By Patricia Mukhim
The countdown to the elections has begun. Many aspirations have surfaced and many more are incubating in the human laboratory. Amongst the more innovative angst is one from a professor in NEHU. He said what Meghalaya needs for its economic resurgence and the much hyped ‘good governance’ is to have either someone like Bihar’s Nitish Kumar or Gujarat’s enfant terrible Narendra Modi! The question is do we have someone like the above? Is our current Chief Minister a happy blend of the two, minus the communal bile of the Gujarat man? Or do we have someone else new who will enter the scene and like a prophet deliver us from our collective pre-election depression?
Mr Ardent Basaiawmoit has, in his enthusiasm for a clean election campaign marked out a few individuals with halos who fit his description of saintliness and propriety (mainly men of the cloth) and excluded others of his tribe who he believes cannot hold the candle to “honesty, integrity and unselfishness.” I used to think that Mr Basaiawmoit belongs to the United Democratic Party (UDP) which is currently the mistress of the Congress party and is therefore liable to be tarred by the brush of corruption that the MUA has willy-nilly indulged in during its four years tenure. Now I am not so sure as to which party this champion for clean elections belongs to. But let us for a moment not talk of corruption but of non-delivery of basic services. Even here the UDP will not be able to acquit itself since it has been the Congress’s alter ego. So how does Mr Basaiawmoit answer his detractors? And mind you there are many! I wish to offer some unsolicited advice to Mr Basaiawmoit. A politician must learn to carry people along. He cannot fly solo and definitely he cannot be a lone ranger. How many in the UDP are joining his campaign? If the UDP, his own party is unable to pitch in towards this campaign then how would the rank and file of this State do that?
I am all for free, fair and clean elections and above all I am against the business lobby turning the Assembly and then the Secretariat into a stock market when we do not even know how to read the Sensex. But the question is whether only the business guys do business in the secretariat? Don’t all our ministers do deals for every project? Don’t PWD or PHE ministers take huge cuts from the multi-crore schemes coming here so that ultimately what we are left with are mega pot-holes and piped water that’s shortening our life span? In short poison water! And if our PHE minister or Chief Minister (the referee in the cabinet) had no business interests why would one electrical engineer rise and rise up the graph like a sphinx even while he makes us drink poison? And why is it that no one has the guts to check his meteoric rise? Any answers Mr Chitlang Pale and Dr Mukul Sangma and of course Mr HDR Lyngdoh (for the roads)?
Politics is not a simple equation. It’s a combination of so many complex coordinates. This time around it’s also going to be bloody in Garo Hills. Some candidates who wish to win by hook or crook have already worked out how to do so. Their rivals will be eliminated before they can even say, “election.” All militant groups – the one holding the truce flag, the other still roaring in the jungles and the third one about to re-enter the lion’s den, will be freely used. There is no dearth of arms as we know. So the fireworks will have just begun as far as the Meghalaya election – 2013 is concerned.
One funny thing about the Congress is its ability to shoot itself in the foot if not both feet. The Congress working president is defending her party’s grass-roots projection of candidates. Fair enough. But is that normal? Isn’t this exercise going to create more bad blood? Will it not plunge all the Blocks into such pandemonium that by the time 2013 arrives every resolute Congress candidate who has been passed over by his Block would have readied himself to contest as independent or have joined another party? Well, the Congress will say that they are actually purging the party of self serving opportunists. But like a senior Union Minister said when he was told about the Block level elections, “We are adept at hara-kiri.”
Interestingly we hear so little about the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP). The NCP has at least one interesting candidate with the potential of a Nitish Kumar. But what will he do in a party where even close relatives have migrated to greener pastures? These things can make you depressed. The NCP guy is the right man in the wrong party. Then you also have all wrong guys in the right party. Don’t ask me which party though. It’s a state secret that can only be got through RTI. That’s if the media can be brought under RTI. And I’m sure many would want that to happen. As it is so many have drawn their daggers out of their scabbards and are just waiting to push it in when the opportunity knocks.
I am also trying to do a simple calculation of the things that the MUA will be broadcasting as its singular achievements. Did someone say this is the ‘Year of the Youth’ in Meghalaya? But we are already in February and there’s not a whimper about how we are going to celebrate youth. The least we ask for is a Youth Policy we can all discuss and add to or subtract from. And a youth policy is not, repeat, not just about sports and artificial turfs and Lajongs and royal Wahingdohs and music etc. It’s all of the above and more. It’s about a long term policy on how we create opportunities for self employment and do a reality check about which trades will be needed for Meghalaya 25 years hence. Let’s throw away the same old clichéd trades offered by the Industrial Training Institutes (ITI) which to my mind should be disbanded and shut down. Look at the one in Rynjah. It looks like a jungle (albeit one overgrown with weeds) right in the heart of Shillong. The decrepit look is enough to tell us what trades are on offer inside. Then there’s a whole new meaning to be given to education because the same, tired curriculum is churning out stereotypes with no mind of their own. Like they say when you are spoon-fed your brain soon takes the shape of the spoon. All the above are priorities and not just the much celebrated “River basin livelihoods project” which have become the slogan of the year for Meghalaya and the vocabulary for which Dr Mukul Sangma knows like the back of his hand. That’s only one of the things that can take Meghalaya forward. What’s our Economic Policy by the way? And do we have an Education Policy? So also a Health Policy? Or a Road Infrastructure Policy? Or for that matter an Employment Generation Policy (not to be mistaken for that obtuse Employment Generation Council employing some senile politician). Some may wonder why I am so gung-ho about policies. The reason is simple. Without a policy you only have knee-jerk solutions to intractable problems. In Meghalaya we have tried to dish out quick-fix solution which always boomerang and come to haunt us later.
Now there is one Policy I am looking forward to and which I believe my environmental activist friends are eager to see in place. Guess which one? The Mining Policy of course. This has been in the incubator for almost seven years. If it was a chicken it would have laid hundred of eggs before it became somebody’s gastronomic delight. Why do I get the gut feeling that this policy is not what the mining mafia wants and therefore it has to be choked to death? But will the once upon a time SBUK member and now the Mining minister do some magic and give us this Policy before our forests and rivers have died a natural death? Tall order is it? Yes we do need a change and we do need Nitish Kumars and Narendra Modis to give Meghalaya a new road map. Let us do a serious search. After all we are a population of 30 lakh people of which at least 25 % are capable men and women with leadership qualities. We need to get out of the rut of repeating the same names again and again like we do our multiplication tables! Let’s get out and get going! 2013 cannot be a repeat of 2008.