By Patricia Mukhim
As Eli Khamarov the Russian born English writer rightly said, “Poverty is like a punishment for a crime you didn’t commit.”
There is a coming of age in the manner in which the convergence of pressure groups happened so seamlessly on August 15. Barring that rifle-snatching incident and stoning of vehicles – a natural reaction of anger and frustration from a youth population already suffering from the corrosive spirit of resentment and victimhood that is spreading across the peri-urban and rural landscapes of Meghalaya – nothing noteworthy happened. So Cherister Thangkhiew’s funeral procession and the last rites passed off peacefully. And if truth be told, the curfew and internet ban were hyperbolic. The youth are conscious that any disruption of law and order at this juncture would deal a body blow to the poorest. And they are among those poorest! From my humble perspective the youth seem to have graduated from the lynch mentality to common morality and that’s one huge mountain they have scaled.
Meghalaya today is a disparate state where a large section of youth carries an intellectual inferiority complex combined with a moral superiority complex. These two complexities pull them apart but they also wish to change things. Only they don’t know how. There isn’t a ready-made road map or a credible leader without any ambition to ride the political bandwagon, who can take the lead. This is the vacuum that’s crying out to be filled. Contrary to what we believe, many of our young people are not just thinking but thinking hard. However, that thinking is no longer about understanding but about belonging. The young are not sure where they belong. The system we have in place called the ‘government’ seems to have abandoned them to their fates. All around they see a culture of exclusion of non-belonginess and they don’t know how to get inside the charmed circles since they were born poor. As Eli Khamarov the Russian born English writer rightly said, “Poverty is like a punishment for a crime you didn’t commit.”
On Saturday August 21, the rifle-snatching youth who were probably paranoid about where to keep the weapons went and threw them in the Umkhrah River but not before informing the Rangbah Shnong of the area and a section of the media about this shrewd strategy. On Monday August 24 the rifles were found! We could take a harsh view of these events or see them as pranks. But there’s also a certain innocence in the act. Many will not agree with my analysis and a few would even berate me for my lack of prescience but that hardly matters, now that one sordid part of August 15 is given a decent burial. Of course, the Scorpio will have to be paid for from the public purse. But things could have been worse.
Then comes August 25 and the public display of anger against the three musketeers in the Government was given full play. In Meghalaya, politics assigns a certain pedigree to the ruling class. They suddenly forget where they come from and where they actually belong. You can’t blame them for that. They are ensconced in the secretariat for several hours and them return to the comfort of their homes with little interface with the rude realities of life on the ground. A video of that wrinkled old soul who continues to slog and strain to earn her daily upkeep is Meghalaya’s reality today. That video has gone viral. When she was offered some money by a kind soul she was hesitant to accept the money and had to be coaxed to keep it. What a wretched life when seen from the prism of an ordinary mortal but there are so many like her who continue to hope for that better future. But when?
One of the debilitating factors about Meghalaya which is rarely discussed is the single-parenthood (mostly single mothers) and its impact on societal bonds apart from the psychological dilemma it poses. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, US senator and sociologist argued presciently and powerfully that the rise of single parent households would make poverty more intractable. I write with due respect to single mothers (being one myself), that this phenomenon is incompatible with social cohesion. Moynihan, himself a product of a single mother household had stated that a community that allows large numbers of young men to grow up in broken families – never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future – that community asks for and gets chaos. I can’t agree more with Moynihan. The tragedy is that no university in the NE Region has till date studied the impact of single-motherhood on the larger thread of society and also why this issue has never figured as an election agenda. This is not something that can be resolved by pushing under the carpet. It has already blown up on our faces!
Much of the belligerence of youth comes from an inferiority complex of not having a father to look up to and to confide in man-to-man. With all the courage that women can muster to bring up their kids single-handedly, sons do need a father for physical and emotional security. Several studies on the topic of why a father is important to a child, have shown that when fathers are affectionate and supportive, it greatly affects the child’s cognitive and social development. It also instils an overall sense of well-being and self-confidence.
The genesis of Meghalaya’s problems are teenage pregnancies which arises from the fact that the school drop-out rate is very high. According to data from Basic Statistics, North Eastern Region (2015) which is the only available data, the drop-out rate at Class 1-5 is 61.0 % male 55.7 female, Class 1-8 is 72.5 % male and 68.3 % female and Class 1-10 is 78.0 % male and 76.7 % female. With such a high school drop-out rate and mostly because the family needs working members, poverty just reinvents itself. Girls marry/cohabit early without fully understanding what they are getting into. It’s the same with the male. Very soon the bond fritters and the man moves away to another woman; so too the woman or sometimes she decides to remain alone with her child/children but we can imagine the difficulties of bringing up children in such a situation. Poverty just replicates but gets worse with each generation.
The large number of youth who are listless and desperate; are already out of school but are unwilling to labour, are often enrolled into pressure groups. That’s how you can have huge numbers turning up at any event. Those that are serious about their studies or have parents that are strict with their movements – their coming and going can never really give their time and energy to being in a pressure group. But there are other reasons too. These pressure groups are socially muscular bodies that wield a lot of clout with the government of the day. It gives the youth who join these groups a sense of importance – something they never enjoyed in their homes where they are perennially insecure.
An essay by Sara McLanahan, Princeton University and Christopher Jencks of Harvard finds that a father’s absence increases anti-social behaviour such as aggression, rule-breaking, delinquency and illegal drug use. The effects they found are greater on boys than on girls.
This article is not about morality but of a vicious social problem that has been part of the Khasi society and one which neither church nor other social institutions have cared to deeply understand and to heal so that the next generation does not need to go through this cycle of dystopia.
Khasi society today is haunted by the drugs menace amongst other social problems. We truly need to take time off to introspect on these issues rather than being obsessed with the kind of politics we have spawned where the corruption of mind and soul is complete. We have bred politicians with no moral fiber to address these painfully, excruciating issues that many single parents are dealing with on a daily basis.