‘Do you hear the rattles of time’s flight? Its cart perpetually goes out of sight…’
That’s Tagore’s Shesher Kabita (The Parting Verse). No particular reason to remember those lines except that the car is climbing the curving hill roads towards Shillong, Meghalaya. The very name of the state holds a hint of ethereal beauty. But I couldn’t find the bard’s famed rhododendrons and my flight of fancy was rudely halted. Instead, a parody of his oft-quoted Where the mind is without fear was almost mockingly staring back at me from a WhatsApp window. The times...
I was brought back to the post-truth world. Of ChatGPT and other insubstantial wonders -- aptly enough, in front of a rapt audience in another town, the feisty Kiran Bedi would soon share her conversation on maya and samsara with Lord Krishna, no less, conducted via the AI tool. Presently, though, it’s quite evident that Meghalaya is not on any Cloud Nine, digital or otherwise. A group of young and veteran woman journalists at a workshop were fretting over the lack of reliable data on most things -- whether to aid policy criticism or to seek meaningful interventions for children learning in a post-pandemic digitalised age. As I wended my way through a table of young women journalists from all Northeast states, and asked about their working experience, the quiet girl from Arunachal had rather mundane concerns. The lack of security -- not national security, but the everyday insecurity of going out after sundown! The images she painted were scary. The Manipuri team, though, would hear none of it, and claimed their problems on that front weren’t insurmountable.
Outside, Meghalaya seemed preoccupied with deciding which Sangma to vote for. Incumbent CM Conrad Sangma is being given a tough fight by his family member Mukul Sangma. So much so that Conrad is staying put in his constituency Tura, in the Garo hills. His erstwhile ally, the BJP, is also maintaining a distance from him and all the bad press around his government. So, it’s a lonely battle for Conrad right now.
Mukul is the unheralded player in the Northeast, the Trinamool Congress. Mamata Banerjee is trying hard to tie another state into the bundle on her white saree pallu, just like Arvind Kejriwal’s AAP did with Punjab. By local accounts, despite the infirmities that have caught up with the ruling party, the benefits may not flow so easily to the TMC and Metbah Lyngdoh’s UDP may hold the trump card in government formation. Just like Pradyut Dev Burman may in Tripura. Where is the Congress in all this? Not visible at all, comes the chorus
Instead, Didi is the new flavour in the town. Meghalaya can be a microcosm of the fragmented opposition story in the rest of India. In Parliament, Didi’s firebrand MP Mohua Maitra has been creating ripples, not the least with the swear word she uttered in the Lok Sabha. Not under the breath either. She has since given interviews to justify her right to abuse in reply to the heckling she faced during her speech. She may have a point about the professional pandemonium-creators of Parliament -- they give out the worst image possible of India to its young (whose future we were discussing at the workshop) -- but Mohua could do better than to let the substance of her speech be overshadowed by indiscreet words. Her fiery articulacy is otherwise beyond reproach.
This is not to say colloquialisms or the language of the street have no power or should be totally abjured -- Parliament debates, after all, are meant for common consumption. But for someone who had the good fortune to listen to and report on legendary opposition speakers, it is a sad day. A reflection of an overall dip in our language skills, a far cry from the days when a Vajpayee, a Somnath Chatterjee, or an Indrajit Gupta could be skin-peelingly biting in their speeches without plumbing such depths.
Both the ruling party and the opposition need to be mindful of the verbal behaviour they encourage, within Parliament or outside. No National Education Policy can be successful unless its birthing context is framed with some thought to long-term consequences. No digital magic, Kiran Bedi’s high-vaulting interlocutor notwithstanding, can cover up for low-brow public discourse. The young are thinking minds with sharp questions, as the TNIE ThinkEdu conclave audience in Chennai. They deserve better than the culture of abuse taking over all spheres of life, subsuming decency.
The nine crucial states that go to elections this year are being called the semi-finals before 2024. But more may be at stake in them than the electoral future of parties. It is the future, in all its unknowable aspects, that we create today with our actions, our omissions, and what we allow ourselves to do.
What we don’t allow is equally crucial. These are strange times. We see the future as if through a stained glass, unable to decipher if what we see is figures on the other side or the disfigurations of the medium itself. Whether it is an Israeli director at a film festival or a US-based short-selling investment research firm -- whose owner too was born in Israel -- India seems to have outsourced the function of criticism. (Perhaps it is Israel’s way of atoning for Pegasus.) It is as if Indira Gandhi’s pet accusations about a shadowy “foreign hand” now have been granted flesh and blood. Beginning from the first EMS regime’s ouster in 1959 to the training of future LTTE stormtroopers in Chakrata and Sirumalai, she must have known a thing or two about foreign hands. Those who are prone to conspiracy theories will also see a BBC documentary as part of an orchestra of global villainy.
Be that as it may, we still have questions we must ask ourselves. Has our democracy worked? Hasn’t there been an outward flowing out of power towards hitherto disempowered groups through electoral politics? Indeed, a large if unstated part of Modi’s appeal is not necessarily Hindutva but the successful way in which he commandeered that subaltern siege on the old elite. But at another level, 75 years of democracy and controlled capitalism seems to have only generated a new set of oligarchs, while not quite displacing the old feudals, maharajas and moneybags. Elections will come and go, but the real change happens at these subterranean levels.
Santwana Bhattacharya
Editor