By Freddy K Sangma
When one hears the gospel of the Indian Army so effortlessly from the mouths of a moribund collective, you don’t have a choice but to be appalled by our ignorance and amnesiac tendencies. But when alarmingly macabre things make their way into the mundane conversations of sundry people out of frustration and disillusionment, history teaches us, it is the perfect breeding ground for various manifestations of fascism. Perhaps we have forgotten what happened when the missionaries in uniform were unleashed in Kashmir (where the military-civilian ratio is one soldier for every ten civilians making every Kashmiri feel like a militant) and closer to home, Manipur’s bitter fight with the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) – the atrocities, the fake encounters, the rapes and the downright violation of human rights. Thank you, but we already have enough misogynists wandering the streets of Meghalaya and we definitely don’t want to be made to feel like militant suspects every time we walk out of our homes to run a few errands.
Militancy of the kind that is currently rampant in certain parts of Meghalaya, is not a disease. It is a symptom of deep rooted political, social and economic issues that have not been addressed for a long time. Perhaps this leads us to the existential question – who is responsible? We need to deconstruct it. Is it the armed private militia, the military, the officials who diverted the funds meant for the marginalised into their own pockets, the incompetent office holders who ordered the police to open fire at public demonstrators one fine September morning killing innocent students at a school playground in Tura? Is it you and I who make naive decisions in the seemingly ordinary things of life and thereby endorse a monstrous macro structure or is it only the dispossessed, the Muslims and the “other”? No, I am not romanticising violence here. Nothing can justify a cold blooded retribution or gruesome acts on humanity, whether it is prettily dressed up and disguised by the State or organised militia. The real struggle is to learn how to mourn for each human life lost during this grotesque epoch – be it a civilian, a soldier or a so called militant, lest we make the same mistake we are accusing others of.
With the banalising advance of the utilitarian and the rational – where scholarship is being dangerously separated from life, where our minds have been colonised, where we no longer own our own bodies, where we have to prove our own existence with a papier- mâché identity, where we are compromised and degraded by the ingress of business corporations into the most intimate aspects of our lives and the commodification of our emotions and community, where the moneyed have a sense of entitlement to own the air water and sky (it is a paradise for businessmen to be able to sell what one does not have to produce), where independent thinking and new imaginations are discouraged, where our musicians, painters film-makers and writers have been relegated to pamphlet writing entertainment machines to endorse popular ideologies, where we prefer parking lots to pedestrian space, where we are happy with sanitised versions of neo liberal policies as long as they come with loosely used labels like “sustainable”, where we are too busy shopping marrying and defending superficial “blood” identities, wealth has definitely spiralled up to dizzying heights among the economic elites. What has trickled down to the bottom is crime, chaos and a vulgar culture of materialistic aspirations to live like the Benjamins and a certain bourgeois idea of “success”. Then we start making absolutist conclusions connecting impoverishment to sheer laziness. Does a Wall Street banker really work much much harder than a farmer who just committed suicide in Uttar Pradesh? Manually carrying a load full of vegetables in baskets almost your own size from the interiors of the villages all the way to the urban market, battling the terrain in the humid tropical weather to be at the mercy of the bargaining customers and traders, is not exactly my idea of laziness. That being said, there are genuine sloths and equally hardworking people both in the rural and urban regions, but it is definitely problematic to dump all under one canopy. What can you do when you have the same aspirations but you are hungry? Go on a hunger strike? What can you do when you have the same dreams as the students who attend elite urban schools but your own school attendance is just a ritual? Think? Reflect? Engage? Thinking reflecting and engaging are elite recreations in this part of the world. It is so easy to write off the rural poor as lazy but aren’t we all, to varying degrees in various aspects? Doesn’t that explain our flourishing domestic help market (or the vibrant “peon” culture in our offices) so that we can get someone else to fetch our tea, put food on our plates, clean our desks, do our laundry and empty the trash? And please let us not use our pathetic excuse of a time constraint. If at all time is indeed genuinely rare for our species, how about being versatile, adapting and being strategic with it. Maybe it is not exactly about being lethargic; perhaps it is indeed about our well-meant intentions of providing livelihood for the unskilled and illiterate, or perhaps we actually like this subtle power play as we derive a certain sense of profound social significance from it. But we cannot get used to this culture to the extent that we fail to see the underlying danger of it in the long run. It is the same as flirting with our emotions when we see a beggar for the first time until they come in their hundreds and we eventually get used to the “normal”. Institutional oppression has percolated so deep into the crux of our society that we fail to discern and acknowledge it.
Militancy in the A’chik Hills today wears a myriad of facades – some there with convictions because of a series of personal events (call it misguided or whatever) while many others there just for quick money. Domesticated and well fed by people from across every stratum, it is not as simple as black and white. Just towards the beginning of this year, an international Mongoloid event with some vague visions was held in the outskirts of Tura (at a colossal private farm) with suspicious funding and nexus and the entire town was elated by the affair. It was a grand orgy staged by the GHADC, the State and a few local elites and we were all in Hallelujah Square for three days. The point being, we are a happy lot as long as we can have our fancy schmancy social gatherings and bottles of wine but we don’t bother about the backstage details. How can we bite the hands that feed us? A vast majority of us have religiously exercised our “power” to vote in the recently concluded elections of the world’s largest “democracy” (or shall we call it by its real name of decentralised monarchy), but for whom and what are we voting for everyday with our time and finances? An eye for an eye is not the solution. It will only pave the way for a vicious cycle surpassing generations. We have to look at its historical context, including how an ambiguously defined nation has colonised its own people. Perhaps it could involve healing our fractured education system with utmost priority, challenging the new world order and problematising the political and economic hegemony over education, information, land, agriculture, imagination, et al., protecting the rights of our “domestic helpers” and the prostitutes (both male and female, since we insist on being a touristy state and with no apparatus in place to monitor it, please let us not act surprised if escorting becomes rampant and hurts our holier-than-thou moral sentiments), freeing the 70,000 something children engaged in the coal mines and letting them play again, land ceilings, restrictions on car ownerships given our topography and excellent town planning, tax policies to check the obscene gap between the haves and have nots and aggressive mechanisms to restrain human greed from its most brazen expression and also to show the society’s disapproval of it.
While there is no easy way out of this morass, creating some hierarchy of tragedies and looking at it from a sinners-saviours or an “us versus them” paradigm certainly will not help. I believe the personal is political. If we have to fight it for the long run, then we have to mock it and resist it – with our art, our songs, our brilliance, our literature, our joy, our sorrows, our stubbornness and our very existence. We cannot afford to become complacent, play naïveté saviourism and start getting used to such vulgar disparities of life and add them to our banquet of givens. It is this collectivisation of the mad impulse that any dominant oppressive authority fears. As long as it remains a private practice or a yearly carnival of the citoyens, the ruling elite is too happy to allow irrationality, but the moment this drive assumes a political and collective utopian colour of the socias, it hampers the very essence upon which this authority is built on. Let us not be content with being manufactured exotic entertainment at Republic Day parades – accoutred in tradition and conformism, to be simply photographed, admired and flattered as glorified “Orientals” and make a grave mistake of accepting that as empowerment. Yes, to be able to sing and dance again. To be able to tell our own stories. To be able to seek joy in the saddest of places and to pursue beauty right to its very lair. To be able to find forgiveness, kindness, hope and second chances in the community even in the midst of adversity, while the system fails to give us the same. And to learn to take care of something – to be faithful in the small things so that we can be faithful in the big things. Hopefully, these words will resonate among many who call Meghalaya their home, irrespective of which “blood” circulates in our bodies.