State Congress in the avatar of Rip Van Winkle : Wake up call after 32 months
- The Sangai Express Editorial :: June 28 , 2014 -

As a short story or a fairy tale, author Washington Irvin created the immortal character Rip Van Winkle, who slept for 20 years after venturing into the forest and consuming a drink.

As a short fictional story, the character of Rip Van Winkle will figure right up there amongst some of the other fictional characters such as Sancho Panza or Don Quixote, but when political parties or political leaders become the avatar of Rip Van Winkle then it is a sure indicator that something is seriously wrong.

Chief Minister O Ibobi may not be Washington Irvin and he may have been under the impression that he was giving a pep talk to the Congress legislators as well as Congress workers when he gave the call to put the election manifesto of the party into action, during the reception programme accorded to the three Congress MPs at Congress Bhavan on June 26.

Even if it was a pep talk or a call to the Congressmen to pull up their socks and get down to the business of delivering, it can also be taken as a tacit admission that not much headway has been made to implement the promises or assurances given in the election manifesto released just before the election to the 10th Assembly.

To put it more bluntly, the call of the Chief Minister may be interpreted as stating that the Congress legislators and Ministers have been sleep walking through their way in the past 32 months that they have been in office.

We can bet with a degree of certainty that majority of the Congress legislators must have forgotten the promises or assurances given in the election manifesto.

We will not be surprised too, if we come across any Congress MLA or Minister who had not gone through the election manifesto minutely or thoroughly.

To be fair to the Congress, it is not the only political party which consigns the election manifesto to the dustbin after the election, for we have seen other political parties do the same earlier.

The only exception may be the pledge to protect the territorial integrity of Manipur. But this cannot be the benchmark of keeping true to the promises and assurances given in the election manifesto of the Congress party.

It was not included in the election manifesto, but to underscore how dismally the Congress Government has failed to deliver the promises made to the people is the question of power supply.

On assuming the Power portfolio, Chief Minister O Ibobi had grandly announced that the power supply situation will improve and even went to the extent of stating that there will be power supply for 20 hours in a day of 24 hours. Obviously the people are not always fools, to be taken in by such tall promises, but at least there was a glimmer of hope that there would be some improvement.

Now more than two years and a half down the line, the situation has not improved at all. The only consolation is it has not deteriorated. So people continue to live with power supply for 7/8/9 hours a day.

If overdraft and pending salaries were the terms that defined the State Government before 2002, then load shedding, scheduled and unscheduled has been at the tip of the tongue of the people, irrespective of ages for more than ten years now.

The intention sounds good, but even after ten years in power, the Congress still keeps harping on equal development between the hill districts and the valley areas, especially Imphal. This in a way is a public admission that there is still a huge gap in terms of development between the hills and the valley.

The reasons could be many and if there is a statesman in the politician of the Chief Minister, it would have been that much better if he had taken the trouble of detailing the reasons why the hill districts continue to lag behind in all spheres of life.

As things have unfolded, it is clear that the reception accorded to the three Congress MPs has turned out to be more than a reception.

This is amusing and at the same time it makes us balk.