It is a common feature of Meghalaya that every killing incident in the borders with Assam where people of Meghalaya are invariably killed have been forgotten. Those killed are poor villagers and the relatives they leave behind do not have the voice or the political clout to raise a political storm. Mukroh was never in the agenda of political parties and it never featured in the last election. Today even the Shillong-based pressure groups that had raised a minor storm in November 22 last year have moved on to other agenda. The only group that raised their voices were the Hynniewtrep National Youth Awakening (HNYM) who took a different route and started arming the villagers as a defence mechanism. This is at best symbolic because bows and arrows are weapons of the past. But some group or the other always appears to take up issues but abandon them halfway when some other more politically populist issue comes up.
Meghalaya’s problem is that it does not have a thriving civil society. Its people depend on pressure groups to take up their issues. On their own they are unable to take up any issue including those that affect them directly. This is a problem that haunts Meghalaya. There is no group that can withstand political pressure and will not succumb to it. Not that Mukroh is the only border issue that besets Meghalaya. There are issues in every border area with Assam. The ongoing border talks between the chief ministers of Assam and Meghalaya had become an election issue in 2022-23 but are now almost forgotten with intermittent statements from one or the other political party. But none of them have pursued any issue with the consistency that is needed.
Those families in Mukroh that had lost their family members to the gunshots fired by Assam Police also happen to be among the poorest. They were given some preliminary assistance from governments of Assam and Meghalaya but when a breadwinner dies the tragedy is felt over a long time. Governments have washed their hands by a one-time payment. No one really cares about the welfare of the children of the deceased and whether those kids will be able to continue with their studies or have dropped out of school. Meghalaya is in that sense not a welfare state. It is an uncaring state that does not care for its citizens. There is a clear division between the affluent few and the growing army of the poor. Governments run on auto-pilot without a heart for the poor. Was this why Meghalaya was born!
