A cloud is hanging over the recent elections in the Shillong Club, with one member alleging that they were blatantly rigged in favour of a few vested interests. For a venerable institution that is more than 140 years old, the accusations make for unhappy reading.
The Shillong Club is a registered company with by-laws and articles of association and, through members’ fees and other income, has access to a substantial amount of money.
An FIR, shared by a source with the press, was filed with Sadar police on December 22 by the member, Shakti Laitphlang, who stood unsuccessfully in the elections.
In turn he was debarred by the club and a counter FIR was also registered against Laitphlang over “threatening” behaviour by him towards the administrator of the club.
On condition of anonymity, members have revealed there is rampant malpractice in the elections of the Board of Directors (BoD) of the club and Laitphlang’s FIR should be thoroughly investigated. They have further alleged that, while the BoD officially consists of seven members, the management is in actuality controlled by just four men.
Threats of expulsion and debarment are common practice, it is said; a few years ago another member, Ajoy Nongrum, was also expelled from the club on supposedly frivolous grounds.
The confrontation with Laitphlang shifted to another gear on January 14 when the management debarred him from entering the club’s premises and suspended his privileges. Some members spoken to stated that such a move was against all norms of civility and brotherhood that the club stands for.
In the complaint, Laitphlang claimed that irregularities in the entire election process were rife, “from not properly notifying the elections to not issuing individual notices to the members” with the sole intention of controlling the results.
The Shillong Club has several hundred members in Shillong and out. However, instead of notifying them all of the impending election, the sole intimation they received was through the club’s notice board, which only a small minority would ever see, it is claimed by some members. The timeframe for submitting nominations was also brief and it is therefore unsurprising that there were only eight candidates for the seven seats available on the board.
The club had done something quite modern in recent times, that is to embrace online voting with ostensibly impartial observers to make the process more transparent. However, questions have been raised about the manner in which the election was held, with sources within the club saying that the company that was hired to provide the online voting software was the same one tasked with overseeing the election despite the obvious conflict of interest that would pose.
Laitphlang also alleged that voting on the day was manipulated against him. The problem, he stated, was in the one time passwords (OTPs) that were meant to be sent to the members to enable them to cast their vote and also the fact that the software being controlled by the club itself can be easily tweaked. His FIR alleges that many members contacted him directly to say that they had not received their individual OTP and/or faced problems accessing the e-voting portal. Yet, he told police, votes were cast in their name.
Laitphlang, on the other hand, was accused by another member of misleading him into divulging his OTP and thereby gaining an extra vote. This is another point listed by the club in Laitphlang’s disbarment. Apparently, this accusation was made against him on November 20 but the club did not act upon it until after he had filed his FIR.
Police are investigating Laitphlang’s complaints, though it has been reliably learnt that one of the board members (a former top bureaucrat) has been pressuring the police to consider the matter as a civil dispute and end the investigation. However, sources have hinted that there are many other irregularities that require probing within the club and that the election process is just the tip of the iceberg.
