The Voice of the People Party (VPP) has today asked the MDA government to come out with a white paper on the boundary agreement reached between Meghalaya and Assam.
The party also said that it is too early to celebrate the signing of the boundary agreement between Meghalaya and Assam. It also said that even pressure groups that once hailed this government are now questioning and expressing their apprehensions on the manner in which the present border pact was signed between the two states.
“At this stage it is very difficult to say whether this agreement is historic or indeed a disaster. Though we would like to give this government the benefit of the doubt, the rush to reach an agreement without being transparent only fuels speculations,” VPP president Ardent M. Basaiawmoit said.
Basaiawmoit said that there are many pertinent questions that need to be asked. According to him, the government was not willing to place the details of the arrangement in the public domain and there is no information if the stakeholders have been informed about the entire process before finalising the agreement.
“There is also an effort on the part of the present dispensation to convey to the people of the State that after fifty years of statehood it has finally managed to settle this boundary problem. However, if we go by what the media reports it is a different story altogether,” Basaiawmoit said.
He also said that people were made to believe that Meghalaya does not have a boundary ever since the State was carved out of Assam and that the present agreement between the two states was made possible due to the consideration and efforts of the NDA government at the Centre.
“The fact remains that no State can become a unit of the Indian federation without a proper boundary. The territory for the autonomous State of Meghalaya was defined by the Assam Reorganisation Act 1969 and the boundary of the full-fledged State of Meghalaya has been defined by the North East Reorganisation Act 1971. Therefore, the narrative created by both the State and the Central government that Meghalaya does not have a proper boundary is misleading and baseless,” Basaiawmoit said.
The VPP president said that on one hand there is a dialogue on the border issue between the two states while on the other there is continuous and unrelenting encroachment by Assam into the territories of Meghalaya.
“It is also quite interesting to notice that the president of the HSPDP who claims to be a follower of late Hoping Stone Lyngdoh who never accepted the term ‘disputed land’ in his argument, went on record to claim that twelve disputed areas were not even parts of Meghalaya,” Basaiawmoit said.
