SHILLONG: Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh did not want the presence of media persons at the two-day NEC meeting, which began in the city on Monday, and asked reporters to go out soon after he arrived at the venue.
“Media persons, you can go out now,” he told the journalists who were invited to cover the event in the congested hall at the Convent ion Centre.
However, according to the press pass issued by the Meghalaya Information and Public Relations, the holder of the pass was permitted to cover the visit of the union minister on Monday and Tuesday.
Even the NEC public relations head Manas Ranjan Mahapatra in his invitation to the media on Sunday had said, “You may cover the speeches of Rajnath Singh, Union Home Minister and Jitendra Singh, Minister, Development of North Eastern Region at the Convention Centre from 2.05 pm to 2.25 pm.”
On the contrary, the media persons were asked to sit in a nearby room and copies of the speech of the home minister were delivered to them later.
When contacted, an official source said the NEC did not coordinate in advance to ensure that media persons cover the meeting.
Furious media persons pointed out that if it was a secretive meeting, they should not have been invited at all.
“This is like inviting a person to a house and the host asking him or her to leave immediately,” they pointed out the irony.
However, an NEC official put the blame on the state government and the police, who, however, denied any role in arranging the meeting as it was an NEC event and the state government and the police were only felicitators.
Adding to the woes was a congested hall arranged for the meeting attended by chief ministers and governors of all the Northeastern states, officers of NEC and the state governments.
The auditorium which was used by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who had attended the 2016 plenary meeting of NEC in Shillong, was not preferred by NEC thereby leading to discomfort from many quarters.
There were murmurs in the hall that it was suffocating as there was no space to move and since it was a sunny day, the visitors were not comfortable unlike other days.
Except Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad Sangma, the chief ministers of several states who came out of the hall at various intervals did not want to speak to the media.
