By RJR – A youth citizen of Shillong
Risa Makri’s article in Highland Post, “When Shadows Shout,” isn’t a defense of civic order, it’s a defense of status quo wrapped in moral outrage. Loud, theatrical, and deeply personal, it tries to collapse a complex issue of survival into a courtroom drama about civility, shadows, and signatures.
Let me begin by addressing the central accusation, that anonymity is cowardice. People choose anonymity for several reasons, the most important being privacy, the desire for their writing to be objectively received without the social baggage that a small town like ours often entails, or to navigate potential conflicts of interest. Most mainstream publications allow for pen names, as long as the real identity of the writer can be traced and verified. In my case, I sent the piece via my own verifiable email that was signed in my actual name. One leading local English daily, despite having all the information, refused to carry the piece but that is their prerogative that tells a tale of their editorial policy. Another publication, after confirming that I am indeed a real person, published it under the pen name I chose. For me using a pseudonym isn’t an act of hiding, it is an act of choosing. I’m a young citizen trying to hold space for thought, juggling the pressure of a demanding education, an emerging social identity, and a need to speak freely without having my family name become dinner table gossip. This isn’t “shouting from the shadows.” This is writing from a place where privacy still matters more than posturing.
Furthermore, when I write I am not thinking of a single person I am writing for or against and rather engaging with the issues that are being thrown up.
My previous piece and this, is not about Lyzander. It’s not about Risa. It’s about the vendors. It’s about the people who survive each day without insurance, without cushion, without legacy admissions, trust funds, or a Plan B. The ones who cook at dawn, sell by noon, and pray they earn enough before eviction notices or bulldozers show up.
Makri doesn’t respond to my arguments, he/she/they (I am not going to assume your pronouns) responds to who they imagine I am. They construct a strawman: the “Marxist youth,” the slogan-chanting radical too unstable for civic life. But let me say this, Karl Marx himself once said, “If anything is certain, it is that I am not a Marxist.” What Marx offered was not a doctrine to be blindly recited, but a framework, a lens through which to examine how power operates, how systems prioritize profit over people, how inequality is not incidental but designed. He gave us the tools to ask better questions, not to worship fixed answers. And yes, I use that framework, not because I want to fit into an ideological box, but because it helps me see clearly: Who profits when vendors are evicted while malls expand? Who decides which acts of desperation are called crime and which policies of displacement are called “development”? Who gets labelled as disorderly or dangerous, and who is allowed to claim they are simply “doing their job”? These are not abstract questions. They are the questions that shape who gets to exist with dignity in this city and who is made to disappear. I do not carry ideology like a shield. I carry it like a toolbox. I critique it. I question its blind spots. Marxism has failed many: on caste, on gender, on land. But to dismiss an argument just because you think it smells like Marx is not critique. It is in fact cowardice.
They ask, “why are most of these vendors non-tribal?” A question like that isn’t innocent. It’s an attempt to racialise/ communalise poverty, to sow suspicion, to pit Khasi against Non-Khasi. To be Khasi and stand with vendors, tribal or non-tribal, is not betrayal. It is clarity. It is refusing to inherit a politics of division. And it is certainly not “ideological blackmail” to demand that justice not be reduced to footpath width and permit numbers.
Makri praises the government’s patience, its “support,” its stalls. But he/ she/ they are not having to sit behind one of those steel boxes, watching footfall vanish. He / She / They don’t have to earn Rs 150 in twelve hours and call that a fair deal. He/ She / They don’t speak from the places where these policies hit.
What makes their article especially dangerous is the way it frames state action as virtue and resistance as threat. Makri says those who resist do so for the “spotlight.” But vendors don’t want the spotlight. They want to survive. They want to sell tomatoes without being hounded. They want to work without being criminalised.
Makri writes that belief in law is not authoritarianism. Maybe not. But blind obedience to law, without questioning who wrote it, who benefits from it, and who it erases, is. Systems that silence do not deserve obedience. They demand resistance. And if that resistance offends, good. It should.
The real crisis in Shillong is not the presence of hawkers, it is the absence of political imagination. Of empathy that moves beyond tokenism. Of civic discourse that doesn’t sound like a preworded script.
In Meghalaya, the word “Marxist” has become an insult lazily thrown at anyone who questions inequality. It’s used to shut down dissent before it even begins. If you ask why vendors are displaced while malls rise unchecked and city roads are choc o block with SUVs —you’re a Marxist. If you ask why access is pitted against survival—you’re a Marxist. If you say the poor deserve more than “patience” and “relocation allowances”—Marxist. As if that ends the conversation.
But I don’t owe ideological purity to anyone. I don’t chant slogans. I don’t carry red flags. What I carry is a deep discomfort with a world that makes life easier for the comfortable and harder for the struggling. If Marx gives me the language to interrogate that, so be it.
As Dom Helder Camara once said, “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why so many people are poor, they call me a communist.” That, perhaps, is the most honest reflection of how resistance is received in today’s world. Comfort prefers charity over critique. It tolerates silence, but panics at questions.
Makri boasts that 248 ( where did these numbers pop up from?) vendors have complied with the relocation. But let’s be honest, compliance is not the same as agreement. People comply when resistance becomes too heavy to carry. People comply when they are tired, when they are alone, when the police keep showing up and the public grows silent. I do not blame any vendor for complying with the state. But let’s not pretend compliance equals consent. If the MUDA stalls were such a success, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
Makri says that people like me are chaos-loving and anti-law. But let’s make one thing clear: law without access is not law, it’s bullying. Law without participation, law without protection for the vulnerable, is simply well-written exclusion.
This is not a Khasi vs non-Khasi issue. This is a rich vs poor, privileged vs struggling, protected vs precarious issue. It’s about who gets the microphone, who gets the benefit of doubt, who gets evicted, and who gets to call eviction “urban planning.”
They claim I slandered Lyzander. I didn’t. I responded to his public writing with public disagreement. That is not slander, that is dialogue. If his ideas cannot withstand criticism, then the issue isn’t my anonymity, it’s his fragility.
This idea that my having signed my name would make the article more valid? No. Names don’t make truth more true. Truth is not a function of font size or bylines. It is a function of experience, of urgency, of having seen your neighbour’s stall broken by the municipal board and hearing someone call it “clean-up.” Besides, what are names in the digital age? One can easily make a fake ID, fake email address, and slap a name at the bottom of a letter. Does that make the argument more legitimate? No. The argument has to stand on its own. Truth is not proved by signature, and realness is not certified by Gmail.
We are told to be polite, to follow the rules, to write feedback letters and not protest. But the system was not built to hear us politely. So yes, we shout. We cry. We resist.
We are told that we’re only credible if we’re calm. But no one is calm when they’re being pushed off the edge.
Makri says the state has shown “patience.” But the state is always patient with itself, never with the powerless. It always calls its own delay “process,” and our delay “defiance.”
And no, I don’t think the state is a cartoon villain. I believe in governance. I believe in planning. I believe in design. But I do not believe in a governance that begins with silencing and ends with cages. If MUDA is such a success, why are vendors still returning to the streets? Why do we praise stalls that suffocate livelihoods and then wonder why no one wants to stay inside them?
I speak not from the shadows but from a city corner that has been told too many times to disappear.
This is not a threat. It is a voice.
And we are done asking for permission to speak.
