By Patricia Mukhim
Some movies are classics in that they teach remarkable lessons. Vidya Balan’s latest release Kahani, is the story of a London based Indian couple. The husband, an intelligence official and a Bengali visits Kolkata for an official brief and just disappeared. A much pregnant (?)Vidya Balan lands up at Kolkata, feverishly looking for her husband only to be rebuffed at every step. At one point in Balan’s arduous journey and moment of despair comes the deep baritone of Amitabh Bacchan singing Tagore’s, “Jodi Tor Daak Shune Keu Na Ase Tobe Ekla Chalo Re. Translated in English it reads, “If no one listens to your call, walk alone.” It was Indira Gandhi’s favourite song and she learnt it while at Shanti Niketan. This song has appealed to many solitary reapers who do not believe in the force of numbers but in the power of one. The reason why I am referring to this call is to draw a comparison between solo operators and one such MLA, Ardent Basaiawmoit. While we hear of many generic complaints taken up in the Assembly there is hardly anyone who will take up a single issue and name and shame the people concerned. Basaiawmoit drew the attention of the House to an issue of life and death – WATER and how it is being managed or mismanaged in our State. PHED is a big budget department but the results are hardly visible. If in Shillong the capital of Meghalaya water carriers are doing brisk business at the cost of the common citizen can the PHED claim to be delivering anything at all?
Ardent Basaiawmoit pointed at the irregularity of appointing an electrical engineer to head the PHED which should ordinarily have been headed by a technician – a civil engineer with specialization in water technology or water-based projects and/or with a background in environmental science. But in Meghalaya this has never been the criterion. The Chief Engineer, PHED, SS Sun is an electrical engineer but above all he owns a football club – Ar Hima which is very much in the reckoning and has traveled places to perform. We need to ask Larsing Ming Sawyan and Dominic Sutnga, owners of Lajong and Royal Wahingdoh Football Clubs respectively how much it costs to own a club. Firstly, the promoter must be affluent enough to bear the cost of arming the team with the best skills (coaching, uniform, body building, training, counseling et al) and that does not come free. It costs money and most promoters run their clubs on a certain revenue model with a host of corporate entities supporting and sponsoring them. Liquor companies are good at such promotions. Recently Lajong had tie-ups with foreign companies, which just goes to show that the stakes are high. How does Sun manage his team? Where does the money come from? A fair guess is that it comes from the multi-crore investment that the State Government has made in the PHED over the decades.
Sadly, not a single politician has the guts to take on this man. Every PHE minister comes under his overt and covert control. Any minister who does not toe Mr Sun’s line is likely to lose his job. Most PHE ministers gossip about the clout wielded by SS Sun but that’s about as far as they will go. No one has so far raised any question in the Assembly about the quality of the water we drink everyday, day in and day out for several years now. No one has asked for an Assembly Committee to go into the nitty-gritty of the functioning of the PHED. There are no RTIs filed on the way the PHED funds are deployed. In fact football fans are quite angry with me for raking up the issue of SS Sun and his over-arching control over the PHE Department. They want me to leave him alone lest Ar Hima collapses. So far so good! But can we allow football fever to cloud our judgment over what’s right and wrong? And are we ready to pay big money for drinking water so that Mr Sun can continue to nurture his team with money meant for our drinking water needs?
Now we hear that SS Sun will also be funding the election of at least five political contenders. Never before has any government official wielded so much clout. And it is sheer idiocy on our part to continue to listen to such stories and do nothing. Why is the political class so shy of taking on this PHED giant? Why are the residents of Shillong not getting enough drinking water? Is there some sort of business deal between the PHED and those hundreds of water tanker owners? If the honchos in the Government are afraid of one of their own official then can we expect them to take on the GNLA or some such militant group? We are a society that wraps itself up in do’s and don’ts and have several hang-ups about what to do and what is not proper. If it comes to taking on someone important we would rather hide behind the curtains. It is normal to see people grinding their teeth behind somebody’s back and then melting the moment the person comes face to face. It’s the characteristic of a bully. All bullies are bold when in control of the situation (while talking behind people’s back) but collapse when confronted by someone who refuses to be bullied. So are we a society of bullies? Perhaps we are. But Ardent Basaiawmoit has proved that he is not a bully. Hence he has boldly taken on SS Sun without a care about his political future. Many others would have hemmed and hawed and even been scared lest Sun defeats them in the next election by funding their rivals. Ardent has shown that if need be he can “walk alone.” Yes that’s another characteristic that’s quite uncommon in our society – the act of walking alone. We operate in pairs. Few would visit the house of a bereaved family alone. They have to have company. And the word common in the Khasi vocabulary is “sngewbieit ” (meaning we feel ill at ease). So a Khasi will decide to say many things at a meeting, especially a discordant one (where the Rangbah Shnong is to be removed for corruption or some such thing) before leaving the house but on reaching the venue of the meeting will end up not speaking a word because of ‘sngewbieit.’ This is one reason why we continue to patronize the blatantly corrupt and make them chief guests and speakers at church functions. So we have no reason to gripe when governance fails. If we are afraid to point out the truth we will always be at the receiving end of bad governance.
So I say hats off to Ardent Basaiawmoit and pray that we have many more MLAs who will not sngewbieit to point out what’s wrong with our governance system. And I wish to ask Mr James Sangma why he left the Assembly even before his question could be answered? Did he ask the question in jest or was he really serious about getting the answers. Lest the MLAs forget, the Assembly is a sacrosanct space and one who misuses it’s august space could be pulled up for breach of privilege? Right?