From Gandhi to this day, fasting as a political weapon

New Delhi, December 14, 2009. - Since getting the issuance of a cricket league to the partition of a federal state, the use of fasting continues to revenues in India, inspired by the struggle of the "Mahatma" Gandhi and strong base in Hindu religion.
The results of the hunger strike as a weapon of political pressure has again been demonstrated in recent days with the government announcement of partition southeastern state of Andhra to create Telangana, after 11 days of fasting regional leader K.Chandrasekhara Rao.
It so happens that the very Andhra born in the 1950s of another hunger strike which killed Potti Sriramulu, whose death fighting for a homeland for Indian Telugu language generated strong political tension that the Government today has tried to avoid.
But the announcement of creation of Telangana has unleashed a storm of protests and resignations of regional deputies, one of which, L. Rajagopal, was arrested today for several hours while returning to Hyderabad with the intention of starting their own protest fast because, they claimed the agents "did not have permission to do so", the agency IANS.
The popularity of the baby fasts of the influence of "Mahatma" (great soul) Gandhi, who frequently resorted to them to combat sectarian violence and also to achieve its political purpose, independence of India, obtained in 1947.
The tactics of the father of Indian independence, inspired by the fasts still in use in Hinduism and Jainism, has set an example in recent decades politicians and citizens.
Buddhist monks calling for Tibetan independence or Hindu priests who want more support for their temples, villagers with demands for better roads, or teachers and nurses who want more wages, they all have been heard in recent months of a hunger strike .
In April, the prisoners in the jail of Calcutta stopped eating to get the school management agreed to give televised league cricket, a sport so popular that players from the hockey also fasted to demand the same attention in sports sections of the Indian media.
In this edition of the "Big Brother", one of the contestants decided to stop eating and drinking to get one of her fellow television venture surrender to his love.
"If I say 'I love you", not "he repeated emaciated but after 36 hours of indifference of his beloved, he left the Gandhian strategy and applied to other purposes.
"For the countless problems that plague India must add a common practice. Every day, some group of idiots launched a hunger strike, "complained an internet forum" Searchindia.com "protest about Telangana.
Example sounded was the Bengali leader Mamata Banerjee, who fasted for 25 days over a stage set up in 2006 on the streets of Calcutta (northeast) to achieve the cessation of a car plant of Tata Motors, which eventually succeeded.
Or the case of the octogenarian head of Government of Tamil Nadu (south), M. Karunanidhi, who appeared one morning last April on a bed lying on the beach in Chennai and fasted for six hours to demand an end to the war in Sri Lanka.
Aware of social sympathy earned by fasting in India, the government frequently access negotiations to placate the strikers, as with Banerjee or Rao.
For political commentator Amulya Ganguli, with the precedent Sriramulu's death in 1952, "if someone can muster the courage to court death, it is virtually impossible for a government to reject his claim" at least as important as state Andhra.
Because sometimes the effort is unsuccessful, as has happened to the remote activist Irom Sharmila of Manipur state, which is being fed forcibly through the nose after eight years using fasts to demand the withdrawal of special powers in the Army Northeast Indian conflict.

Share

Thematic area:

1. Gandhi returned to India in the mind of a disturbed gangster
2. Met, between devotion and resentment, 25 years after the assassination of Indira Gandhi
3. Sonia Gandhi calls for protecting the poor effects of financial crisis
4. Legislators elect the next president with an Indian woman as favorite
5. New large salad ingredient for india: Telangana region