By Napoleon S Mawphniang
After Lumpongdeng, Which Island, Which Forest, Which Valley Is Next?
There is a phrase from Nikos Kazantzakis that has been haunting me of late. In Zorba the Greek, the irrepressible Zorba looks at the futile gestures of men pleading with those in power and says simply: “You can knock on a deaf man’s door forever.” It is a line that cuts with surgical precision through the noise of public protest and government assurance and nowhere does it resonate with more bitter clarity than in the unfolding tragedy of Lumpongdeng Island in Umiam Lake, Meghalaya. The property has been signed away. The lease has been executed. The money is on the table and it is on the side of the government. Whatever you and I say from this point forward may very well be the knocking on a deaf man’s door.
But we must knock anyway. That, too, is what Zorba understood.Let us be precise about what has happened, because precision is the first casualty in these affairs when the machinery of state public relations goes to work. The Government of Meghalaya has handed over 66 acres of Lumpongdeng Island — sitting at the ecological and spiritual heart of Umiam Lake — to the Indian Hotels Company Limited (IHCL), the hospitality arm of the Tata Group, for a 60-year lease. The proposed development is the Taj Umiam Resort and Spa, a project whose updated cost figure now stands at approximately around Rs 330 crore, with projected revenues from the lease estimated at a staggering Rs 1,981 crore. For our conscience , This is not a modest tourism initiative. This is a corporate land transaction of the highest order, dressed in the language of “development” and “monetisation.”
Chief Minister Conrad K. Sangma has since clarified — with some urgency, one suspects, given the scale of public outrage — that no permanent construction will be permitted on Lumpongdeng Island. One is grateful for the reassurance. Except that official documents associated with the project reportedly mention luxury villas, cafés, and restaurants. These two positions cannot coexist in the same universe without one of them being a falsehood. Which is it? The government has thus far not resolved this contradiction. It has merely restated its position, which is, as Chomsky once noted about official power, the preferred method of burying a lie — not retracting it, but repeating the truth so loudly that the contradiction gets drowned out.
Lumpongdeng is not an anomaly. It is a symptom. It would be intellectually dishonest and journalistically negligent, to treat it as an isolated incident. Consider: in June 2025, the Meghalaya Cabinet approved the leasing of 273.41 acres of unused MeECL (Meghalaya Energy Corporation Limited) land to the Tourism Department for a period of 60 years — extendable by a further 30 years , yes 30 years — at the astonishing rate of Rs 1 per acre ( at the astonishing rate of Rs 1 per acre (Rs 0.000022956841139 per sq. ft. — less than the cost of a matchbox, and that is the cheapest price we have put on our children’s inheritance) .
The land covers key locations including the IB campus, Lee Junction, Nomsdea, and L. Ponging Island. Ninety percent of the lease revenue would continue to flow to the Power Department. The tourism department gets the land; private entrepreneurs get the contracts; the communities who have lived beside these lands for generations get — what, exactly? A press release? A promise? This is the architecture of dispossession in its most legible form: the common form – the systematic conversion of public and community-adjacent land into instruments of private profit, wrapped in bureaucratic language dense enough that most citizens cannot penetrate it until the bulldozers arrive. In his landmark work Manufacturing Consent, Intellectual Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman described how state and corporate power operate in tandem, constructing narratives that legitimate the transfer of resources from the many to the few. The government of Meghalaya does not need a propaganda model imported from Washington. It has developed its own, finely calibrated to the terrain of the Northeast.
The Green Tech Foundation has been conducting an indefinite silent sit-in at Lumpongdeng Island itself, and later moved its protest to the steps of the State Secretariat in Shillong. The Hynniewtrep Integrated Territorial Organisation (HITO) wrote a formal letter to the Chief Minister urging revocation, (clearly) stating with admirable directness: “We earnestly urge you to reconsider this misguided course of action.” HITO also invoked the Land Transfer Act of 1971 — a piece of legislation specifically designed to prevent non-tribals from acquiring land in Meghalaya — questioning whether the lease to IHCL was consistent with its spirit, if not its letter. Local headmen in the area have publicly denied having endorsed the project, contradicting government claims of community backing.
These are not fringe voices. These are the constitutionally recognised custodians of indigenous land — the very people whose consent should have been the precondition, not the afterthought, of any such transaction. And yet the deal proceeded. The lease was signed. And now, as the government has essentially confirmed, the property is sold — or as good as sold for the next six to nine decades. We are told that “no permanent structures” will be built. But a 60-year lease over 66 acres of a pristine lake island is itself a permanent alteration of the social and ecological contract. Duration is permanence by another name.To understand the present, one must reckon with the past. India’s post-independence development narrative has been, in too many instances, a history of state-sanctioned dispossession. The great dams of the Nehruvian era — Bhakra, Hirakud, Rihand — displaced millions of people, the majority of them Adivasi. Arundhati Roy, in The Greater Common Good, documented how “big dams are to a nation’s ‘development’ what nuclear bombs are to its military arsenal.” The logic is crystal clear and identical: sacrifice the peripheral to serve the centre. Sacrifice the community to serve the corporation. You always witness. The vocabulary changes like — “eco-tourism,” “luxury hospitality,” “revenue monetisation” — but the geometry of power remains unchanged.
In our state Meghalaya specifically, land dispossession carries a particular violence, because the Khasi and Jaintia peoples have always understood land not merely as property but as inheritance – the root from which identity grows. The traditional system of community land governance through Dorbar Shnong and clan structures was never merely administrative; it was cosmological. When the state converts community-adjacent land into a corporate lease without genuine free, prior, and informed consent, it does not merely take land. It severs a people from their sense of place, from their ontological coordinates.
This is the question that should be keeping every citizen of Meghalaya awake at night. The government’s lease-and-monetise logic, already applied to 273 acres of MeECL land and now to Lumpongdeng’s 66 acres, is not a policy. It is an appetite. And appetites, historically, do not self-regulate. What other ecologically sensitive land, what other community-adjacent island or forest fringe or lake shore, is currently being mapped by consultants in the corridors of the Secretariat? What other “unutilised” land is being prepared for the next 60-year handover? The citizens of Meghalaya deserve answers to these questions before the deeds are executed, not after.
The Green Tech Foundation, HITO, and the local headmen who have objected are performing the most fundamental act of democratic citizenship — dissent. But dissent, as recent events have shown, runs headlong into a government that has already decided. The money is counted. The documents are signed. And so, like Zorba’s fool beating on the deaf man’s door, we protest. We write. We document. We demand.
Perhaps the door will never open. But the knocking must be heard — in the courts, in the legislative assembly, in the conscience of every Meghalayan who understands that what is leased today cannot simply be reclaimed tomorrow. The island does not belong to the government to give. It belongs to the lake, to the ecosystem, to the unborn generations who will one day ask us what we did when the deeds were being signed and the hills were being sold.We had better have an answer.
(The writer is Advocate , Trade Unionist Ethicist & the Humanist Architect. Views expressed are personal.)
