survived violence in Manipur, goes far beyond online polemics.

Forty-year-old Nepram is behind two organizations—the New Delhi-based Control Arms Foundation of India (Cafi) and the Imphal-based Manipur Women Gun Survivors Network (MWGSN). Both work towards a women-led disarmament movement in the country. While Cafi works in tandem with organizations around the world, including the United Nations Programme of Action on Small Arms and Light Weapons (UNPoA) to curb the distribution and proliferation of small arms, MWGSN counsels and provides support to women who have lost family members.

 For Delhi, Nepram says, the “war” in Manipur is foreign, but to deny its existence is wilful indifference. She says 60 battalions of the Armed Forces patrol every inch of Manipur. There are 32 insurgent groups. “How can you still not call it a war zone? You don’t even allow the International Committee of the Red Cross to enter there.” According to her findings, on an average day, three-four Manipuris, mostly men between the ages of 19 and 40, are shot dead because of the ongoing conflict, leaving behind young women with young children.

This war is more than 50 years old. There has been a series of ethnic armed conflicts in the North-East since the 1940s. The region has around 70 major population groups and sub-groups, speaking around 400 languages and dialects. Perhaps in no other region of India, South Asia or the world have militant outfits mushroomed to such a degree. They now form a complex matrix that Union home ministry policies and global humanitarian agencies may fail to understand or resolve.

Manipur’s women have spoken out loud against atrocities related to insurgency and the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (Afspa). And in a sense, Nepram continues the battles that Irom Sharmila and Ima Ngambi started. Sharmila has been on a hunger strike since 2000, demanding the repeal of Afspa, and is currently on trial for “attempt to commit suicide”. She survives on feeds through a nasogastric pipe. Ngambi, a mother and wage worker from Imphal, stripped naked along with other women to protest the rape of Thangjam Manorama Devi in 2004—an act that instantly grabbed headlines in the national media. Nepram is sceptical of the fame that the other famous Manipuri, M.C. Mary Kom, enjoys. “Her life and work is an inspiration to many. However, it’s sad that she has now only become a ‘brand’, a ‘product’. We truly wish she emerges out of this.” She is waiting to see if the Mary Kom biopic releasing next month will have an impact on the state because the screening of Hindi films has been banned in the state since 2000.

“Growing up there, I thought all this was natural. It was only after I came to New Delhi that I realized that the situation was not at all normal. I then stumbled upon a 1997 UN document titled Trafficking In Small Arms And Sensitive Technologies. That book, combined with a paper on small arms written by the Canadian government, changed my life,” says Nepram.

Pursuing south-east Asian studies at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, she discovered during her research that 57 different types of illegal small arms were making their way into the North-East from China, Pakistan, Belgium, Afghanistan, the US, Russia, Myanmar and Israel. In 2004, she founded Cafi to mobilize civil society and hold informed debates on arms control. In 2013, the UK-based organization, Action on Armed Violence, described her as among the 100 most influential people in the world working on armed violence reduction. In 2006, Nepram received the WISCOMP Scholar of Peace award from the Dalai Lama Foundation.

Nepram is the sixth child of Yensembam Ibemhal Devi and Nepram Bihari Singh. Her mother, a zoologist, retired as the principal of a school in Imphal and her father was an additional director in the state industries department. “I realized the values of a working mother much later in life. I learnt the basics of math and science from my mother. My father was like an artist.

” Nepram remembers watching the film The Killing Fields, based on the genocide in Cambodia, along with her father when she was 10. “When I visited Cambodia, it brought back scenes from the film in my mind,” she says.

Violence was an integral part of her childhood. “I grew up in a quaint little locality called Heirangoithong and have special memories of it. The Heirangoithong massacre of 1984, where 13 civilians were shot dead by the CRPF jawans, is etched in my memory.” Nepram has authored four books, among them a novel titled Meckley (2004), about that massacre.

In 2004, another violent incident that she witnessed on Christmas eve led to the formation of the MWGSN. A group of three gunmen dragged a 27-year-old and shot him dead. “Till today, his wife Rebika Akham does not know who the killers were and why they killed her husband,” says Nepram. The MWGSN offers small loans to women like Rebika for occupations that range from silk reeling and weaving, lucrative in the state’s vibrant handicrafts sector, to fishery and mushroom farming.

The soft-spoken Manipuri often travels outside India to talk about her ideas on disarmament. On those trips, she also meets Manipuris living in those countries, seeking their support for a secure Manipur.

Her other love is poetry. About insurgency, Nepram writes,

The birth of insurgency is in —
Damaging “governmentality”,
Dirty policies and politics.
The birth of insurgency is in —
Witnessing innocent deaths,
Wronged arrests and torture.
The birth of insurgency is in —
Hungry bodies
Haunted futures.

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