Yearning of the displaced people
- The People's Chronicle Editorial :: April 04, 2024 -

"After you win the election, will you allow us to live our lives like this?"

This is a poignant question a heartbroken woman living in a relief camp for nearly eleven months now asked when a group of leaders from the Indian National Congress (INC) visited to campaign for the upcoming elections to the 18th Lok Sabha.

In a viral video of the interaction shared on the micro-blogging social media site X, the woman is heard saying, "For so long, we have complained and requested the government but felled on deaf ears. They feed us and our children, some rice and dal in this relief camp.

It's almost a year now. It is so difficult to live now. I am very keen to cast my vote. Even though our houses have been burnt down, we want to return to that place even if living under a tarpaulin.

It is painful to live here. We just want to return home. We miss our home. Even if our beloved brothers from the locality feed us a nice meal, it isn't tasty.

My desire is to have a simple, even one meal a day, but at my own home. No matter how poor the dwelling may be. I request the Sirs who have come here for campaign, to please grant us that joy of having one meal at our own home.

After you win the election, will you allow us to live our lives like this? When my children ask, "Mother, let's return home," I don't have an answer. We are living here half dead.

From being an owner of our household; in our own land today, we have been reduced to beggars. May you win your election. But I pray you, sirs, allow us to return to our home and live a normal life."

We are reproducing the literal translation of what the woman had said entirely to drive home the point of how hard it is for the people who have become displaced and are forced to seek shelter in the relief camps set up across the state after their houses were burnt down or razed to the ground in the ethnic conflict that broke out since May 3 last year after people of Kuki-Chin community clashed with the Meitei/Meetei over the latter's demand for recognition as Scheduled Tribe (ST).

In a similar manner, during the interaction programme, "The Candidates: Lok Sabha Polls 2024", which was telecast live on an OTT platform on Tuesday (April 2), a young man from the audience who is staying in a relief camp wanted to know how long it would take for any of the candidates to ensure resettlement of the displaced people if they got elected as Member of Parliament (MP).

When the moderator of the programme interjected that the question could be raised to only one of the candidates due to time constraints, the young man chose the candidate of the Congress party.

But this is a question that could have been best answered by the candidate of the ruling party in the state, who unfortunately did not turn up to make his appearance.

So, in the absence of the candidate of the ruling party BJP at the programme, the young questioner must have, perhaps, thought it best to get the answer from the candidate of the opposition party, who only reiterated the obvious that the issue could be settled in a snap of the finger if the Prime Minister of the country has the will and conviction to do so instead of playing politics among different groups of people, Leaving aside the question of whether the answer given by the Congress candidate was satisfactory to the young man and other people in the audience, this incident has once again underlined the yearning of the displaced people to return to their respective homes.

As they say, home is where the heart is, no amount of interim rehabilitation measures taken up by the government like the construction of pre-fabricated houses could ever ensure the kind of comfort and happiness one could get from living in their own houses, howsoever modest it may be.

Such arrangement may be a better option than living in relief camps opened at schools, colleges and other government buildings which do not even have the basic amenities of life and lack privacy, but it is never going to be the place where the hearts of the displaced people reside.