By Risador M Makri
Something feels broken in Shillong- and it’s not just the streetlights flickering out of rhythm. The government calls it a reshuffle. But what it’s really done is reshuffle competence out of the picture.
We’re told this was about “balance,” about “fresh faces.” But freshness without depth is just perfume on decay. Because let’s be honest — this new lineup doesn’t inspire confidence. It embarrasses it. These ministers aren’t even half of what their predecessors were, in either capability or comprehension. You can’t replace experience with enthusiasm and expect the system to run itself. Meghalaya doesn’t need figureheads; it needs functioning heads.
Take the Power Department. Under A.T. Mondal, the city finally saw something that had eluded it for years — reliability. No power cuts. No sudden blackouts. No mysterious “technical faults” at 7 p.m. on a Friday night. It was smooth, efficient, and quietly revolutionary. Mondal wasn’t loud about his work; he just made the lights stay on. That was enough.
And now? The lights are back to flickering like old memories. The new minister, barely equipped to handle the complexities of a power grid, has turned one of the best-run departments into a daily guessing game. Some mornings there’s power, some nights there’s none. The city groans, the markets pause, the students curse under their breath as they sit beside uncharged laptops.
It’s almost tragic. You can feel the difference between competence and confusion — it’s the difference between light and dark. — both literally and metaphorically. The new minister seems overwhelmed, unsure, and unprepared. It’s almost painful to watch. Shillong has gone back to its old routine: candles, generators, and the quiet curse of the working class whose day ends when the current does.
And tourism — well, that’s an even bigger tragedy. Paul Lyngdoh didn’t just run the department; he embodied it. You could feel his presence in every caption on his Instagram, every picture that told a story without trying too hard. A shot of rain on cobblestones. A sunset over Sohra. A Khasi song performed under a bamboo roof. That’s what made him different — he understood that tourism is not infrastructure alone; it’s imagination.
Under Paul, Meghalaya’s story was being told beautifully — quietly but confidently — to the world. It wasn’t about slogans or staged festivals. It was about feeling. And people felt it. You could sense it in the way visitors wrote about the state; they didn’t just come here, they belonged here for a while.
Now, the storytelling has stopped. The minister is silent and reads from a script. The Khyndailad stretch, once meant to be our postcard of renewal, still looks weary and empty. The new minister, whoever thought he was ready, hasn’t even started to understand the language Paul spoke fluently — the language of place, of people, of poetry.
The truth is simple: this new cabinet doesn’t have the weight or the wisdom of the one before. It’s like watching a play where the lead actors have been replaced overnight by understudies still reading their lines. They stumble. They improvise. And the audience — us — are forced to pretend the performance hasn’t collapsed.
If the old ministers represented experience, this new group represents experimentation. And the stakes are too high for experiments. We’re talking about electricity, livelihoods, and an economy that breathes through tourism. These aren’t rehearsal subjects; they’re survival lines.
The MDA calls this a “strategic move.” From where the public stands, it looks more like an institutional downgrade. There was a time when governance in Meghalaya had flashes of brilliance — now it’s just flickering.
And yes, we notice. We notice the empty press conferences, the recycled statements, the hesitation. We notice that the new ministers are not even half of what the old ones were — not in intellect, not in instinct, not in the sheer dignity of work.
But here’s the bitter truth: this reshuffle had little to do with performance and everything to do with pressure. Word around the corridors is that certain groups within the party pushed for these changes — factions demanding visibility, allies demanding rewards. It’s a classic case of politics cannibalizing progress.
And that’s where it hurts most. Because when party interest outweighs public interest, when internal appeasement matters more than infrastructure, when positions are swapped not for merit but for management — the people lose. Every time.
What we’re witnessing isn’t governance; it’s choreography. Every move calculated, not for impact, but for image. And in that performance, the very ministers who delivered real, visible change were quietly removed.
This isn’t balance — it’s betrayal.
The MDA government can call this strategic. But from where the public stands, it looks like a demotion of development. Meghalaya is too small, too fragile, too full of potential to be held hostage by internal politics.
We deserve a government that fights for power, not plays with it.
Because in the end, no matter what happens in party rooms or backdoor meetings — it’s the ordinary citizens of Shillong who sit in the dark, both literally and figuratively, waiting for the lights — and leadership — to come back on.
It’s embarrassing, not because the old were perfect, but because the new seem painfully unprepared to even try. The lights may come back on eventually. But for now, Meghalaya is learning the hard way that you can’t reshuffle your way into competence. Some people earned their portfolios; others just inherited them.
And it shows — in every blackout, every stalled idea, every quiet evening where progress once stood proud.
