Editorial:There is also a Panchayat Poll Campaign underway

It used to be emotive issues at one time, but now even an incident will do. Political posturing can be expected to get nastier as the political space receives something more immediate and current in the form of the Sunday violence which has attracted more notoriety on the small town of Namthang in South Sikkim than its residents will be comfortable with. The camps still loyal to the ruling party and the group expelled from or disaffected with it had, for at least two years now, been snapping at each other with allegations and counter allegations which were neither new nor different from the exchanges between the ruling and Opposition camps in the past. The dissidence of a sitting MLA leading the anti-party activities added some excitement to the confrontation, but the debate, although more aggressively argued, offered no new insights. But then the patience snapped on Sunday and words turned to blows. The incident happened late in the night so only the parties involved know exactly what happened, but given the scale of the clash, even individuals involved experienced only isolated episodes of the rampage which played out through the town. It can thus be safely vouched that the actual sequence of events will never be reliably known, at least not in the very near future. That said, what becomes worrying is that blood has been let. Some people have been hurt, but none, thankfully, so grievously so as to make a tragedy out of this irresponsible lapse of reason. What is also annoying is that the incident is now being played out as an issue. It was a law and order breakdown, and it was only because it transpired late enough in the night for no innocent bystanders to get caught in the scuffle, that only the involved parties traded blows. Even a couple of hours earlier, and lay people who detest violence would have definitely joined the list of injured. Two police cases, one by each side, have been registered and even though the officials are yet to make, well, an official statement on the episode, both sides have been keeping busy repeating allegation, every day. It would be one thing if these regular relay of statements, claims and counter claims helped in explaining what transpired at Namthang and why, but it is obvious from the tone and approach of the press conferences and press releases that the incident is being leveraged to ridicule, embarrass and challenge. The material arriving in the public domain is only offering more confusing signals than convincing arguments. Also, since the Namthang incident has become the focus of all attention, the panchayat elections have been sidelined, not just by the parties involved, but admittedly, also by the media. Although the ruling party has secured a comfortable number of seats at the ward and Zilla level uncontested, the polling set for 03 November will be the largest panchayat election exercise in Sikkim thus far because never before have so many wards and zilla seats gone to poll in the past. And yet, the poll process has stayed off the news for the entire week now. Although even the campaign trail is essentially a litter of rants instead of reasoning and self-indulgent stances instead of humble lobbying, at least the springboard would have been issues of rural Sikkim. Now, even that attention has been shifted away.