By Patricia Mukhim
The world today is in chaos like never before. Social media has added to the pandemonium with news coming to us by the minute. No one really knows what news is credible and what isn’t. The India television media and news portals can hardly be trusted to give us accurate news of the war in the Middle East. Most are peddling news that suit the Indian establishment. While LPG gas is going low and small businesses have stopped functioning owing to non-availability of commercial LPG cylinders the Prime Minister keeps assuring us Indians that everything is under control and we need not panic. Why, is it that even at this critical juncture the Prime Minister is not giving a press conference where media persons can ask pointed questions about India’s position on this war and why India, formerly a non-aligned nation is now siding with Israel a country that has carried out genocide in Palestine? Many argue that Hamas started the war with their attack on Israel in October 2023. The reason? Palestinians were fighting against Israeli military occupation of Palestinian territories and its hunger for more land. The occupation of the West Bank and Gaza began with the Six Day War of June 1967. They still are under Israeli occupation.
The inequities of the past have led to the rivalries of the present and the emergence of Islamist terror groups whose belief is that if they are too weak to fight a just war and if the world order doesn’t pay attention to their concerns then they have to launch a different kind of surreptitious warfare. In the Middle East today the war is about Islam versus Zionism. Islamic terror has spread worldwide and some countries are known to aid and abet such terror. The precision attack by the US which killed Osama Bin Laden at his Pakistan hideout dealt a body blow to Islamic terror but we have not seen the last of it. In an unequal world terrorism seems to thrive to overcome the inequities seemingly dealt out by the forces of democracy.
Ironically the country calling itself the world’s superpower which believes it is the only custodian of democratic principles, long after they have been dismantled brick by brick, has in the present case teamed up with a dictator who sees himself as the sole warden of the Middle-Eastern Countries. That India too has in many unspoken gestures such as the Prime Minister accepting an award from Israel two days before the country launched a full-fledged war against Iran, becoming an ally of the US and Israel is what the world assumes.
Back home there was a similar inferno in the Garo Hills over what is a matter that has been left unattended since 1951. People in conflict situations seem to enjoy seeing buildings going up in flames. The cost of rebuilding these structures will finally come from the taxpayers’ pockets if such buildings are for commercial use. What is really at the heart of the matter and is the protest by groups against the filing of nominations to the Garo Hills District Council election, legitimate? Not if one goes by the existing legal framework governing Autonomous District Councils under the Sixth Schedule and the election rules framed in 1951. According to these rules non-tribals who are permanent residents of an area within the Council and whose names are in the electoral rolls as voters to the state assembly are also able to vote and even contest elections to the Garo Hills Autonomous District Council (GHADC). This happened because the law never clearly restricted the franchise only to Scheduled Tribes in Garo Hills.
The Meghalaya High Court has upheld the Assam and Meghalaya Autonomous Districts (Constitution of District Councils) Rules, 1951 and stated upfront that unless this rule is duly amended by the Councils and ratified by the Governor it cannot be wished away. So where does that leave the GHADC election or even the KHADC and JHADC for that matter. Both these Councils too have not amended the above act. The only saving grace is that permanent non-tribals residents in the Khasi and Jaintia Hills have not asserted their rights to vote in the Council elections and much less to contest such elections. They know the fall-out only too well. After the violence of 1979 and the years following it which saw several non-tribals being uprooted from their hearts and homes and many leaving the state for good, no one really wants to assert their constitutional right. They have decided to live and let live. Even the seats reserved for non-tribals in the state legislature have now gone to tribal MLAs.
The question to ask today is – what have the state leaders done to ensure that the Sixth Schedule remains a protective mechanism for tribal customary practices and their land holding systems. Despite the many flaws in the customary land holding practices, the fact is that even if land is alienated it continues to be held by fellow tribals. Today the capture of land by elite tribals threatens to turn large swathes of tribals in the rural outback into a landless class. But there is as yet no movement against such injustices perpetrated by fellow tribals on their disempowered brethren. The District Councils have existed since 1951 but have the Councils really worked to uplift the tribal population by putting an embargo on the transfer of community land to individuals thereby turning Ri Raid into Ri Kynti? The Syiems or Nokmas often in their personal capacity and not vide the decision of the Dorbar-in Council continue to do this on the plea that they are the real custodians of community land. The question therefore is whether the District Councils are asserting their rights to defend the powerless and landless tribal?
Having said that, the Sixth Schedule which was created to specifically protect the rights of the tribals who were then under the rule of the Assam Government where tribals were a minority, it would have been prescient for the tribal leaders then to foresee that the District Council was exclusively a tribal institution meant to protect their customary practices but more than that their land rights so that the same rules applied for land acquisition in non-tribal areas are not adopted in schedules areas. It’s intriguing that someone like JJM Nichols Roy or later Capt Williamson Sangma the first chief minister of Meghalaya did not detect these flagrant loopholes in the 1951 election to District Council rules. Or did they leave the rules untouched because sections of non-tribals were their dedicated voters during the legislative assembly elections and so they did not want to stir the hornet’s nest?
Well, after decades this ominous disregard for the Rules which now allows a non-tribal to contest an election to a Council designed specifically to uplift and defend tribal interests, has come to haunt us. If the non-tribals have been in the voters’ list of the GHADC since 1952, how do they become outliers without the 1951 rules being amended? Asking the non-tribal voter and candidate for a Schedule Tribe certificate at this juncture too is non-sequitur. If non-tribals have been on the voters’ list since the council’s inception and some non-tribals have even served as Members of District Council (MDCs) in the past then what were the tribal leaders who made loud claims about protecting the land and identity of the tribes doing? Why were they sleep-walking for so many decades? This gap between constitutional intent (tribal protection) and actual electoral rules is what lies at the heart of the present controversy in Garo Hills. The earlier this is addressed constitutionally and not through violent upheavals the better it is for all concerned. Violence pays very short-term dividends.
