Normally ministers seek to govern and ensure that law and order prevails. In the case of the MDA Government, a minister in the present dispensation is guilty of instigating pressure groups to agitate against the Centre’s belligerent stance vis a vis granting of the Inner Line Permit (ILP) to all visitors to Meghalaya..The ILP is an archaic colonial law that has somehow found favour with groups that insist that the tribes (particularly the Khasi- Jaintia ) tribes need protection from the avaricious “exploitative” non tribal. This logic is inherently flawed because the non-tribal in Meghalaya is already deprived of the right to land ownership and to conduct business unless sanctioned by the District Councils. An analytical study would reveal that the loss of the right to own land is because community land is shrinking. The reason lies in the fact that the affluent tribal is land hungry and has managed to buy land beyond their ability to use them.
Such absentee landlords are legion and there are no checks and balances on how much land an individual can own because there is no land ceiling act in Meghalaya. While chief ministers like BB Lyngdoh had the foresight to introduce the cadastral survey which would clearly establish the identities of the land owners and also enumerate how much of community land is still available for use. Unfortunately, the process was short-circuited by no less than the HSPDP supremo, HS Lyngdoh who resisted the cadastral survey on the pretext that the indigenous tribes would have to pay land taxes to the government. But that surely was not BB Lyngdoh’s motive. However, since he headed a fragile coalition he had to give in to the untenable demands of coalition partners. Had the cadastral survey been conducted in the 1980s as desired by BB Lyngdoh the boundaries of Meghalaya too would have been demarcated and there would have been no border skirmishes.
These attempts at streamlining the governance processes, especially those related to land holdings patterns in Meghalaya that were thwarted by coalition partners of successive governments need to be documented because ultimately it is not the outsider that is responsible for the growing inequalities in Meghalaya. It is the tribal elite that benefits from the amorphous policies that obscure the grim realities obtaining here. To make up for the defects in governance there is a clamour for unnecessary protectionism like the ILP. And now a minister of the MDA Government is warning the central government and instigating the Khasi Students’ Union (KSU) of which he was a former member to go on agitational mode in order to get central sanction for the ILP. Is this the brief of a minister of the present government? Is it not a dangerous trend? Obviously, this grandstanding is because the 2023 elections are just a wink away. But what a disastrous strategy!
