Editor,
From the news report in your paper (ST April 5, 2017), it is evident that the fall of the National Peoples’ Party (NPP) led executive committee in the Garo Hills Autonomous District Council (GHADC) is due to the wrong handling by the party’s leadership.
Clearly the leadership of the NPP has failed to keep the NPP Members of the District Council (MDCs) and their prominent followers and supporters in their constant loop. It also appears that the NPP leadership forgot to focus on the task at hand in the run up to the 2018 general elections and got distracted somewhere else and the wolves have managed sneak into the shed and have stolen the faltering sheep. What the NPP leadership needs to do urgently is to stay focused, be attentive, sympathetic and large-hearted towards the MDCs and MLAs, followers and supporters and well wishers. It is high time that NPP leadership comes down from their high stance and humbly take the masses along with them, just like its founder, P.A. Sangma, who was humble, easily approachable, mixed freely with people, tried to understand their grievances and spoke the language they understood. Oh, yes, he was a mass leader par excellence.
Again, it is apparent that proper care and attention was not given by the NPP leadership to the MDCs under the ruling coalition of the GHADC; constant one to one or group contacts and interactions seemed to be missing. NPP leadership ought to understand that the party is still in its nascent state and needs to be deeply rooted in all villages, nooks and corners of Garo Hills and Khasi Jaintia Hills. It should be firmly established in Garo Hills and then spread its wings to other parts of the state if it can prove to be the best alternative in Meghalaya.
For a while now there have been rumblings among the NPP MDCs for reshuffling and change of guard in the ruling coalition and for better management of the resources and also to peg in more revenue from all available resources to weather the resource crisis in the GHADC. But, it seemed there the party leadership did not pay heed and spent more time campaigning in Manipur. Perhaps proper collective planning did not take place on how to mop up more resources to meet the various liabilities of the Council.
Hence, the inevitable has happened.
Yours etc.,
Philip Marweiñ,
Shillong-2
Governors’ Role in Manipur & Goa
Editor,
It must have been a bolt from the blue for the politically conscious denizens that post the February 11 announcements of the final results of assembly elections to Manipur and Goa, the BJP which could notch up far less seats than Congress was paradoxically invited by their respective Governors to form a government with the support of a few opportunistic MLAs. I thought that in such a case of poll results where none could muster absolute majority, the party that secures the most number of seats ought to have been invited first to explore viable possibilities of government formation. If, however, the latter could not cash in on the situation, the next largest party like the BJP in these two states should be invited to fill the vacuum. This principle was, however, given short shrift by the said Governors, who, instead, called the BJP to form a government by giving it ample time to manipulate the required numbers to gain majority with ease. This is nothing short of a mockery of democracy! The appropriate forum for test of majority is indubitably on the floor of the assembly and not at the Governors’ residence, who is invariably appointed by the powers that be.
Incidentally, it was in the fitness of things for the Governors to have gone through the Sarkaria Commission final reports of 1988 which dwells on the Governors’ role which may have a bearing on situations such as those in the states of Manipur and Goa. For such unethical political skullduggery the Congress too while as a dominant ruling party at the Centre in the 1970s and 1980s was far from being blameless as it was a past-master in the art of toppling democratically elected State governments. Drawing from the glaring example nearer home, and if my memory serves me a right, it was in the 1976 Mendipathar Convention of the APHLC, the then ruling party of Meghalaya led by late CM, Capt. W. A. Sangma, that this popularly elected regional party government was made to merge with the Congress, prompting some high-minded cabinet ministers like BB Lyngdoh, SDD Nichols Roy, DD Pugh, PR Kyndiah (who regrettably later joined the Congress) to bravely sacrifice their coveted posts as a token of vehement displeasure at the Machiavellian ploy engineered by the Congress at the Centre under the leadership of Indira Gandhi. In sum, we can only conclude that this time around the Congress party is paid back in its own coin. And it is precisely because of such glaring examples of nefarious political designs of the Congress that the sarkarai Commission was set up in the 1980s in the face of nation-wide protests led by prominent figures like Jyoti Basu, ex-CM of West Bengal, R. K. Hedge, ex-CM of Karnataka et al.
Yours etc.,
Jerome K. Diengdoh
Shillong – 2