By Fabian Lyngdoh
There seems to be something incongruous in the type of social system we are living in today. Human beings live in the midst of paradoxes and contradictions; amidst opulence and poverty, knowledge and ignorance and amidst high hopes and despair. Yet the ideas of success and happiness prescribed and recommended are to propagate this unjust system forever. It seems that it has become a fashionable luxury for many of us to express concern for the poor and the marginalised people, for the disabled, gender justice, and for nature and the environment, while at the same time fervently maintaining, and deadly protecting our own lifestyle in glass houses and high towers, and inspire our offsprings to achieve, not realising that it is that kind of lifestyle which is the real cause of all the injustices in the society. Indeed, for some, it seems that working for the cause of the poor and the downtrodden is itself the means to maintain their higher position in the social scale. Working for the poor while at the same time enjoying the difference between one’s social standard and the miserable life of the marginalised would amount to insult, not charity. It is the mind-set of the colonist charity. It is not empathy which identifies itself with its object, but it is a dressed-up sympathy which distinguishes itself from its object.
We consider it a success when we can create a wide gap between ourselves and our fellow men in the constructed social scale. We even justify such achievement in the stratified order, as the blessing of God. “I am rich because God blessed me; they are poor because God does not love them!” Can there be a rationalisation more absurd than that? Wealth, fame, honour and power are not the gifts of God, but they are the gifts of the unjust social system. Every extra crore of rupees that a man earns, and every extra hectare of land that he acquires, reduces the per capita share of the poor in the common wealth of the economy.
When Jesus said, “I have come that you may have life, and have it abundantly” (John, 10: 10), He did not mean that his followers should live a good life as a means to achieve success in the social scale above the fools, the sinners and the ignorant, and to wear the robe of celebrity with a branded lifestyle, so that one may have life not only abundantly, but luxuriously as in the Garden of Eden. Is such a garden of abundance available for all in this unjust social system? Everyone shall have life, and have it abundantly, only when there would be equal distribution of wealth and power in the society; it implies a life free from the oppression of the caste system and free from a society that is based on economic stratification. But we have a society which promises justice and equality on the basis of competitions in which the clever ones would always be the winners and the simple and innocent ones would always be the losers.
With the elections-2018 drawing nearer, there is a wide spread concern for the lack of proper administration and development in the State of Meghalaya, and it seems that everyone would like to vote for a change. But Meghalaya politics is only a part and parcel of Indian politics. Hence, the change that we want can never come in isolation, apart from the National politics. And, change cannot take place merely by the process of elections in the political front, without change in the socio-economic background. Hot debates in the Parliament and in the States’ Assemblies have so far not been concerned with establishing a just Indian society, but years have passed by, only with deadly fights for who shall hold the reins of power regardless of injustice and poverty.
What kind of change then do we really want? Is it the welfare of the minority urbanites and the rural elites, or the augmentation of the living standard of the majority rural folks? Shillong is the hub of policy concern, but the type of government to be formed shall be decided by the electorate from the rural constituencies. The change that we want would commensurate with the kind of success in life that we define. Regardless of conscience, the situation we are in is always in favour of the interests of the clever minority groups of various hues. In its naked truth, the coming election shall be the election of Kings by the King-makers, not by the people at large. The votes of the people would only validate or justify the will of the King-makers. It is not the election of a legislator for the good of the whole State; it does not matter whether good laws are made or not, provided that the King is able to bring wealth and fortune to the King-makers, respectably known as ‘party leaders’ of various grades. The more corrupt the King is, the better their fortune would be.
All the political parties, old and new, are the same in structure and objectives, only the people are different. The goal is to capture power in five years. Stake holders in the forms of party leaders and party sponsors are already in place to reap the fruit of success. The actual manifesto is not how to make the State more productive, but how the distribution of wealth from the Central funding is to be decided. The common expectation is that the party Kings should hold lucrative departments, which are described shamelessly as ‘dohkshong’ (fat part of the pork) even by the media and well-meaning persons. Corruption of the King is the way to success of the King-makers in every field. Even new legislators with academic credentials and good intention would be entrapped and digested by the existing system overnight. In our private world we have defined corruption as a side-income which is an accepted means to success. So, where are we?
If that is the social situation we are in, then what is wrong for an aspiring youth to support a corrupt candidate or an illiterate crore-pati if that is the way to his success in life? What is wrong for the simple rural folks to bargain money and vote for non-performing representatives, when their performance or non performance is all the same, and has no direct impact on their day today living? Moreover, there is no trustworthy agency to clearly identify which is the genuine party, and who is the right person that the people in a constituency should vote for. All parties have interesting manifestoes, and all the candidates have good promises up their sleeves; an illiterate candidate would even speak better about his concept of development in the language more understandable to the rural electorate. Whom shall the people vote for? We are in a dilemma of conscience. This is because we have defined well-being in term of individual’s success in the capitalistic framework. By what means that success is achieved doesn’t matter at all in this scheme of things. Success is that a beautiful temple or church is built to worship God; it doesn’t matter whether the funds are diverted from a road or a bridge that should have been constructed, or from the medicines that should have been procured for the poor and the needy; success is that a corrupt bureaucrat is able to send his/her children to study abroad so that they would rise up in the social scale far above their neighbours; success is that a person is able to manipulate political decisions to further his/her business interests. Ultimately, success is that a person would be able to join with the circle of the elite, when he doesn’t have to work at all and spends his days in leisure and luxuries, as the blessing of God flows automatically into his bank account. That kind of success is possible for a clever person who knows how to position himself in this corrupt system, free of all conscience. ‘Shall I disregard conscience and become rich in the mainstream, or shall I follow the truth and remain poor in this incongruous system?’ That is the dilemma of the conscience that thoughtful people are facing.
What is needed is to redefine the present concepts of human well-being and success that we have idealised, and formulated in our educational system and operationalized by our academic and vocational institutions. We need a drastic social transformation as conceived by Paulo Freire in his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed; a transformation initiated by the underprivileged people who constitute a majority in any society. A social transformation initiated by those who are well placed in the existing social system can never be true to the core because their own lifestyles and their own placements in the system contribute in one way or the other, subtly or conspicuously, towards the propagation of the existing system. A just system and real democracy would be established only when the underprivileged and marginalised people realise that their miserable positions in the society is not their fate determined by God which cannot be changed, but it is an oppression of the social system which can be eradicated by human efforts.