Election mania
After the District Council election results were announced on February 27, supporters of candidates went berserk.
Anyone looking at them would imagine that the victory was theirs. Looking at the melee, a wit remarked that people never learn lessons.
He pointed to women with little babies on their backs all dancing on a two buses that must have been hired by the victorious MDC.
“What do these women understand about the reason why they voted for this or that candidate. They must have got a 500 rupee note and fell for it hook line and sinker. That’s how cheap a vote has become in poverty stricken Meghalaya.
Some other women sat on the boot of a Maruti 800 with their feet dangling out and touching the road. The traffic cops at Khyndailad instead of booking the driver for breaking the MV Act simply laughed it off.
Somebody has rightly said that India is not ready for parliamentary democracy. And much less are states like Meghalaya where the literacy rate is only about 68% (that is if we can believe Government statistics.
CM’s muster roll
Recently, rival politicians trained their guns at each other with members of a regional party calling the Cabinet Ministers “muster rolls under the Chief Minister.”
A former politician observed, “This is a very correct metaphor because nothing moves in Meghalaya without the Chief Minister’s say so.”
He pointed to the so-called Single Window Agency (SWA) whose clearance is necessary for setting up industries.
The SWA is chaired by the CM. The single window is meant to fast-track environmental and other clearances but it is so convoluted that only the desperate industrialist with the idea of exploiting the resources of Meghalaya would have the patience and the energy to continue running from pillar to post within this single window.
The SWA meets very seldom and files for clearance are pending with the CM he quipped. Even though the Congress later retaliated at the unkind cut, it made a lot of people think what the ministers actually do and whether they are accountable to the CM (boss) or to the people who elected them.
ILP back to haunt Govt?
The demand for an Inner Line Permit had taken a back seat for two months to allow different actors to campaign for the District Council election.
For the regional parties the ILP movement seemed to have paid dividends even though MDCs would be hard put to explain how the Councils would legislate on an ILP for Meghalaya. More so since different Councils have different mandates and will be led by different political conglomerates.
So if people have voted for their MDCs with the idea that he/she would enforce the ILP in the State they are badly misled.
But who will tell them these home truths? And now the daggers will be out of their sheaths yet again so that ILP also becomes an issue for the Lok Sabha polls. In Meghalaya politics is a past game of pressure groups!
