The appointment of a Congress party member as a nominee to the Garo Hills Autonomous District Council (GHADC) , when the National Peoples’ Party (NPP) which already has a majority in the House had appointed Conrad Sangma as their nominated member, is a travesty of good political practice. The Congress has 14 members in a House of 30 while the National Peoples’ Party (NPP) has 15. In that sense the NPP has a majority and is therefore well within its rights to appoint a member of their choice. The NPP had nominated Conrad Sangma who is eminently qualified to lead the present Executive Council. But the GHADC which had been used as a political ploy by the Congress Party (repeated adjournments of election on untenable pretexts) is again turned into a political tool to literally get even. With the appointment of Congress nominee Selma D Shira, the House now faces a stalemate with the NPP and Congress each having 15 members. The process of horse trading would now begin in right earnest in the absence of an Anti-Defection law in the Autonomous District Councils. Both parties will try to buy MDCs in order to form the Executive Council (EC).
The earlier EC which was voted out had turned the Council into a den of corruption. Attempts to investigate the scams were sabotaged in various ways by the Congress-led, State Government. It is learnt that several appointments of clerical and other staff have been made to the GHADC after the candidates paid hefty sums of money for the posts. Some of them had even sold off their land to pay bribes to the GHADC councilors. Now that they have been going without salaries for several months the employees are spilling the beans. A new EC might have unearthed the scams and tracked them to their source. Hence the Congress Party and State Chief Minister, Mukul Sangma is in a tearing hurry to ensure that this does not happen. If the district councils are only about corruption and power games, do we need them at all?