By Patrick Kurbah
On Dec 21, Deputy Chief Minister Prestone Tynsong inaugurated the entry-exit point at Umling. Ironically, on the same day, the morning Shillong Times paper had a front-page article ‘Spectre of doom and gloom for Sohra tourism.’ While the current reasons for the plummet in tourism may largely be related to the pandemic, the picture is not too distant from what is likely to come for our major revenue generator if we continue to install barriers of entry into the state.
To be honest, negotiations for the right things have never happened in our state because once an issue is solved, there is nothing major to politicise and run as pertinent issues for forming public perception. The issue of influx for instance. Meghalaya shares a 443-km border with Bangladesh, guarded by the Border Security Force, which are porous and not fenced in many parts. This is the main cause of illegal immigration. If our politicians and so-called pressure groups really wanted the issue solved, they would talk to the centre regarding the strengthening of our borders. Realistically, this would have been a much better solution to consider than setting up of entry-exit points or rallying for the Inner Line Permit (ILP), because it is also in the national interest to make borders strong.
Moreover, such a measure does not cause any hindrance to any other citizen of the country for coming and visiting the state, either for tourism purposes or for business and education purposes. In this circumstance, even the issue of influx largely gets minimised because our constitutional fathers foresaw the need for protection of indigenous communities of northeast and therefore proposed a strong shield of the Sixth Schedule. Due to the presence of this constitutional protection and the establishment of the Meghalaya Transfer of Land (Regulation) Act, 1971, the property rights and the rights of legislature stay with the local communities.
As of today, 92 percent of state assembly seats can only be contested by indigenous tribal communities of the state. In terms of property, more than 95 percent of land is held by the indigenous people, with the percentage growing even more now that people of many communities are leaving the state after having faced enough of the nuisance and xenophobia caused by pressure groups.
Even after that if influx is still an issue, the Meghalaya Residents’ Safety and Security Act (MRSSA) currently takes care of that, where tenants are to furnish information to police stations and to local authorities. This not only takes care of the issue of property possession, so acutely related to citizenship, but also helps in formation of a databank to understand the numbers of migration. More so, the retention of traditional institutions also forms as a strong check measure.
With such stringent measures in place, no deliberation has happened so far within all the stakeholders of the state as to why a demand for ILP, an amended MRSSA, or entry-exit points is still warranted. The only deliberation that has happened so far has been amongst political leaders, whose only vested interest in this debate is to win elections and retain power, in which members of the august civil society have time and again refuted the installation of any more barriers for the state.
This refutation from the civil society is very well warranted because every time the topic of influx flares up in the state, motives of pressure groups and political leaders start from ‘preservation of culture by curbing illegal immigration’ and end at ‘no outsiders.’ The derogatory nature of the term ‘outsider’ in a globalised world, especially when said with the worst of intentions, cannot be discussed enough given the fact that we have always been taught to see our fellow countrymen as our own. Our indigenous fraternity will agree that barring few incidents involving ignorant and mindless people, there have hardly been instances that they have not been welcomed when they step into the native lands of other communities all across India. Our children have studied in cities like Delhi, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Kolkata for better quality education, have worked for securing good jobs in some of the top firms, and have come out to be stellar humans of appreciation. And yet today, in a thriving world of diversity, creativity and excellence, our state is finding ways to add more barriers for our state, staying in denial that it will not affect anything, but very well knowing the harms.
It is over simplified for anyone to say that barriers will not affect anything. States which currently have the ILP today, namely Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Mizoram and Nagaland, have a Gross State Domestic Product (GSDP) much below that of Meghalaya. Such states, even till date, are not seen as lucrative destinations of business and economic development. The resultant? A high number of youths staying unemployed, migration of young people to other states to take up meagre-paying jobs, and in worst cases, militancy. The borrowings of such states from the centre has also been growing every year because of the lack of revenue generating streams.
In Meghalaya, though we are very marginally better off, our situation is not very different and will be worsened furthermore, if we do not end up creating efficiency for revenue generation. Pressure groups will not do that for us. Along with that, there also has to be investment in job capacity creation and skilling. It is not enough for us to be satisfied with few institutions of national importance. We have to go beyond that to try and build more such institutions which can remain sustainable and beneficial for a larger number of people. These are the real issues of our state today. India being a nation with a large young population dividend, in Meghalaya we are wasting this.
It has to be mentioned separately and much more exclusively that coal cannot be a major revenue generator as it has environmental implications and is bound to extinguish in stock. It is not sustainable.
However, I am not making any new arguments here. Many people, much more learned, have made such arguments before me. But it apparently seems that pressure groups have more say in the state’s functioning than the civil society. Disguised as student unions and youth fronts, it is the safest claim to make that a majority of the members of such groups are either dropouts, unemployed or have ambitions to make the easiest entry into politics by constantly staying in the limelight by making tall claims. They have been asked repeatedly in many interviews by the media of the importance of having measures like ILP, given that many other safeguards already exist. Their simple answer – because it is needed for protecting our people. There is no nuance in their arguments, no understanding of the comparative harms and benefits, and of course, no consideration of our own people who have been vehemently stating that they do not appreciate such measures because it hampers their livelihood. Such a voice has been even stronger from the section of our society who have suffered bitterly due to the pandemic and know what it means to work hard for a living. Interestingly enough, the pressure groups have never taken up their issues. At this point, it does seem more personal for them; it was never about the people of the state because they were never consulted in the first place. Despite this, our governing institutions continue to act at the whims of such groups.
For any ecosystem to exercise self-sustenance, the foremost requirement is to evolve with time, adapt to circumstances and then devise mechanisms through which self-reliance can be sought. Self-reliance can only be made functional in today’s world if there are sufficient resources for everyone, knowledge on how to utilise the resources and then creating sufficient room for everyone to generate more of such resources for the system. Of course, every ecosystem which we have seen in early history strove for self-sustenance. But given the irony of the lack of equitable distribution, people formulated mutually beneficial alliances for sustenance through sharing of resources, ideas and wealth. This model holds true for the globalised world of today, where none can claim that the prospects of growth come without any interdependence. This is how the human race progresses. This is what we direly need for the state of Meghalaya given the unutilised potential and the demand of growth from society.
We need to stop playing to the tunes of pressure groups, who have never stood up for our progress. We need to voice our concerns in numbers against any measure which we think will be detrimental to us. Staying silent is not an option today when we are going towards regression, because tomorrow we will not have anything left to fight for.
To end, a utilitarian and noted philosopher John Stuart Mill had said something which holds water even today, “It is hardly possible to overstate the value, in the present low state of human improvement, of placing human beings in contact with other persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar … Such communication has always been, and is peculiarly in the present age, one of the primary sources of progress.”
(The author is an independent legal consultant in Bengaluru) Email: [email protected]