Shillong, Sept 13: Former Chief Minister Mukul Sangma on Monday claimed that the Congress has been able to protect itself from the poaching exercise by other political parties.
“We have been able to insulate our team effectively from all these pouching exercises and that is probably the toughest job which we have embarked upon and we have successfully taken this responsibility of protecting and insulating our team till now,” the CLP leader told reporters on Monday.
He said after the formation of the Meghalaya Democratic Alliance (MDA) government on March 6 in 2018, Congress MLAs were approached by the National People’s Party and other political parties.
“So this whole new trend of poaching the members of a particular political party has been on all across the country and this has been here and you have seen how the aggressive poaching culminated into one of our colleagues in the party (MM Danggo) resigning and joining another political party (NPP) and creating a vacancy in the respective constituency and forcing a byelection. So this is there for everybody to see. Now after that did they stop no, did they continue yes, are they continuing, yes,” he said.
The five-time MLA Danggo, however, was defeated by Pius Marwein of the UDP in the bypoll.
The former chief minister acknowledged that the toughest job was to keep the Congress flock together.
“We have not just been busy in keeping our flocks together, insulating it from the continuous poaching but we have been able to actually remind people about the difference of the kind of governance that we get in the preceding years, the difference of governance what you see now, if somebody says it is comparable I would say it is not comparable please don’t compare because our focus was different but the focus of the present government is completely different,”Mukul said.
According to Mukul, politics is the toughest job. He added, “I have always maintained that nothing else is toughest than politics so politics is only for those who are really committed and you have to be baptised through fire whether you are really capable of withstanding all those factors which try to take away your focus and priority from the focus and priority for the interest and larger good of the state.”
