Instigating Disaffection

A contractor undertaking a rural development work, when confronted by an agitated set of villagers protesting the destruction of three homes by irresponsible road-cutting works recently, enquired, “Who is instigating you?” Not how badly the homes had been impacted or how severely the families affected, but who was inciting the people into speaking out! This attitude, as common among government servants as those earning from ‘development’, underlines the disconnect between policy-framing and delivery in Sikkim. Admittedly, this pernicious demeanour is not unique to Sikkim, but its universality should not be a reason to allow it to pervade.
Among the affected families is an MDR TB patient, who, apart from his frail health has to also look after two school-going children. This widower has been living in a neighbour’s cowshed for the past month, has lost his home, his orange field and vegetable patch to a reckless PMGSY road project which swings on an alignment which bypasses rural homesteads so that it can link VIP plots. When his neighbours stand up for him and others affected, a contractor forced to the site after the area MLA took note, obsesses over who goaded the people into protesting. There is definitely something amiss in this picture. For the record, in the present case, other arms of governance have been prompt in responding to the situation, but the one that matters has been disturbingly unmoved to the level of being callous.
The disquieting response is emblematic of an insensitivity which appears to have struck deep roots in Sikkim, an insensitivity which ignores human condition and seeks out intents behind everything that people do. So when villagers protest destruction of homes due to unregulated recklessness, officials, shouldered with the responsibility to monitor such works, convince themselves that the people have been instigated, not motivated, but instigated. This is their way of covering-up for their own failure and with every instance where such insensitivity is allowed to pass without reprimand, the hurt imposed on the people is allowed to fester. It is attitudes like these that cultivate anti-incumbency and as more and more genuine complaints are frowned away, the system weakens itself as more and more people stop respecting it when they find it invariably tilting in favour of the well-heeled and well-connected. Faced with such a system, people’s responses typically seek to either co-opt the system in their favour [by establishing political clout through contacts or as vote-banks] or rejecting its authority, which need not always be violent or confrontational but can be as damaging with its unattached distancing. Neither situation augurs well for the people and the society because both responses amputate the social responsibility which holds a people together. Worse still, neither recourse appeases the people and they continue to carry a hurt, now, also burdened with guilt. All this because one cog of governance has muddled its priorities...