By Patricia Mukhim
Gandhi Jayanti demands that we understand the life and struggles of Gandhi. One of the key messages that this revolutionary leader espoused is, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” Indeed, self is a difficult place to start because it is easier to see other people’s faults but not our own unless we consciously retreat and search our souls. The ILP protagonists have blamed the entire universe for all that’s wrong with Meghalaya. The last bastion which is the women of Meghalaya are castigated for their eagerness to embrace the so-called illegal immigrant (I have not yet been able to decipher what they mean by this. I see it only as a bogeyman for some underlying pathological societal disorder). Do these rumour-mongers have data on which to base their allegations? Are Khasi women so dumb as to shortchange their own interests without mutual advantage?
However, this not the first time that women have been blamed for societal ills. There are 4600 female-headed households (99% Khasi) within Greater Shillong city with a population of less than four lakhs. Those who culled the statistics did not find out the community of the husband/partner who abandoned them. This would make interesting reading. Having survived for over fifty years and overcome personal and societal distresses it is not a generalisation to say that most of the above women have been abandoned by men from their tribe. Along the way many abandoned women have been picked up by non-tribal men who have cared for them and their off-springs. So should we blame the women here? I am surprised that women in Meghalaya have remained silent on this petty and highly revolting mud-slinging against them.
Having blamed women so viciously and vociferously, my question to the self-proclaimed patriots is whether they are free of guilt? Do they take or demand donations from non-tribals? Do they pay for petrol filled in their vehicles? Don’t they take a cut out of all goods like fruit, fish etc that enter Meghalaya’s markets? And don’t all of us therefore have to pay more money to buy these items? Let them answer these questions raised by readers through this newspaper honestly. Give us a list of donors and well-wishers. Let the leaders declare their own sources of income and the source of funding for their organisations. That kind of transparency was what Gandhi believed in. Every movement including Gandhi’s needed money to sustain it. Gandhi took the help of rich Indians but gave meticulous accounts of how the money was used. Why is it that in Meghalaya we do not consider it our duty as citizens to ask these fundamental questions?
Much has been written about the Jaitbynriew and its perceived predicament as a tribe that could become extinct. The Khasi people will never become extinct. That’s for sure. But a large section of them will become landless and impoverished. How much of land today resides with non-tribals? Can we get the exact statistics? How much land is owned by tribals? What is the percentage of land owning tribals? Would we be able to get the statistics in a society where everything is so obfuscated by multi-layered institutions all meant to protect the Jaitbynriew but shortchanging them at every step? Way back when BB Lyngdoh suggested land cadastral survey there was stiff opposition to this proposal. Why? We need to look back at history and find out where the resistance came from? It obviously came from quarters that were afraid that their names would appear as owners of whole hillocks and forests and rivers even though we piously claim that the Khasi people are a tribe and a community with a shared tradition and shared common property resources! The truth is the opposite. Nothing is shared in this community. “What is yours is yours, what is yours is also mine or shall become mine as soon as the opportunity arises,” has become the Khasi credo. That is why no one ever raises the real issues – The Land Ceiling Act and land reforms. If these two don’t come soon large sections of the Jaitbynriew will become landless. I can’t see how culture, language or anything else would matter then. The only language that might become the medium of expression by the impoverished masses would be the language of the gun and revolt. This is the ultimate language of the oppressed.
What is noticed here in Meghalaya is the rapid erosion of the sense of community. We are a Jaitbynriew because of shared beliefs in our collective pursuit of the common good. All the institutions that have been created for our protection are supposed to promote this common good. But are they doing so? Just look at water, the primary resource that we cannot live without! Who owns water today? Whatever comes as rain is nature’s gift- a free resource but there is a limit to how much of rain water a poor tenant in a rented accommodation can store. But the affluent who owns hectares of land which includes water sources and catchments is able to store all the rainwater through a natural process. Will that person share that resource with others? Or will he /she start a water selling industry? What is peculiar about this state is that the resources beneath the earth also belong to individuals. Coal is a good example. A person owning land on which coal occurs is a rich man. So where is the question of shared resources?
What the Jaitbynriew should be discussing today is whether we are we simply borrowing jargons such as “common property resource” from the western world and trying to imprint them into our own milieu when we have never understood the concept of common property in the first place. I tried to look for a Khasi equivalent for common property resource or shared resource but could not come up with any. In Khasi ‘ka jong nga’ means mine, ka jongphi means yours, ka jong ngi means ours. Can the poor rightly lay claim to anything – land , river, water, forest and call anything at all ka jong ngi and lay claim on those? If the Umtyngngar River was ka jong ngi then could a few people river now turn it into a dry, stony streamlet from where sand is banked by one or two people only? Are the above not issues of life and death for the community? After all water is life! So why are there no movements against this encroachment by a few tribal elite into the natural resources of the larger tribal community? Is it because there is no political gain in doing so as those hurt might be our friends, family, clansmen or fellow politicians?
We need to explore our own biases and hypocrisies as a society. By constructing a fear of ‘outsiders’ (whatever that means) some NGOs are trying to camouflage the obnoxious inclinations of a section of society to create wealth without labour and to quench their unsatiated greed. Each time there is a fear psychosis created in this state, the bargaining chips of the NGOs goes up in direct proportion to the fear. Those from outside who wish to set up business here would, besides the Single Window Agency of the Government, also have to win the goodwill of these NGOs. So what does that tell us? Over the years the language of pressure groups has been convoluted by the idiom of Jaitbynriew without even trying to understand what hurts them most today.
The bottom line is that all the institutions traditional and constitutional have proved ineffective in protecting the collective rights of the Jaitbynriew because this concept itself is flawed. A Jaitbynriew as it was conceived must have been a cohesive unit since we started with a barter economy. No one could have become too rich or too poor in this economy. Now with all natural resources having been commodified, monetized and privatized can we still use the term Jaitbynriew as if we lived in the Sotti-juk or the golden age? There is no Jaitbynriew today. We are only parts of a very dichotomous whole.