Shillong, Jul 3: The outlawed Hynñiewtrep National Liberation Council (HNLC) has continued to criticise the Voice of the People Party (VPP), which leads the administration in the Khasi Hills Autonomous District Council (KHADC).
The banned militant group today rejected VPP leader and Nongkrem MLA Ardent M Basaiawmoit’s defence of the KHADC’s Regulation and Administration of Land (Amendment) Bill 2026, saying it gives the council “unprecedented” powers over land governance.
Basaiawmoit has cited the commonly known figure of 76 per cent of the population of the state being landless. However, the HNLC pointed out that this figure applies to all of Meghalaya and not just Khasi Hills where the KHADC has jurisdiction. “Before proposing such a drastic amendment, the KHADC should have produced district specific evidence demonstrating that Khasi Hills faces a unique problem requiring this extraordinary legislation. A Meghalaya wide statistic cannot be used to justify a Khasi Hills specific law,” the HNLC said.
Even if the figure could be applied to Khasi Hills, the HNLC said that landlessness according to this definition applies to the western concept of individualistic land ownership and not community ownership as has been a traditional facet of Khasi society.
“For generations our people have lived, cultivated and inherited rights over Raid and Hima land through customary institutions and community ownership rather than colonial-style private titles. Equating the absence of private title with landlessness imposes an alien concept upon Hynñiewtrep society and then uses that distorted conclusion to justify weakening the very institutions that have safeguarded our ancestral lands for centuries,” the banned group said.
One of the arguments for the amendment is that a few Syiems and headmen hold too much authority over community life but the HNLC argued that the solution to this is not taking their power away and giving it to “another small group” in the KHADC but rather to make the traditional institutions more transparent and accountable.
“If landlessness among the Hynñiewtrep people is genuinely a concern, then the answer is accountability, transparency and stronger protection of community land,” the HNLC said. “Every land transaction should be recorded in a transparent public registry. Every Syiem, Rangbah Shnong or public official found abusing community land should answer before an independent tribunal or the District Council Court. Decisions affecting community land should continue to involve the Dorbar Shnong, Dorbar Raid and Dorbar Hima so that no individual or political office can exercise unchecked authority over ancestral land.”
The bill, it went on, does not address the real causes of land insecurity but exploits the concerns of the landless “to justify one of the greatest concentrations of land authority in recent history”. It replaces local accountability with centralised political control and removes an important safeguard that required consultation with customary institutions, the HNLC added.
