By Patricia Mukhim
I have been writing a Friday column for this paper since the 1990s. In recent times I have had to make way for the growing number of columnists contributing excellent pieces to this newspaper. This week though, I felt that it’s important to remind readers and society in general that we need to now look beyond the state of Meghalaya and think national. Anything happening in any part of this country affects us too. Ever since the Pahalgam terror attack targeted at Hindu men with 26 of them killed in cold blood, the country has been on high alert. For us in Meghalaya things have started turning ugly since August 2024 when Sheikh Hasina had to flee for her life and seek refuge in India even while Mohammad Yunus who heads the caretaker Government is adopting a belligerent stance vis a vis India.
Meghalaya shares a 443 kilometer long boundary with Bangladesh and large sections of that boundary is unfenced. At Balat the river serves as a boundary and people cross at will. They say that all kinds of products from India are transported from India to the other side across the river at night. It’s the same with Ranikor, Bholaganj and Ichamati. This means that illegal migration is not a formidable task at all. The BSF with all their manpower are hardly able to police every inch of the border. Now with Bangladesh having become a close ally of China in the eastern sector (China is already supporting Pakistan in the western front) we in the North East are hemmed in by the fact that our only outlet to the rest of India is through the 22 km narrow Siliguri corridor.
True the Government of India now plans to build the Shillong to Silchar 4-lane highway to take the load off the Siliguri corridor but this 166.8 km four-lane masterpiece connecting Mawlyngkhung in Meghalaya and Panchgram in Assam will only be completed by 2030 which is 5 years away. Government of India claims that this road is meant to fuel economic growth and give a fillip to the Act East Policy. As far as the Act East Policy is concerned the less said the better. With a troubled Myanmar posing security concerns and a Manipur still in turmoil; the Moreh trade point at a standstill, one wonders when the Act East Policy, which in the first place was never intended to address the economic future of a land-locked North East will ever be banished from the Government of India’s vocabulary.
Coming to India’s retaliation to the Pahalgam terror attack using the nomenclature Operation Sindoor, as citizens we are still in a state of animated suspension as to who called the ceasefire between India and Pakistan after the launch of what India calls a targeted attack on terror camps in Pakistan and not targeting their military installations or civilian infrastructure. India’s Foreign Minister has been at the receiving end of public affront because he allegedly informed the Pakistan establishment that India was going to launch its attack, thereby putting that country on high alert and consequently its ability to adequately respond to the Indian fire-power. One has seen wars in the past too but never has the media gone ballistic in its reportage as in reporting Operation Sindoor. The role of the media is to report facts not to hyper-ventilate and pretend that its duty is to arouse the spirit of nationalism and patriotism both of which have descended into the dustbin of jingoism. Today the media is divided inasmuch as the citizenry is completely polarised on ideological lines. And in this cacophony of warmongering aided and abetted by a section of the media, do we in the North East have a say? A voice? Do we matter?
As Indians, we all support our armed forces and rally with them but we don’t need anchors of television channels looking for optics to tell us that any question we raise on Operation Sindoor is an act of treason. Since when has it become illegal for citizens to question the government of the day and its acts of omission and commission? Why is the government now conflated with the nation? If India is a democratic nation and the Constitution guarantees its citizens free speech, as long as we do not defame any person in particular, then why are so many people booked for expressing their views on social media? Doing journalism the way we were taught to, is today fraught. Yet barring a few, we don’t find citizens rising up to claim their rights. Since 2014 we have been silenced and self-regulated so that we don’t step on the toes of the government and end up in jail.
Recently the State BJP called for a solidarity march to express gratitude to our armed forces. What was the intention of this show of strength? Does it mean that only BJP members stand with the armed forces and other political parties and citizens have no allegiance to the nation? But we have been reduced to silent onlookers. This culture of silence which someone rightly termed as a conspiratorial silence is a dangerous trend. Every person is thinking twice about what to say; what to comment on social media and how to steer clear of any controversy lest they be arrested.
What many of us ordinary citizens want to question is the logic of sending out MPs to different countries of the world to explain India’s position vis a vis Pakistan – to expose Pakistan as a terror-nurturing rogue state as if the world does not already know that. Geo-politics today is all about economics and about nations arming themselves to the teeth to protect those economic interests. It’s important to count the number of countries that stand with India today. Why has India been so isolated to the point where even the US which we all believed was our greatest pal is lending its weight behind Pakistan. Today China is solidly behind Pakistan; so is the US and Turkey. Where did our diplomacy go wrong? Is it not true that the countries of this world are also aware of the rapid erosion of democratic tenets in India with the freedom of the press in tatters? So, what are the visiting MPs going to tell their counterparts?
The Constitution of India is intended to restrain power and to ensure that citizens access their rights. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is meant to build international alliances to promote peace; our legal systems are created to peacefully settle disputes while our scientific institutions are meant to cure disease and news outlets to inform the public so they can then make informed choices. What has happened to these institutions today? Several NGOs that were working towards easing the suffering of the most distressed lot have lost their funding under the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA). Universities have become battlegrounds where only one idea and ideology is now allowed the space to flourish. These institutions are all meant to enhance human dignity but they have degenerated into making our lives nasty, brutish and short, which was what human existence was, prior to the spread of civilization.
All of this is happening right before our eyes but we have receded into the manholes of silence each one trying to protect their own backs. But at what cost? We engage individually on social media but have never attempted to meet and brainstorm on what the future looks like. We need to remember that Operation Sindoor is on a pause (ceasefire) and that any of the two countries could go to war again with the threat of nuclear combat hanging over our heads like the Sword of Damocles. Do we have any views to offer from this north-eastern periphery?
Yuval Noah Harari in his latest book ‘Nexus’ says, “We live in an interconnected world where the decisions of one country can have profound impact on others. Some of the gravest dangers posed by Artificial Intelligence (AI) do not result from the internal dynamics of a single human society. Rather they arise from dynamics involving many societies which might lead to new arms races, new wars and new imperial expansions. Thus, a paranoid dictator might hand unlimited power to a fallible AI including even the power to launch nuclear strikes. If the dictator trusts his AI more than his defence minister, wouldn’t it make sense to make AI supervise the country’s most powerful weapons?
We are living in a highly wired world and the fact that countries like China are now ready to launch into electronic warfare where they have complete visibility of the enemy’s war space and can strike anywhere they want, makes peace a very fragile entity.
These are concerns that affect us all and as citizens we have a right to ask if war is the solution to fighting terror?