The National People’s Party (NPP) put out a long-winded and rambling attack against leader of the opposition Dr Mukul Sangma today, describing him, in a couple of choice insults, as pathologically dictatorial and a megalomaniac.
Going beyond the insults, however, NPP spokesperson Nickey Nongkhlaw further claimed that Dr Sangma and his brother Zenith have been targeting the current government over the state of the Meghalaya Energy Corporation Ltd (MeECL) even though it was their previous Congress government that put the state-owned power utility in such dire financial straits.
“In 2017, when the Congress was in power, Mukul Sangma came the closest to privatise the MeECL when he signed deals with Renew Joule Private Limited to take away the power department’s mandate of setting up power plants. He targeted Ri-Bhoi district, Mendipathar and Ampati for this privatisation deal,” Nongkhlaw said. “In the same year, he signed deals with ETA Star Infrastructure Ltd, Brijraj Power Metallics Ltd and MSGC Power Ltd for taking away small thermal power projects of MeECL and handing them over to these private companies.”
The former CM only cancelled the deals after public opposition, the press release added. However, Dr Sangma further weakened the MeECL by giving the cancelled projects to NEEPCO.
“No wonder power cuts were rampant during Mukul’s time, stretching to four months every year, because he put MeECL in such a bad financial position that it did not have any more money left to fulfil the obligations of the bad agreements Congress had signed in 2007,” Nongkhlaw stated.
“For Mukul and his brother to lecture on the power department is simply very ironic. In fact, if they had some amount of guilt left in them for deliberately misleading the public for all these years, they would not have contested elections at all,” he said.
