When the afflicted begin to feel they have been heard

What of Governors in India today? Does the Mahatma’s advice to Governor Burrows apply to them as well? Constitutionally speaking, yes. It is the legislators and ministers who have to act in democratic India. Empowering the unempowered is the legislators’ privilege and duty. Where do Governors come in?

The oath which Governors, upon entering office, subscribe to is instructive. It obliges them to ‘‘preserve, protect and defend the Constitution and the law’’. This means that Governors must exercise their prerogatives and, equally, respect those of the elected government. But the oath also binds them over to ‘‘the service and well-being of the people of the State’’.

Gandhi could not, would not, have wished it to be otherwise. But Gandhi apart, what do the people expect the Governors to be doing for them? How do Governors perceive their engagement with the people? I can only see it in terms of furthering the empowerment of the disadvantaged—the women of India before anyone and all else.

State Governments run the empowering engine. The Constitution positions the Governor in the engine car, but not in the engine-driver’s seat. It places them a little behind and above the driver, at a point of slight elevation, from where the driver’s skills, reflexes and direction can be overseen, from where the Governor can also see the track ahead and render timely warnings, encouragement and sometimes, blow the whistle, without any backseat driving!

That ‘‘track’’ in our kind of democracy with our kinds of developmental challenges, can only be in terms of empowering our people. For there can be no ‘‘well-being of the people’’ without their being brought out of their chronic and multiple despondencies. And brought into a sense of their self-esteem and self-worth.

In my limited experience I have found one method of empowerment, even if it is often transient, even momentary. And that is to platform people, real people—our most numerous reality. To listen to them and make those directly responsible to do the same. When a noun ‘‘platform’’ becomes an active verb, a non-entity becomes an entity, a digit becomes a person, and a thought, a fear, an emotion finds its voice.

And when that voice, that true voice is heard there is no mistaking it. It is simply too powerful in content. Which is why in the several open discussions that we see on television (the best thing about our TV channels) it is some unknown face, some unheard voice, that invariably carries the show. In the numerous letters that I receive every day, it is from the simple postcard, the inland letter, written in the correspondent’s own hand that I get my most interesting, important and serious mail. Likewise, in the course of my travel within West Bengal, it is the face lost in the crowd of welcomers, the hand raised above the occupiers of front seats, the persistent if hesitant gaze of a bystander that educates me and, in fact, empowers me.

It is from those that I receive the most valuable insights into life’s taxes and dividends in Bengal. It is from them that I see life as it is lived—whether in a dilapidated rajbari where the impoverished family still looks after its terracotta temple. Or in Kolkata’s redlight district Sonagachi where many of them are minors and 9-10% HIV positive but where their amazingly bright children attend school run by NGOs. In a Farakka bidi maker’s hut where a thousand rolls must be made for something like Rs 35 but where a girl is reading, as part of her syllabus, the Preamble to the Constitution of India. In the villages adjoining the Bhagirathi, Padma and Ichhamati where those rivers’ meandering fury obliterates homes and homesteads in a trice but where agriculturists return to the land, with a song on their lips, as soon as the crisis abates. All of them need empowering and all of them, by their response to timely action, empower society and government in turn.

More often than not, this ‘‘true’’ voice is a woman’s voice. It has spoken to me with the unmistakable ring of an urgent truth in the Sunderban to ask for life-saving embankments in the tide-swept mangroves. I have heard it spoken in Darjeeling to describe the fear of druggism, in Murshidabad about the gross inadequacy of a khadi spinner’s wage, in the ‘‘Pagla ward’’ of a jail to ask for compassion.

When the afflicted feel they have been heard, they feel they count. When they know what they have said is being acted upon, they feel they matter. When they see change attributable to their intervention they feel they are participating. And that is when they share power. Empowerment is not a hand-me-down. It is a recognition of what, in a participative democracy, should exist but often does not and therefore has to be made available.

The first step towards that ‘‘making available’’ has to be platforming people. Not tokenistically or symbolically but actually. For this, Commissions serving human rights, women, minorities, and heads of government department must be on the move, charaiveti! They must spend as much time ‘‘out there’’ as at headquarters, organizing jana sunwai sessions as a matter of course, undertaking field surveys in ways the Indian Statistical Survey can advise them on, with the respondents being leaders. Asoka enjoined his amatya and mahamatra cadres to do as much. And he was an emperor.

Where do legislators fit into all this, one may ask. Are our assemblies and parliament not a form—a prime form—of jana sunwai in themselves? Of course they are, and so are our panchayat bodies. They are most certainly so in West Bengal.

Whenever I have seen women pradhanas and Zilla Sabhadhipatis in West Bengal, a few of them of tribal and minority backgrounds, I have felt a surge of hope. But can there be anything like enough or too much of contact and conversation between and with the people? We as part of ‘‘the people’’ have never felt we have been heard enough, have we?

Our legislatures are meant to enact, our executive to act. But apart from acting and enacting, there is an interacting that is needed alongside. And a reacting. The conversation that gets drowned in our speeches, the understanding that is lost in our engagements, the rectification that is forgotten in our justifyings—all these need to be redeemed. And when they are, they cannot but lead to empowerment.

India enfranchised is not enough. Ask the man and even more so, the woman who did not vote. And ask why.