Chief Minister Conrad K Sangma on Monday said having a sense of patriotism and love for one’s own people does not get stronger by hating others.
His statement came after legislators of the Voice of the People Party (VPP) staged a walkout in protest against the Governor for addressing the House in Hindi during the first day of the Assembly’s budget session here.
“I want to make it clear that we have to remember that each and every one of us here be it any tribe or community, any language speaking community obviously we love our own people, we have a set of patriotism in us but having that sense of patriotism and love for our people doesn’t get stronger just by hating others or by bringing others down or by bringing comments like these that you cannot speak in this language, it does not strengthen your patriotism, it just creates the negativity which is not healthy at all in our society,” Sangma told reporters after the session.
“Hence, loving your own people is one thing but loving your own people and hating others is again another different thing altogether. That is not the kind of culture that we would like to see especially in the assembly,” he added.
Stating that the government had already passed a resolution for inclusion of the Khasi and Garo languages in the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of India, Sangma said, “We are following it up at every level, we continuously having dialogues with different organizations to ensure our languages are promoted in different ways.”
He informed that numerous discussions were held at the assembly level in figuring out how to promote our languages within the assembly also and lots of things have moved forward in that line.
“There are many ways to promote your own language but being negative towards someone else is not the way to promote yourself. Therefore, we need to ensure our languages are promoted, yes it is important to ensure we push our languages but as I said not with the mind-set of hating somebody else or hating some of the other languages that does not strengthen our desire to strengthen our own languages,” the CM asserted.
Further, the CM termed the behaviour of the VPP legislators as embarrassing and said, “…it is not healthy at all and doesn’t send a good reflection of our members and the way our house is being run
I would urge the members to not engage in such kinds of scenes and create this kind of situation. There are many other ways in which we raise the concern.”
Sangma said the Assembly has had occasions in the past also where the Governor has not addressed the House in English and the primary reason has been because of the limitation that the respected Governor had in terms of fluency with a particular language and not being able to speak or read a particular language.
“It is wrong to draw the conclusion that just because a person spoke in that manner or in a particular language that he or she is disrespecting our people. It is not correct to connect these two points,” he added.