By Patricia Mukhim
Budget sessions are all about figures and mindnumbing speeches by Finance Ministers whether at the centre or the states. They are uninspiring, predictable, repetitive and are devoid of excitement. In fact financial data has a reputation for being notoriously boring. No wonder some MLAs were found sleeping even while Chief Minister, Mukul Sangma droned on an on, justifying the allocations in different sectors by his government. It is for this reason alone that former Finance Ministers like P Chidambaram and Dr Manmohan Singh injected humour in their presentations. They were often dramatic but incisive. The very act of entering parliament with that briefcase of papers was a stage act. And then they would lace their speeches with verses and couplets; quote Bollywood lyrics and do everything to try and get the attention of the Treasury and Opposition benches. There would be laughter and bonhomie and barbs as well. But no one actually slept through a budget session.
Now a siesta or a cat-nap is not a sinful thing except for the fact that our journalists have now specialized in the art of focusing their lenses on sleeping legislators. But decorum demands that when the leader of the treasury bench speaks the ruling party MLAs should be all ears. So too the opposition! But then we are all humans. Listening to a monotonous monologue can put anyone to sleep. The person presenting the budget must himself be excited about what he is doing. He needs to communicate the success stories behind the dry data and put some lilt in his voice. The problem with the treasury benches is that their leader has been the only one speaking all through this session. Unless a speaker is a Ted Talker or trained in a Toastmaster’s Club he would find it hard to hold the attention of people every day for hours together. There is such a thing as aural fatigue which is that people want to hear a change of voice or a change in the tone and tenor. Data and dry facts appeal to people with an analytical mind but even their attention can be sustained only by examples and snippets of humour. There is a difference between being a captive and being captivated. Most speakers make us feel like captive audiences; very few captivate us. Look at financial guru Warren Buffet speaking. He is captivating and one can listen on and on.
But like somebody remarked the other day, ‘boring is the new sexy in government budgets.’ A boring budget is one that justifies not adapting a comprehensive poverty alleviation policy; one that skims over health care; one that is rhetorical about the spurt in crimes; one that is not bothered about the fact that women in this state have to take up sex work because they are driven to it by extreme poverty. A budget that does not address key issues such as the banal education system that has over the years produced unemployable graduates and post graduates is a boring budget. A budget that looks at only generating revenue by pushing up taxes on liquor and cigarettes is humdrum since it happens every year. Will the CM who is also the FM and who is also the IM (Industries minister) and the TM (Tourism Minister) tell us what is creative about the budget except that the deficit has shot up exponentially just because the NGT has disallowed further gouging of the earth for coal. This shows poor financial management in that other avenues for revenue generation remain untapped and there is a consistent effort to project the state as having been a victim of the NGT ruling when in fact we should be thankful to the NGT for saving us from environmental catastrophe.
Now having spoken my bit about the budget, I cannot help wondering why our legislators raise up issues that are so banal in the Assembly. There is John Leslee Sangma who wants the Meghalaya Houses at Kolkata and Delhi to serve ethnic cuisine such as dry fish and perhaps khappa and tungrymbai. Is this what the Assembly sessions are about? That we discuss the menu of the Meghalaya Houses? And as far as construction of sports stadia; non-availability of rooms in the Meghalaya Houses; the pay of Meghalaya House staff etc., such banal questions need not be brought to the House. The MLAs can write to the Government on these matters and only if responses are not forthcoming then questions can be raised in the Assembly. The legislature is a place for making policies in order to prevent the arbitrariness of executive orders. Without a policy how does the Opposition hold the Government accountable? Hence one wonders why the Opposition has not demanded a Policy on key social and economic sectors. There is need for a revised Health Policy (in case we had one before which we don’t seem to); an Education Policy; a Land Use Policy, amongst others. And surprisingly, although the issue of landlessness has come up in the national survey, neither the legislators from the ruling party not the Opposition are keen to bring this up. I wonder why. Is there a vested interest among politicians to avoid bringing up this issue? If so is this not a grand collusion…an anti-people agenda?
Recently a local television channel captured the voices of nine sex workers who admitted to using Marveline’s Inn since 2013 to service their clients. They also admitted that they can enter the guest house and leave freely without needing to provide details of their identity. That there is a regular sex trade carrying on in the city for a while now and that some of our young mothers who have been abandoned by their male partners and also by the system are taking to this trade is a foregone conclusion. In India, prostitution or the exchange of sexual services for money is legal but the act of soliciting sex in a public place or keeping a brothel, pimping and pandering are illegal. Hence prostitution is a contentious issue with no one really knowing where to draw the line between legal and illegal. In 2007, the Ministry of Women and Child Development reported the presence of 2.8 million sex workers in India, with 35.47 percent of them entering the trade as child prostitutes before the age of 18 years. The number of prostitutes has doubled in the last decade. Mumbai alone is home to 200,000 sex workers, the largest sex industry centre in Asia.
A Human Rights Watch report says that Indian antitrafficking laws are designed to combat commercialized vice but prostitution, as such, is not illegal. Interestingly a sex worker can be punished for soliciting or seducing in public, while clients can be punished for sexual activity in proximity to a public place. Over the years, India has seen a growing demand for legalizing prostitution so that sex workers have some rights and are not exploited by middlemen. Also legalized sex work would help women take better precaution in the wake of the growing HIV/ AIDS menace.
In this respect, Marveline’s inn is culpable insofar as it allows the rape of minor girls to take place inside its premises. With consenting adults the law might take a different position. But my point here is that extreme poverty and the lack of employment opportunities is what pushes women to take up a trade that they don’t really look forward to. When one woman was asked why she took up this trade her response was that she had gone to a friend to seek financial help but the friend instead introduced her to sex work. The question to ask is whether government has a policy to address this depressed category of society. And whether there is enough research to determine the numbers of such women who are pushed into prostitution because this has a direct impact on their children’s future.
So MLAs instead of muttering inanities in the August House can show greater responsibility and sensitivity. They are elected to initiate enlightened policies. To do that they must educate themselves of issues that prevent the state and its people from making progress. The questions they raise must reflect a mature mind that has delved into the subject and which comes from adequate research. That’s the reason MLAs and MPs in other states employ young researchers to do the fact finding and build up a case on the issue/issues. Here we find MLAs raising issues brought to their notice by an interest group.
2018 is arriving sooner than later. If the citizens of Meghalaya continue to elect legislators who suffer from a lack of vision; are lackadaisical; are smart but enter politics for business then we might as well say goodbye to human development in Meghalaya.