By Patricia Mukhim
The noise, the rhetoric, the singing, dancing, gyrating et al will end on Saturday. So too the craven desire to be outrageous at public platforms. Fancy this! A BJP candidate says in a public platform that he can enter right inside Narendra Modi’s kitchen because as a BJP member he is like the youngest son of Modi. Such utterances makes one wonder if people have temporarily taken leave of their senses during this period when we should all actually be more circumspect because we are determining the fate of our State and the future of our younger citizens. These young citizens need to see that ray of hope in the distant horizon but the thinking lot who are becoming a small majority in Meghalaya are already disenchanted by what they see. Frankly speaking, they see no hope when they scan through the names and faces of the contestants, barring the few bright sparks whose chance of being elected by people bribed to their necks with money and booze, seems distant.
This rapid collapse of trust and the rise of animosity against a system that defies change are emotional, not intellectual problems. And we as a society have not yet learnt to appreciate that emotions are often more powerful and override the intellect and that most of our decisions are not based on reason but emotions because we humans are wired that way. The only people who seem to understand this are politicians even though we may write many of them off for not being educated enough. The point is they have learnt the art of managing our emotions. They can inflame passions at will! Look at how we have been taken by their eloquent speeches that we have to be fearful of the “outsider,” the alien who will take away everything from us. But at the end of the day it’s the politician, not the non-tribal/alien/dkhar who takes away what’s due to us in all of five years! It’s politicians who have the last laugh by conning us into believing them.
American journalist and poet Carl Sandburg once said that politicians must wear three hats – one for talking through it; one for throwing in the ring and one for pulling rabbits out of. In Meghalaya, some politicians are doing all three but the first one the most – talking through their hats because they don’t have anything of substance to say. They have won their votes through cheap wisecracks and ironically some represent constituencies that are supposedly intellectually superior than most! But perhaps we are wrong in assessing that intellect. It shuts down during this season because there’s only that much that the mind can process especially when we are bombarded by social media every minute these days and we see women holding currency notes in their hands and dancing away witlessly or some politician spewing out some outrageous drivel. We have had too much bombardment of the senses this election and one wonders what effect this will have on our collective psyche post March 2.
There’s a laundry list of scams against the NPP-led MDA government, the latest one being the land scam in the Urban Affairs Department. There could be many more that we are not aware of because the lid is not yet broken and they are not just the scams committed by the NPP but by their partner-in-crime the UDP which is now looking at a Khasi Chief Minister so as to facilitate more loot in this region. Sometimes these mindless claims make us feel exasperated because we know the devious intent of these people and because they think we are cretins needing to be tutored in politics.
At the time when Covid hit us we all felt vulnerable and I am sure even politicians felt so. Days ago we lost one candidate in the midst of the campaign almost as if to shake us out of our stupor of invincibility. But humans are impervious to these life lessons. They continue with their pursuit of wealth and power without being moved by the inherited uncertainties of life itself. After March 2 when the heat and dust settles, hopefully after some rain (It has begun to rain cats and dogs in Sohra) as a citizen first and a media person later my attention will be on how the prospective decision-makers are creating events but on how people perceive these events. In a state like Meghalaya, with its subterranean moorings and non-overlapping lenses, the process by which people make sense of events is more important than the event itself.
The election this time has become a soap opera in which all of us have willy-nilly acted our parts. Those with concern for the future of Meghalaya have failed to step out of their comfort zones and to hit the streets to counter the falsehoods and call out the lies of those who have treated the state as their personal strongbox from which to draw out money to burn. In covering this election one has seen from close quarters how power inequality shapes people’s lenses. There’s both ideological and emotional polarisation. Campaigning has been loud and jarring. Candidates have been talking over each other even at common platforms instead of having conversations. The political vocabulary this time has been a burlesque of hyper-ventilated men and women saying one thing but meaning something else. Do these lectures matter to the enslaved mind of the apathetic listener who is paid to attend these meetings? No, they don’t. People here are still innocent enough to remain loyal to the one who pays them the money.
Ultimately the election is a wound that never heals. If the same coalition shindig returns with BJP leading the lambs it will be revealed that people of Meghalaya have not used their experiences to vote freely. Their choices have been short-circuited by the money power demonstrated with such vulgarity this season. It is said that experience is not what happens to you but what you do with what happens to you. Clearly, from what can be gathered so far the people of Meghalaya have no past experience whatsoever. They seem to enter every election without keeping a record of the past.
The Them-Metor (Sweeper Lane) issue is forgotten; the Power Scam is forgotten; people who have not had power connection but have been served with bills will forget that too on Feb 27. People who were not given their Covid dues will no longer remember that they have been cheated. Parents whose children cannot attend school due to abject poverty will believe they deserve their fates. It’s their fault that they are poor. What can the government do? This has been drummed into their senses. Whatever comes their way is a bonus they are grateful for. The free rice meant for the poorest but sold elsewhere and the money pocketed by those in power is forgotten. And this is because people also are not told what schemes the Government of India has marked out for them. The communication system from government to the public is almost non-existent. The public information dissemination system has been used only to tell the public that the government inaugurated this, that and the other. This is the governance system we have lived with for 50 years and it will continue until the poor rise up one day and start a revolution. We await that moment of emotional revolution because, not everything about the emotions is bad. Politicians have played with our emotions for so long. It’s time they get a taste of their own medicine too.
Right now the echo chamber we live in prevents us from sorting out our priorities and having intelligent conversations about the complex policy problems we encounter. Some of us blame the internet for inflaming the most negative human reactions. The internet is not to blame; our unguided passions are. I am sure even at this moment many feel a certain weariness of the soul; a sort of exhaustion that induces pessimism which in turn makes us cynical and pessimistic. Oh, the burden of elections!