By HH Mohrmen
What is really the cause of this imbroglio in the state? What are we really afraid of? Who do we feel threatened by? Are we afraid of being outnumbered by Nepalis or Bangladeshis immigrants? Or are we feeling threatened of being inundated by our fellow Indians? Or we don’t really know? If we look at the people targeted for attacks, it looks like (at least to the attackers) any non-tribal is a threat to the state and its people. While some said that the crux of this confusion is that like many indigenous people around the world it is the identity crisis.
If the issue is against foreign nationals, then people coming from Nepal to work in India are covered by Indo Nepal treaty and the right forum to take this issue is in the parliament in Delhi. Again if the fear is of being overwhelmed by people from Bangladesh, then the immediate need is to allow fencing of the border but again there is problem here. There are little over twenty thousand people of Khasi Pnar origin who live across the border in Bangladesh and they still maintain their connections with their relatives in the place of their origin. They visit each other during times of joys and sorrows and it is difficult if not impossible for the poor betel leaf farmers to acquire even a passport not to mention a visa to cross over to India. The porous border is all that the people in the border need to visit each other and they can’t possibly wait for their passport or visa to visit their grieving relatives. After the story of how this writer illegally crossed the border was shared in the media, a high ranking BSF officer from Shillong called to confirm if I had really crossed the border. When I replied in the affirmative the officer admitted that it is very difficult to man the border because of the rough terrain. To solve this problem this column had once suggested that the Central government could provide the people of Khasi Pnar origin in Bangladesh with People of Indian origin status (PIO), then there would not be any problem to fence the border. This is again an issue that needs to be brought to the right forum and that is the parliament of the country.
The influx of people from other places to Meghalaya is because there are jobs available here and if we do a little bit of analysis we’ll find that they can be divided into two broad categories, traders and labourers. More than ninety percent of the areas in the state fall under the jurisdiction of the three Autonomous District Councils and trading by nontribal in the Sixth Schedule areas is within the District Councils’ domain. Non tribals can only do business in the area if they possess a trading license. Therefore we already have mechanisms in place to control trading by non indigenous people, but the problem is with the people we elected to manage this affair. An EM in charge of trade in a certain ADC was asked ‘why he issued so many trading licenses to non tribals?’ The answer was, ‘because no tribal had applied for license.’ The EM was later advised to correct himself and apologized that it was a slip of tongue, but it is obvious the problem is not with the mechanism but with the people who manage it. In many ADCs the trading license is also considered as a source of revenue for the ADCs kitty which defeats the spirit of the law – to control trading by non indigenous population. Again the complaint is also against benami but in this regard too we already have a benami transaction act which is supposed to check this unfair activity.
To protect the interests of the tribal we also have the land transfer act which prohibits selling of land to non indigenous people, but again it is the representatives that people have elected to the assembly and the councils who has failed the people by allowing corporations with no interest in developing the state to own land and set up industrial plants in the state. Cement companies have only exploited our resources to the maximum and given back nothing to the state.
There is a section of the community which feels threatened by the inter-racial marriage lest it dilutes the pure Khasi Pnar blood! To this day we have villages which forbid local women from marrying a non-local men. If any woman marries a non-indigenous man she is excommunicated from the community. The question is who is a pure Khasi Pnar? Did the scholars not say that we belong to the Austro-Mongoloid stock, which is a mixed blood in the first place? How can we say that our ancestors have not entered into marriages with non-Khasi Pnar community? There are ample evidences of intermarriages between the hills people and the plain dwellers. In the Khasi tradition, clans which prefix their names with ‘Khar’ can trace their origin to a non tribal Iawbei who married a male tribal and had a new clan created via the Khasi custom of ‘tangjait’ . Then we have the Dkhar clan both in the Khasi and Jaintia and in War Jaintia we have the Pohrmen and if the suffix ‘rmen’ is taken to consideration, ‘rmen’ in War Jaintia dialect is the equivalent of ‘dkhar’ in Khasi. In that case Mohrmen or Myrmen also has some ‘dkhar’ connection. I may not be a pure blloded Khasi Pnar. Does that mean my love for the jaidbynriew is suspect? Marriages in every religious tradition are considered to be sacred; some say that marriages are made in heaven. If all marriages are made in heaven then how can we discriminate one marriage from another? How can a marriage to non tribal be not as sacred as the marriages among the Khasi Pnar?
Many have noted in this space that we need both skilled and unskilled labourers for many development works and private constructions in the state; this is a phenomenon that is happening all over the world. We can’t stop Indian labourers from working in any part of India, perhaps we can only check their entry and exit. In this case the State Labour Department can perform this job. The problem is only with labourers from Nepal and Bangladesh and as mentioned these are issues that can only be taken up in Delhi.
Therefore this is an opportune time for the pressure groups and the regional parties to take their fight to the next level without causing any hindrance to the society. Obviously the right place to address this issue is in the parliament so the need of the hour for the pro ILP groups is to field a consensus candidate from the Shillong parliamentary constituency with the influx issue as the main agenda in their manifesto. If the consensus candidate wins the election, they will not only defeat Mukul Sangma at his own game, but the victory itself will be a referendum to prove that people are supporting the issue. The new MP will then have five years time to work on this single agenda and convince the central government to come up with mechanisms that can protect the natives of the state. More importantly if the consensus candidate wins, the pro ILP groups will be able to make Dr Mukul Sangma taste his own medicine, because Sangma all along claimed that the government cannot implement ILP in the state since ILP was never in the Congress manifesto in the last Assembly election. If they win then they will have a stick to beat the MUA government. So is it too much to expect the regional parties and the pressure groups to unite at least this one last time for the sake of the jaidbynriew?