IMPHAL, November 9: Irom Singhajit, elder brother of Sharmila, said the defamatory report aired by NDTV was preplanned with a secret motive as more and more people of India are starting to support her longstanding struggle for removal of AFSPA 1958 from the state, the entire north east and now from the whole country.
After the Amnesty International campaign “Release Sharmila Free” began and the opening of a toll free telephone line 18002000059, there was a massive response from all across India within a short period.
NDTV approached Sharmila with a set of pre-planned questions to derail Sharmila’s struggles and divert her from the successful path she is going, he added.
He recalled that the word ‘honor killing’ was first used by Sharmila only after she heard him mentioning it during a conversation, way back in 2000, when she was sent to Sajiwa Jail for the first time.
In the year 2011, in connection with the issue of NRI Desmond Coutinho from USA, Shinghajit said he wrote a letter to Sharmila warning her that the man can give disturbance to her struggle and suspicion that he could be a secret agent of Indian government.
‘The prestige of our family and locality and state which you serve will be ruin forever. At the time I am better off in jail instead of living a shameful life,’ he wrote to her.
Just after he wrote the letter to her as a brother, she started using honor killing. But JPF never used those words to Sharmila, Shinghajit clarified.
Another point made in the NDTV report that JPF stopped her from giving financial support to the Uttarkhand Nature calamity was wrong, he stated.
Sharmila did not talked about offering help directly to the Uttarkhand people, but she mentioned about giving financial support to the Red Cross Society for the incident. We the JPF trustee members convened a meeting to discuss her wishes. Red Cross society is a big organisation. Sharmila’s assistance will be negligible. So instead of it we like to spend the money she had accumulated from the honor and awards on her campaign for repeal of AFSPA. Because, the repeal of AFSPA is our only destination. So, we did not recommend her proposal for sending monetary assistances to the Red Cross Society.
She is a Manipuri lady and she will fight till she succeeded in her campaign for repealing the black law AFSPA 1958, he added.