The North Eastern states have been well and truly divided. It is here that we see the fragile unity and tenuous bonds that the states and their people boast of. While Assam continues to protest the CAA and are demanding its revocation as dissenters in different parts of the country are doing, there is no unified protest in the seven states of the North East. Meghalaya which protested against the CAA when it became an Act are now pacified by the promise of the Inner Line Permit (ILP), for which the Meghalaya Assembly passed a resolution on December 19. It is also amusing to note that the entire saga involving Agatha Sangma who stood up to support the CAA is now water under the bridge. It shows that there is very little understanding of the ramifications of the CAA and that people can be pacified by the ILP – an instrument that is least effective in checking illegal influx, for the simple reason that those who have entered Meghalaya with dubious purposes will not come here through the official channels and the regular routes used by tourists and other travelers to the state.
It is intuitive that your young scholars in Jawaharlal Nehru University have much more perception than those responsible for the short-sighted protests here. Three young scholars have questioned the efficacy of the ILP against CAA. They surely have much more understanding of the politics of Hindutva practiced by the BJP as a vote-winning mechanism. In Meghalaya, the so-called protests centred around Governor Tathagata Roy’s absurd remarks and then veered towards the ILP demand.
The demand for ILP is not new in Meghalaya. Successive governments that have understood the regressive nature of this colonial act have kept the demand on the backburner. This time public ire has been used to push an Act that has the potential to screw up Meghalaya’s economic growth trajectory. Will every demand by every group that is able to mobilize an angry mob be agreed upon by our honourable elected MLAs? What sort of democracy is this? In fact, the recent unprecedented passage of an Act without much public debate has damaged the very idea of parliamentary democracy. Those legislators in the House were simply pacifying an angry crowd outside the Assembly premises. Not one legislator dared to differ and hold his/her own views. If only our legislators could pass laws that relate to better public health and nutrition or take quick decisions on making policies for environmentally sustainable mining in Meghalaya we would have been seen as a progressive state. But that is a distant dream. Do we now need to mobilize a crowd for passing laws that would address extreme poverty and landlessness in Meghalaya? Will the crowd respond to these non-sexy issues? Debatable!