ITANAGAR, Nov 7: The People’s Party of Arunachal (PPA) has appealed to the state government to take a firm and affirmative stand on the “actual status of the sixth schedule demand and the panchayat election” in the state, which it said “has been kept pending for more than a year.”
Demanding clear-cut policies on these issues without further delay, the lone regional political party of the state said that “the government of the day has been found wavering and procrastinating on many issues of state interest, such as the need for an Article 371 (A)-type constitutional status for the state of Arunachal Pradesh to do away with the decades old defective Arunachal Pradesh Statehood Act of 1987, which has been the long pending demand of the PPA.”
The party also claimed that the government recently convened the assembly session “in a hurried manner amid the life-threatening Corona pandemic to pass a one-point resolution in favour of the demand for sixth schedule status for the people of the state in the constitution of India.”
It claimed that such haste “indirectly indicated that the people of the state are more in favour of the autonomous council bodies for some of the regions within the state,” and added that “the demand for the sixth schedule also implies that the people have out rightly rejected the relevance of institution of democratic decentralization at the grassroots in the state.”
“The people of the state seem to be completely unaware of the constitutional clauses of the sixth schedule, one of which is the non-existence of panchayat election,” the party said, and questioned the state government’s stand on the sixth schedule and party-based panchayat elections in the state.
