Patricia Mukhim reponds to Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma after he made a comment on her, “Thank you for your good certificate, Mama (Uncle). But I never incite anyone.”
That was Patricia Mukhim’s pointed response after Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma suggested that some intellectuals in Meghalaya, including the veteran journalist and writer, had spoken against Assamese tourists and, at times, instigated people.
Sarma had said that while many people in Meghalaya welcome visitors from Assam, “intellectuals like Patricia Mukhim” had written against Assam tourists in a manner that could incite people.
Mukhim, true to form, did not appear interested in turning the exchange into another shouting match.
Instead, she did what she has done for much of her public life.
She looked at a road.
And she asked a much more uncomfortable question.
After torrential rain battered Shillong, Mukhim drew attention to the road leading to the Indian Institute of Management, Shillong.
“Look at what happened to the road leading to the IIM Shillong yesterday after the torrential rains in the afternoon,” she wrote, pointing out that if a road leading to an institution of national and international importance could be reduced to mud and slush, the condition of roads elsewhere could be even worse.
She questioned whether the mud had come down from a nearby construction site and why adequate retaining structures had apparently not been put in place. Then came the question that cuts through the politics:
Why does the two-laned road stop at NIFT? What sort of long-term planning is this?
That is Patricia Mukhim.
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When accused of provoking people, she talks about roads.
When told she is against tourists, she talks about sustainable tourism.
When governments become uncomfortable with criticism, she asks why things are not working.
And when society retreats into silence, she has spent decades insisting that citizens must speak.
A life that was never planned, but became a life of purpose
Mukhim herself has described her journey as something she never planned.
She says she simply “stumbled” from one thing to another.
She was raised largely by her mother after her father left. Her mother, struggling to make ends meet, nevertheless managed to educate her. Mukhim became a mother herself at 18. She later raised five children, endured the loss of a child in infancy, and suffered the devastating loss of a daughter to suicide in 2008.
Her first salary as a teacher was just ₹270.
She taught for 25 years.
Then journalism found her.
She had already been writing letters to newspaper editors, frustrated by what she saw around her. Eventually, an editor told her, in effect: stop writing letters and write articles instead.
The rest became history.
She entered journalism in the 1980s and went on to become one of the most influential public voices to emerge from Meghalaya. She became editor of The Shillong Times and a columnist whose writing carried the concerns of the Northeast far beyond the region. The Hindu Centre describes her as a journalist and columnist who has written for several newspapers and magazines and served on the National Security Advisory Board.
But journalism was never merely a profession for her.
It became an instrument.
When Meghalaya was afraid, she walked into the streets
Perhaps the most important part of Patricia Mukhim’s story is what happened when Meghalaya was caught in the grip of militancy.
In 1996, she helped form Shillong We Care, a citizens’ initiative that sought to provide a counterpoint to terrorism and militancy.
At a time when shutdowns could bring the entire state to a standstill, when shops closed before darkness fell and people were frightened to speak, Mukhim and a small group of citizens walked into the streets.
They held meetings, organised volunteers, staged street plays, and walked to Independence Day and Republic Day ceremonies when militants sought to impose their own authority.
The message was simple:
Violence is not the answer.
Militancy destroys economic life.
A society must not surrender its future to fear.
There were times when only a few dozen people dared to come out.
Then came the killings of innocent people.
Something changed.
People began speaking.
Mukhim and her colleagues helped create a civic climate in which resistance to militancy could become visible. She has also recalled how the then Home Minister R.G. Lyngdoh took measures against establishments paying extortion money to militants and opened a path for militants willing to surrender and return to civilian life.
The transformation of Meghalaya was not the work of one person, of course.
But Mukhim was one of the people who refused to accept that fear should become normal.
Her protest was never limited to militancy
She helped campaign against corruption.
She said:
A few of us got together to challenge this because we don’t want to become another Manipur or another Nagaland where you will have Armed Forces Special Powers Act where the military will go on a rampage so we went around creating awareness on this. After that, we also started another organization called People’s Rally Against Corruption where we fought corruption, focusing on one issue where we have a Meghalaya House in Kolkata in Russell Street.
The government of that time was going to hand over that fine location to a corporate entity called Asian Housing Corporation Limited, and we thought this is a sellout, we are going to give it for 99 years, which is a virtual sellout. So that corporate house would take all the frontage and give just two or three rooms to the Meghalaya government, when that place is, in fact how these Meghalaya houses are. They are meant for people who come to for different reasons, education, health and to be living there for a little while is like a home away from home. If we give away that, we are finished. It is a bad deal anyway.
So we protested against that and 45 of us were arrested and put in a police station, I was the only woman and the boys all helped to make a rough short bed and I had a shawl, I covered myself. The next day, a lawyer took up our case and we walked out.
We also started a fight against the online lottery because they knew it was a bad deal. The guy promoting it already had a lot of money to pay our government and we thought the state will be losing more money, so we protested against that as well. My life has been a protest. It was a natural call. We did all this (with will volitionally) without any desire for any favours from the government whatsoever
She worked on ideas for a Meghalaya Economic Development Council because she believed the state needed a genuine economic roadmap.
The awards came. The voice remained the same.
Mukhim’s public record has been recognised repeatedly.
Among the honours she has received are:
Padma Shri, one of India’s highest civilian honours, in 2000.
Chameli Devi Jain Award for Outstanding Women Mediapersons.
FICCI-FLO Award for excellence in journalism.
Upendra Nath Brahma Soldier of Humanity Award.
Siva Prasad Barooah National Award for journalism.
North East Excellence Award.
ONE India Award.
The Siva Prasad Barooah National Award record lists Mukhim as its 2007 recipient.
If you go to her home, there is one room with walls glittering with all the medals she received, perhaps thousands!
But perhaps the most revealing measure of her influence is not a medal, trophy or citation.
It is the fact that she has repeatedly been willing to say things that powerful people, comfortable institutions and frightened societies would rather not hear.
In 2021, the Supreme Court quashed an FIR against her, holding that her criticism of governmental inaction over violence against non-tribals could not simply be branded an attempt to promote hatred. The case became another significant moment in the debate over free speech and dissent.
She has never believed democracy means staying quiet
Mukhim’s philosophy is blunt.
Citizens cannot expect democracy to work if they remain silent.
They cannot keep discussing problems behind closed doors.
They cannot hide behind anonymous letters.
They have to be counted.
They have to speak.
They have to be brave.
And she has repeatedly argued that women, in particular, must become more politically vocal, not to tear one another down, but to raise their voices for the larger good and for the generations that will inherit the society being built today.
That makes the current controversy rather revealing.
Because Patricia Mukhim is not a newcomer suddenly discovering outrage.
She has been doing this for decades.
She questioned militancy when speaking against it was dangerous, challenged corruption when it was inconvenient, protested public policy when others preferred silence, and criticised her own society when she believed it was wrong.
And today, when Assam and Meghalaya are locked in another uncomfortable conversation about tourism, identity, roads, livelihoods and mutual respect, she is still doing what she has always done:
asking questions.
One may disagree with her.
One may challenge her language.
One may argue with her conclusions.
That is democracy.
But to reduce a lifetime of dissent to the accusation that she is merely “inciting” people is to miss the extraordinary complexity of the woman behind the headline.
Behind the fighter is a mother: The mother of five children, though two of them have passed away, leaving her with three surviving children.
There is another Patricia Mukhim, however, that public arguments rarely reveal.
The woman who loves her garden because it has been her healer.
The woman who remains physically disciplined, who advocates yoga, walks green paths and climbs mountains even in her seventies.
The woman who believes women should speak louder because silence has cost society too much.
And the mother.
A mother whose life has known extraordinary hardship.
A mother who lost a child in infancy.
A mother who lost a daughter to suicide.
A mother who, by her own account, cannot let a day pass without thinking of her daughter. There are days when she closes the door, locks herself away and cries.
That grief does not make her weak.
It makes the steel in her even more remarkable.
She came from a struggling home. She was raised by a mother who fought to educate her. She began her working life as a teacher on ₹270 a month. She raised children while building a career. She found journalism almost by accident.
And somehow, from that difficult beginning, she climbed to the highest levels of Indian journalism and public life.
She did not inherit a platform.
She built one.
She did not inherit influence.
She earned it.
And she did not use that influence simply to make herself comfortable.
She used it to prod Meghalaya.
To question it.
To challenge it.
To push it toward a better future.
Perhaps that is the Patricia Mukhim worth remembering amid today’s political noise.
Not merely the woman accused of being outspoken.
But the woman who has spent a lifetime believing that silence is far more dangerous than speaking out.
A writer.
A journalist.
A protester.
A reformer.
A mother.
A grieving woman.
And, above all, a fiercely independent voice from Meghalaya who still believes her state can rise higher.
At 70 plus, she is still walking the mountains, tending her garden, still writing. And still asking why the road stops where it does. And still refusing to be told that asking difficult questions is the same thing as inciting people.
Because for Patricia Mukhim, perhaps the real provocation has always been something much simpler:
the refusal to remain silent.
JANPATH NEWS NETWORK (JNN)
Independent. Fearless. On the People’s Path.
