SHILLONG: While the Chief Minister, Conrad Sangma remains non-committal on approaching the Centre or the Supreme Court to solve the vexed boundary dispute with Assam, an ally of the NPP-led MDA Government in Meghalaya – the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) is of the view that there is a need for the Survey Of India (SoI) to conduct a survey of the disputed areas first.
“If the survey is not acceptable to either side, approaching the Supreme Court will be the ultimate solution to the Assam- Meghalaya inter-state boundary row,” said NCP MLA and state President, Saleng Sangma.
He also felt that until and unless the government involves the centre, the issue cannot be solved.
Elaborating further, he said that centre’s involvement can be in the form of calling the Survey of India and giving them full-fledged power by both Assam and Meghalaya governments to conduct the survey.
He said that once the survey was done and if any of the two states has a problem with it, the Supreme Court could be approached. “May be the Supreme Court is the ultimate way to solve the problem otherwise this will linger,” he said.
Taking a dig at the Leader of the Opposition and Congress MLA, Dr Mukul Sangma for trying to politicise the issue, the NCP president said that the Opposition leader was the Chief Minister for eight long years and one of the first thing he said when he was sworn in as the CM was to solve the boundary problem, which he couldn’t.
Referring to his recent comment against the MDA government on the boundary issue, Sangma said during the tenure of Dr Mukul Sangma both Assam and Meghalaya had congress Government but they failed to come to some understand and he was now asking the new government to wake up, which is not acceptable
He also informed that he was a member of a committee that was constituted to look into the issue but they were not given any importance.
The boundary dispute between Assam and Meghalaya took ugly turn recently when the residence of the Secretary of Hima Nongspung in New Balakhowa village in Ri Bhoi district was ransacked by a group of people from Assam and the Secretary was also arrested and lodged in an Assam jail for few days.