DELHI is and continues to be the favourite destination of Congress politicians and ministers, especially when the UPA was in power. Whether it is to press for leadership change in the State or other flimsy reasons, Congress MLAs and ministers love to visit Delhi and park there on some pretext or the other. But Dr Mukul Sangma seems to take the cake insofar as visits to the national capital are concerned. It makes us wonder what has happened to all that big talk about Meghalaya being on the top of the Information Technology (IT) heap. These days teleconferences and Skype calls which most public and private sector companies resort to in order to cut down on time and travelling costs are the order of the day. People do not have to be physically present at meetings. They can participate over Skype. These same VIPs must be using Skype to communicate with their sons and daughters in foreign countries although they also travel there quite often if we are to check their itineraries. After all, most of the children of the top VIPs of Meghalaya study abroad! They can afford to do so because of the indirect entitlements that democracy brings for those that are elected to rule.
Now all of a sudden we have MLAs of the Opposition camps also flying to Delhi to ‘inform’ the Home Minister and Prime Minister about all that is going wrong in Meghalaya. These worthies should ask Narendra Modi the brand new Prime Minister whether he depended on New Delhi to run Gujarat for all these years. Modi is a leader and a self-starter who needs no one’s permission to rise to the top or to do what is needed for Gujarat’s development. He crafted the model himself and used the bureaucracy to take that governance down to the lowest common denominator.
The Opposition MLAs are actually exposing their own incompetence. They are elected because people believe they are leaders. Now they seem to need the Union Home Minister and Prime Minister to do what they have failed to do, which is to keep the Government on its toes and to rap it on the knuckles for its failure to contain militancy in Garo Hills apart from other failures of governance. Instead of rushing to Delhi each time there is a crisis in the State these MLAs should have visited all the districts of Garo Hills on a fact-finding mission instead of depending on the NPP to feed them the details. There is a lot of misplaced urgency to visit Delhi. Some officials fly there every week on the plea that their presence in the national capital is essential. In view of the austerity drive launched by the Modi Government to cut down wasteful expenditure we can only hope the culture of entitlements in Meghalaya too is brought down to the minimum.
