By Patricia Mukhim
Public confidence in politicians is at an all-time low. Hence we recall past politicians with a certain deja-vu and forget some of the things they had done during their time which we had then thought was abominable. I recall how in 1988, (Late) PA Sangma came to state politics, was elected and became Chief Minister. He desired to transform Meghalaya and tried to effect change through galvanising the bureaucracy which he felt then was the engine of progress that could deliver governance to the last mile. Hence he held a sort of monitoring and evaluation of different departments every Friday and expected to get a brief from officers about the work taken up in each district. One of the things that PA Sangma did which I recall was to bring the Oriental Company for road construction. This Company constructed roads and also repaired the old ones. The road from Rilbong bridge right up to Upper Shillong and beyond and from Nongthymmai to Laitkor were some of the best made roads. They lasted several years. But that irked the local contractors who had formed a clique of their own and wanted to oust PA Sangma.
The contractor lobby also had a veritable network inside the government that informed them of any future road construction project so they could go and buy land along the area at dirt cheap rates and then sell that land to the government at four times the cost. PA Sangma was a hyper-intelligent politician and soon realised that this modus-operandi was proving to be very costly for the state. Government was spending more on land compensation than on road construction. At one time Sangma announced publicly that those villages that wanted roads should donate land because after all Meghalaya claims that land belongs to the community and if a road or roads were to benefit communities what was the problem in donating that community land!
By then the contractor mafia had begun to collect ammunition to topple the PA Sangma government which was a coalition of Congress-HPU-HSPDP and Independents. PA Sangma’s government lost majority when the HPU, HSPDP and Independents withdrew their support. I believe that was a strong signal that in Meghalaya a Chief Minister who wishes to bring any reforms and upset the status quo had better drop the idea. To that extent, Conrad Sangma is a fast learner and a street-smart politician. He is not too bothered about ethics and morality. His credo is to survive the rough and tumble of the most excruciating and also the most demanding profession in a very extractive milieu where everyone is out to get their pound of flesh; everyone in the government and outside is asking – “what’s in it for me?” Conrad is like a performer in a circus who has to keep several balls in the air at a time.
It is easy to blame the MDA Government when one is a spectator from outside the boxing ring. Those inside must be feeling the heat. Inside that ring the people don’t feature at all. It’s the ministers and other MLAs of the ruling party that must be kept in good humour lest they decide to do a Judas. The government is but a conglomerate of avaricious individuals each wanting a larger share of the pie, to the point of sucking the lifeblood out of the state and its despairingly poor citizens. And in this melee comes the Congress with five MLAs who are peddling themselves, ostensibly because they want to better serve their people; their constituents (its sad how we the constituents have to take the blame for all the shenanigans of our MLAs and the decisions they take in our name, as if they even care for us). Media persons outside Meghalaya are trying to figure out how the Congress can join a government that also has the BJP in it. That does need some figuring-out but not if they know the gerrymandered (aka Eastern-West Khasi Hills) politics of Meghalaya.
But we cannot really blame the Congress MLAs for feeling left out of the fun and frolic of being in the charmed circle. They have been in that circle for so long that they have forgotten what it means to be in the dog-house. I recall the noted columnist Swapan Dasgupta writing about the Congress at one time in these stinging phrases, “ A Congress polluted with money, drunk with power and crazed with lust was picked up and shaken upside down like an old piggy bank.” This says it all. The Congress – out of power in the Centre for over seven years finds it difficult to drive the party vehicle. It costs money to run a political party. Ask the BJP how and why they need to patronise Adani and Ambani, the two wealthiest billionaires in India. The Meghalaya Congress is well aware that the Congress at the Centre will find it tough to return to power at the Centre, what with all the regional satraps ganging up to rule Delhi. Besides, Rahul Gandhi in his speech in Parliament had recently called India a union of states where the Centre cannot call the shots. The Meghalaya Congress did not need to read tea leaves to understand that was a call for the Congress in the states too to call the shots; the AICC be damned.
So elections 2023 will be fun to watch if only it does kick back the decadent and rapacious five-year political artists back to the State Assembly. In all of this the NPP seems to be gaining ground since there is a beeline to join the Party. But the NPP also has an opportunity to get in some political crackerjacks who can change the political contours of Meghalaya in 2023 before the state dips to a dangerous low in all its socio-economic rankings. This will create a disparate constituency of youth with nothing to lose. That is a dangerous nadir because that is where revolutions are born.
The other day NDTV had a panel discussion around the issue of unemployment and the latest CMIE (Centre for Monitoring of the Indian Economy) data released on February 5. Several panelists aver that the data is unreliable because it does not capture unemployment statistics in the informal sector. Meghalaya’s unemployment ratio was shown as 1.5% only. This surely cannot be correct data by any yardstick. There is a burgeoning youth population that is listless and frustrated because they have a certificate from a college but no job openings. The private sector is looking for employees which educational institutions are not turning out. There is a huge mismatch between what colleges and universities churn out year after year and what the market actually can absorb. This should have been the burden of the elected representatives but such issues are never discussed in the Assembly.
However, there are times I believe we deserve the MLAs we elect because as one of the panelists on the NDTV debate – Mr Madan Sabnavis, Chief Economist, Bank of Baroda says, “In India people don’t protest on things critical to them; they protest on frivolous issues.” Just look at how disempowered we are as voters. The candidates are thrust upon us by political parties. We just have to elect those because we couldn’t care less or because we think we have no power to protest or because we are too afraid to speak up. US President Gerald Ford, once famously said, “We have an election in which candidates without ideas hire consultants without conviction, to carry out campaigns without content.” Here in Meghalaya the consultants are camp followers who assert that they can bring votes but must be duly compensated once elections are done and dusted and the MLA is elected.
John Adams the remarkable political philosopher once cautioned Americans that the problem with democracy is that you get the leaders you deserve. This implies that if we throw up an undeserving leader it is because during the electioneering we never did our duties as citizens and ask questions from the candidates that need to be asked. We instead attend these meetings, listen in silence and clap; go to the candidate to shake hands as if to get him/her to register our faces in his/her memory just in case we need a favour sometime in the future.
So yes we deserve the decrepit, profligate governments we have had since 1990; governments that torpedo the very idea of democracy. Each time an election arrives we believe we have reached the tipping point when Pandora’s box would be opened but we are defeated by the world of nods and winks that make up so much of government business these days.
Why am I even writing this? Does it make a difference to anyone anywhere? No it doesn’t but to write is better than to paddle closer to the deadly shores of cynicism and despondency. Am not here to save the world but to plant myself at the gate of hope!