By Louis Pyngrope
The title of this write up is self-explanatory. The stress is on electing educated MLAs which is the need of the hour. Our voters need to be reminded again about this. Every voter of the State needs to focus on electing educated and committed MLAs for the next government. It is very difficult to assess who amongst the existing MLAs are to be re-elected. In my assessment, based on their performance, none of the 60 MLAs deserve to be re-elected. To be fair, let us elect educated new faces so that we can get the fittest people running the government according to the expectations of the masses. If we fail to elect the right people in 2023 it would be suicidal for us because we would then be the worst- governed State in the history of Indian democracy.
It is very important for us to remember that for the past 50+ years none of the governments in our states have ever set education and health as top priority in the list of governance priorities. As a result, today we are lagging behind in both sectors in comparison with other states of India. In fact, Meghalaya is ranked at the bottom of the list of well performing states in both these sectors. I am very sorry to say that this is the same ideology of the underdeveloped countries all over the world. Now it is time for us to awaken and to free ourselves from such dangers. Once we can come out of this mindset other spheres of activities will be on the right track and a brighter future awaits us. Hence the candidates and the political parties to be elected are to be weighed on these criteria. The elected political party should have education and health as priorities in their election manifestos and the candidates should possess good educational qualification with good statesmanship quality at the same time.
This General Assembly election is an opportunity for us to elect good representatives to the Legislative Assembly. Failure to do so will lead to all of us the electors being responsible in ruining our state without learning how to transform the mistakes committed in the past 50+ years which had brought our state to this existing unacceptable condition. We do not have an education policy, no health policy, no mining policy, sports, environment, energy generation and distribution policies, etc., till date. So how can we expect our state to perform better in all the fields mentioned above?
With the present Government, we see many flaws, the most prominent ones are the rise in unemployment to the extreme limit so much so we don’t see any hope of coming back to a situation we experienced in 2018 just before the formation of this Government. We cannot remain silent spectators at the actions of the present coalition Government. I believe we have learned enough that we will never commit the same mistake to create a situation compelling the elected members to elect a similar type of government in 2023.
Again, with the calibre of the MLAs elected we understand how we were cheated by our government in arriving at the so-called solution to our boundary problems with Assam which was so much against the wishes of the affected people living in the border areas. Our Government, instead of arriving at a correct decision by taking on board the opinion of the people living in the disputed border areas, instead took their own decision on the long pending border dispute between Meghalaya and Assam which led to the present state of dissatisfaction of the affected people in the affected border areas.
Once again, as a reminder to all of us, any wrongful decision made by us in electing MLAs to Meghalaya Legislative Assembly in 2023 will make us regret it forever as this government has failed to bring any transformation that could have benefitted our society. One more very simple law that could have been enacted by our government is the blanket ban on plastic items as they have caused so much pollution to our earth and water bodies. The government is afraid to take action as the meat sellers were complaining about the absence of substitutes to plastic bags for carrying the meat bought from the sellers. The government needs to be blunt and take direct action to ban plastics without any hesitation as we are not supposed to have such a short memory to forget about the methods used in the recent past just before the acceptance of plastic bags, to carry the meat bought from the market.
This Government has failed totally to bring justice to the bereaved family of Late Cherishterfield Thangkhiew by delaying in making the official report available to the bereaved family. It is only in this government that teachers’ organisations have agitated by spending days and nights at the parking lot near Additional Secretariat with the expectation of getting a solution to their long pending demands in connection with their salaries. In the eyes of the law, it is more justified for these SSA teachers to fight for the payment of their salaries as they have been appointed to teach the young children at the elementary level which is the fundamental right of every Indian child. This failure to pay salaries happens because there is no education policy which could put a limit to the number of categories of teachers right from the elementary level to the higher and technical level. There are innumerable mistakes committed by this MDA Government with the above-mentioned failures being just a few.
If we are anxious about bringing change in our state, it is high time for us to set up think tanks and involve ourselves en-mass in canvassing for this coming election. It is the only method to get rid of the existing useless politicians and make them learn their lessons taught to them by voters. They should understand that such mistakes are not to be repeated whenever they return to politics in the near future.
This is the right time to get young and fit politicians to save the image of our state. Our new politicians will hopefully also be the rulers and statesmen we can rely on to bring back the fame and prestige we have experienced in the past.
We understand the criminalisation of politics today. Money plays a crucial role in politics where votes can be purchased from the voters. We need to do away with corruption by convincing our people not to accept money for election of legislators or to succumb to the feeling that once money is accepted, it is mandatory that these be translated to votes. Let us unanimously commit to elect real legislators so that we can have the governance we deserve. We have to make sure that there is no room for mistakes in electing good legislators with one single political party, having a clear mandate on education and health reforms and policies leading to their developments in our state. That political party must have the above in its manifesto to obtain absolute majority and form the next government.
(The writer is Retired Associate Professor, Lady Keane College)