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| A child, attracted by colourful balloons, reaches out for them from her father’s lap near Lady Hydari Park in Shillong. Picture by Eastern Projections |
Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) leaders’ tryst with love gone sour is becoming quite legendary. Such a tryst is now haunting Sahidul Alam Choudhury, former rural development minister in ex-chief minister Prafulla Kumar Mahanta’s ministry.
Choudhury, who rose from humble origins to reap much wealth while he was minister and confidante of Mahanta, is now in the line of fire of his estranged wife, Bedana Choudhury.
Bedana, a gentle and modest woman, went public last week with her plans to contest the next Assembly polls against her former husband on his home turf — the Algapur seat in Hailakandi district. Her ire against Choudhury, she said, stemmed from the fact that the former minister dropped her like a hot brick about three years ago when he fell in love with a lecturer in English literature at a college in Hailakandi town in south Assam.
Bedana, 38, is now seeking to turn the tables on her former husband by exposing his alleged financial skulduggeries before the press soon. She also made it clear that Choudhury’s financial wheeling-dealing would be the theme of her campaign against the man “from whom she is not yet legally separated”. This is turning out to be yet another case of how love’s labour lost can well be recouped in a vengeance game.
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| Apang |
However hard Arunachal Pradesh chief minister Gegong Apang may try to absolve himself of the charge of engineering a coup with the help of the NSCN (I-M), his government’s actions betray his strong words.
Even before he was sworn in as Mukut Mithi’s successor, Apang announced that he would consider granting autonomous district council status to the Tirap and Changlang districts, which form part of the NSCN (I-M)’s map of Greater Nagalim. He went further and announced that his government would scrap the Arunachal Pradesh Control of Organised Crime (Apcoca) Act and put a halt to his predecessor Mithi’s efforts to flush out militants from the state through Operation Hurricane. No doubt these decisions have brought smiles of triumph on the Naga outfit’s face. But, in the process, the cat has also come out of the bag.
The pre-election bonhomie between the Congress in Tripura and the Indigenous National Party of Tripura (INPT) appears to be withering away under the weight of its inner contradictions.
For long, the CPM has been campaigning against the INPT, branding it as the “overground agent” of the National Liberation Front of Tripura (NLFT) militants and its electoral alliance with the Congress as “unholy”.
When it became apparent last year that the Congress would form an alliance with the INPT, the ruling Left Front launched a strident campaign against it. Its efforts notwithstanding, the alliance remained in force but suffered reverses in the last Assembly elections. To worsen matters, the banned NLFT rebels who had been rooting for the Congress-INPT victory failed to intervene on behalf of the alliance mainly because of unprecedented deployment of security forces.
But the recent desertion of seven senior leaders from the INPT has pitch-forked the issue of NLFT support as all the seven defectors told the media that the INPT was under the grip of NLFT militants. There were other charges as well. Significantly, INPT leaders did not issue a single statement contradicting the charges. Now, embarrassed by the charges, alliance partner Tripura Pradesh Congress Committee has allegedly sought a clarification of the matter. Sources, however, did not specify what course of action the PCC would take vis-a-vis the INPT in the future. The PCC has also instructed all its tribal leaders to assemble in Agartala to hold discussions on how to strengthen the party’s tribal cell to reduce dependence on regional forces.
One thing leads to another. In this case, hopefully for the better. With complaints pouring in regarding the poor execution of development projects in various blocks in the state, Meghalaya director of community and rural development (C&RD) department, W.L. Lyngdoh, decided to test their veracity by conducting surprise checks.
However, it was Lyngdoh who was in for a greater surprise! During one such check on the Kharkutta block office in East Garo Hills, he found almost all the 20 officers and staff missing from their place of work. Not only that, there also seemed to be no clues — leave applications or tour programmes — pointing to the cause of absence. Lyngdoh further observed that the cashier of the block office had not signed his attendance for two months. The BDO offices, which monitor the performance of work by gram sevaks and sevikas, are supposed to notify the director, C&RD, on the progress on a weekly basis. Be that as it may, miffed by such tardiness, Lyngdoh has now initiated a tech-savvy move to check officials playing truant. Attendance and work progress would now be monitored via the Internet in the community information centres.
What do they say about necessity being the mother of invention and progress?
Down the ages, elephants have become part of Tripura’s history and folklore, often scripting tragedies.
In 1618, Mughal badshah Jehangir invaded Tripura because the then king Yashodhar Manikya had failed to give the annual tribute in the form of elephants to the provincial Mughal ruler of Bengal. Years later, in 1993, the romantic escapade of a pair of elephants, endearingly called Saheb and Bibi, again managed to rock the state’s political establishment. The elephant duo’s owners Arab Ali and Chirag Ali often rented them out to timber businessmen and forest traders for pulling timber logs. On May 19 that year, when the pair was taken on a jaunt to a forest near Mizo-dominated Saboal village in the Jampui hills, Saheb and Bibi decided to take off for mating in the forest’s cool surroundings. When one of their mahouts tried to bring them back to work, the elephants trampled him to death. Possessed by a murderous instinct, the pair then ransacked a nearby village, killing four more people.
Unable to control the wild predatory elephants, the then SDO of Kanchanpur requested the wildlife section of the forest department for permission to liquidate the pair. On May 22, Saheb and Bibi finally fell to bullets. The next round of trouble for the government began as the owners of the two elephants filed a court case in Dharmanagar demanding compensation of Rs 4 lakh. The government lost the case. Now, with an appeal from the government pending in the Supreme Court, the subdivisional administration in Kanchanpur is desperately searching for the order issued by the forest department to kill Saheb and Bibi. But it would seem that the ghosts of Saheb and Bibi have returned to haunt the administration with the copy of the order missing not only from the SDO office but also from the forest department’s Agartala headquarters!
