Is it possible that the BJP still has virtues, although naturally they will not be the same as they were when the Party took over the mantle of the ruling Party in India, and certainly not the same as those possessed by its old guard whom we hold in such high esteem. The Party men of today have a dangerous curiosity, a multiplicity of characters and with it a multiplicity of driving forces, yet, and you would have guessed what has happened, beneath all these driving forces, the Party High Command has applied the desperate remedy with the appointment of Rickman Momin as its new President and now hopefully the Party will no longer hurt itself. What will follow is anyone’s guess; presumably many changes are around the bend.
If there is any virtue that the present leader must have, it is to get along with the hypocritical, secretive and fixed inclinations of his Party men and women and their most fervent needs: and so he will be required to surgically look into the heart and soul of these people because that is where they keep their most secretive reasons for joining the Party. There is one prerogative I want to share with him – he should not let himself be misled, he should be a skeptic. Anyone worthy of being called a leader will tell you that skepticism is the key.
To be able to learn one needs to evaluate things, to see the fruitfulness of the thing in the distant future, to see the basis or the foundation on which the thing is built upon, and to assess its past successes or failures on substantiated facts. In short, to value or disvalue anything one must be able to see hundreds of reasons that lie beneath, behind, above and around it. This is the nature of the spirit of a person who wants to do great things and does great things – a skeptical spirit. That is what describes and determines the strength of the individual, and fortunately it is exactly what I could assess on my first encounter and meeting with the new leader of the BJP in Meghalaya Rickman Momin on the 10th of October 2023.
As a leader of the Party, I could sense that Rickman has convictions and he means to use them as a means for a purpose and I tell you there is much that he can achieve by using convictions as a means towards an end…the end being that the Party must appeal to the hearts and minds of the people of the State. I will not go into the discussions I shared with him and on which I drew these conclusions, but let it suffice the inquisitive mind that in Rickman, Meghalaya is about to witness a ‘born again’ BJP. And as to Nicodemus’s question, well….A passion to get things done is a necessity if one is to get things done.
Here it is necessary to touch on a memory a hundred times more painful than anything else for every member of the Party in Meghalaya past and present. For one reason or another, we turned to the Central High Command for everything and anything we wanted, we literally had nothing to offer the Party that was locally raised or capable of regenerating a self sustaining Party in the State; in short we brought nothing home – to the BJP that is. Even in the last ten years when the Party has been in command at the Centre there was nothing that the Party here could think of creating for its own sustenance in spite of every opportunity to do so. These past ten years could and should have seen the renaissance of the Party in Meghalaya and with it the renaissance of Meghalaya but that was not to be.
See for yourselves what the National People’s Party (NPP) has done for itself just by being on friendly terms with the BJP for the past five years!!! Am I being understood, is there even a desire to understand what could have been if the correct people were in the correct place for the BJP? What a politician is is hard to learn because it cannot be taught; one either knows it from experience, otherwise one should be sufficiently proud to admit that one knows it not.
And if we knew what politics was, we should have brought an end to corruption, a re-evaluation of developmental values and progress and an inherent tribal genius of every kind as against the opposing values to what we are today. Changes were required for the creation of a transparent infrastructure, and accountability in public service – in short Good Governance – so that successive structures could be built upon it to ensure a State ready for any innovation in any Department as compared to the current lackadaisical attitude of every Government Department…perhaps something that would have even welcomed the NEP as compared to the opposition we are witnessing to it at present.
The question that the past ten years has asked the Party is the same question I ask. Why was there not a more fundamental, more direct, more strenuously delivered attack on the entire front and at the very centre of the incompetence and the corruption of the State Government? Why did we sit back and allow the most vicious attack we have ever heard in our fifty-year history of the State to become the most corrupt State in the country? Why did we sit idle and permit this most disgraceful and unassailable charge to echo and reecho in our ears instead of delivering a direct and fundamental attack at the very core of the cause?
After all there was every opportunity to do so time and time again and my articles more than provided the much needed dynamite but my appeals fell on deaf ears and blind eyes. Doubtless, if it had been done, it would have been the greatest victory anyone could have desired for the Party. Corruption and favouritism would have been abolished, but what happened? Instead we locked stepped with the rest and we were painted with the same brush instead of gaining the profound gratitude and the tremendous appreciation which could have been ours. For the entire year we have been a madhouse.
All that should be buried now that Rickman is holding the reins. Hopefully we will begin the slow process of digging in and grabbing every opportunity and not letting anything go in vain. All that twisting and entangling in everything that came our way brought about a lack of direction from which we are suffering – a total lack of political acumen, the most incurable kind, the kind that is hardest to defend because all we have done was to sit on our hands and gaze fixedly at one another.
I have made my pronouncements and judgements and maybe I have been harsh because what I saw in the past year was the depravity of the Party members and to our discredit the ability to make a disvalue of every valuable thing that was there for the taking. To me it was the most extreme form of dependency. I end up with one question, “Where shall we begin…the breaking down or the building up?”
