By HH Mohrmen
Ordinary citizens of the state would have no reason to doubt that the list of 60 Congress candidates to contest this coming election to the Meghalaya state Assembly was indeed selected and prepared by the All India Congress Committee. Vincent Pala, MP from the Shillong parliamentary constituency has on his Facebook update said something similar, that the list was thoroughly discussed and prepared. Like any ordinary citizen of the state, Congressmen and women too have no reason to suspect that there is a game plan behind the list and congratulated their leaders on completing the difficult task to come up with the list of 60 candidates from hundreds of ticket aspirants. AICC observers too like the MP can now heave a sigh of relief and concentrate on the next important task ahead and that is to win the election.
What ordinary folks like you and me fail to see is what lies behind the list? What happened behind closed doors before the list was made public? How was the decision made as to who would be allotted tickets from each of the 60 constituencies? Of course winning the election is one very important criterion for selecting a candidate but there is much more to the list than merely getting a winning candidate. Can anybody believe that the candidates were really selected by Madam Sonia or the AICC observer for that matter? Madam Sonia is a busy person she will not have the time to sit through the selection process; and even if she does; she will not be able to distinguish one ticket contender from the other, not even between Ngaitlang and Stanly Weiss despite the beard. Madam can hardly recognize the 206 Congress MPs in the Lok Sabha and the party’s 70 MPs in the Rajya Sabha, so how can we expect her to know all the aspiring candidates from an obscure Meghalaya and decide to select one from the other. She and the AICC observers have to rely on the information fed by those who are in charge of the party in the state. Madam therefore can at the most sign on the dotted lines of the list prepared by the Congress leaders from Meghalaya and may be bless the Congress candidates featuring on the list.
So who really had a role to play in selecting the candidates? And who was given the responsibility to brief the AICC observers on the winning potentiality of the candidates and convince the observer that candidate A has a better chance to win than the candidate B? Surely, the AICC state observers too could barely identify few prominent candidates let alone comparing the winning prospects of one from the other. In a situation like that is it not true that the three most important Congress leaders of the State have the sole responsibility of providing necessary information to those in charge in Delhi? Inadvertently the power to select lies with the trio from Meghalaya and the kind of information and updates they feed to the powers that be in Delhi. So the sitting MLAs and the aspiring candidates who were not allotted ticket have no one else to blame but the three Congress leaders. They were not allotted tickets because there was nobody to drum up support for them in Delhi. The three most powerful Congressmen must have backed another (hopefully) winning horse hence they were denied Congress ticket. It also means that the 60 names that have made it to the list have the backing of at least one of the three most powerful Congressmen in Meghalaya.
Who are the three musketeers of the Congress in Meghalaya? Obviously the bad blood between Mukul Sangma and DD Lapang is still alive and the wound has not healed. Lapang who was unseated by Mukul Sangma to head the Congress led government in Meghalaya is eying for the Chief Mnisterial berth once again. Of course it is well within Lapang’s right to aspire for another stint as the Chief Minister of the state and Lapang knows that he will need somebody to take on the might of Mukul Sangma. He realizes that it will be an uphill task to defeat young Dr Mukul Sangma in the Congress’s internal politics, therefore he found in the MP of Shillong parliamentary constituency Vincent Pala, a friend turned foe turn friend again to team up and hopefully Pala will be able to help Lapang regain his Chief Ministerial post again.
The battle for the post of the Chief Minister of Meghalaya began even before the election bugle was sounded. Both camps are trying to ensure that their supporters are allotted tickets and this is one reason why there is a delay in declaring the list of candidates allotted party tickets. The struggle to decide which candidate is selected made the two camps revert to their old animal instincts. Like lions in the wild they decided to demarcate the territory they control. The solution was that the Lapang-Pala camp would decide who to allot the tickets to in the Khasi Jaintia part of the state and Mukul would have the final say on who to allot tickets to in Garo Hills.
The process of allotting party tickets to the aspiring candidates is the beginning of the race to the Chief Minister’s post and also the resumption of the old inter-party politicking within the Congress party in Meghalaya. So while the hoi polloi, are busy canvassing for their candidates to win the coming elections, the masters of the game are already in the next stage of the game and that is to gain power and control in the state. No wonder the game of chess was invented by early Indian politicians. Politics is ultimately a game of control and command for those in power. This is the game which involves removing anyone that can be a stumbling block and even sacrificing one of your own to reach the goal. So those Congressmen and women who failed to figure in the list just happened to be on the wrong side of the fence; their only mistake is that they did not kowtow to those who have the power to select candidates.
The issue of allotting party ticket to candidates has not only rocked the Congress ship in Meghalaya, but the issue will have a drastic impact on the prospects of the party winning an absolute majority in the 2013 election. With several disgruntled Congressmen and women throwing their hats in the ring as independent candidates, the Congress candidates’ chances of winning in the particular constituency is already hampered.
The next part of the game will be after the election results are declared. The master players are all set. They have already placed the dice on the chessboard. But election can also be a game of chance; it could go either way. There is also a saying that ‘politics is the art of the possible.’ It will be interesting to see what Pala’s game plan is? Now that he has been relieved of his ministerial post in the Union Government, Pala is no longer as busy as he used to be in Delhi. He would definitely have more time and energy to spare. Knowing that his future lies in the state politics, the young and active MP will definitely plunge into State politics sooner than later. Pala will also be tempted to get his hands dirty in the state politics after the elections. Politics as we all know is about power. It only depends on who has a better game plan now, or who will be able to play the master stroke. For voters in general, no matter how sincere we are in our effort to get (what we believe) good candidates elected, we are only playing the politician’s game.