Mizoram NGOs push to replace current CS, demand Mizo official be appointed
The committee had called for a protest in front of the chief secretary’s office in Aizawl on Tuesday. Since Sharma was out of town, the demonstration was called off.
Mizoram's chief secretary Renu Sharma (Twitter/@MizoramTourism) Mizoram’s NGO Coordination Committee, a conglomerate of five influential civil society groups, is pushing the Centre to replace the state’s chief secretary Renu Sharma with a Mizo-speaking IAS officer, citing a “language barrier” in administration.
The committee had called for a protest in front of the chief secretary’s office in Aizawl on Tuesday. Since Sharma was out of town, the demonstration was called off.
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The Central Young Mizo Association, which heads the NGO Coordination Committee, had reasoned that while they did not have a “personal problem” with Sharma, the chief secretary’s inability to communicate in Mizo was a hurdle in administration. It said that it had resorted to protest because multiple requests to the Centre demanding a change had fallen on deaf ears.
The opposition to Sharma’s appointment is not a recent development.
An Arunachal Pradesh-Goa-Mizoram and Union Territory (AGMUT) cadre of the 1988 batch, Sharma was appointed as the chief secretary by the Centre on October 28 last year after her predecessor, a Mizo bureaucrat, Lalnunmawia Chuaungo, had retired.
However, on the same day, the Mizo National Front (MNF) government led by chief minister Zoramthanga, issued a notification appointing J C Ramthanga, additional chief secretary, for the same post. Following a few days of confusion, the Centre’s choice finally prevailed and Sharma — who had earlier been posted to Mizoram twice (finance and general administration departments, 2011 and home and personnel and administrative departments, 2016) — landed in Aizawl on November 1 to take charge.
On October 29, 2021, Zoramthanga, whose MNF is a National Democratic Alliance (NDA) ally, had also written to Union Home Minister Amit Shah requesting that his government’s choice of a Mizo-speaking chief secretary be accepted.
In his letter, Zoramthanga said that a “chief secretary without the knowledge of a working standard Mizo language will never be an effective and efficient chief secretary” in Mizoram. “The Mizo people by and large generally do not understand Hindi. None of my Cabinet Ministers understands Hindi. Some of them even have a problem with English,” he had added.
The NGO Coordination Committee, too, had written to the Vice President, Prime Minister, and the Union Home Minister last year. “We wrote another letter in May but there has been no response,” said a leader from the committee.
He added that language was not the only concern, but an “indigenous Mizo” IAS officer was all the more important since the “longstanding, crucial” issues like the interstate border dispute with Assam, and the Bru refugee issue with Tripura, needed proper facilitation. “These are sensitive issues, and we feel that a Mizo officer would facilitate faster movement on these topics,” he said.
A government source from the Centre said that the request was not “logical”, especially because of a lack of viable alternatives. “There are few Mizo officers in the AGMUT cadre (which serves Mizoram). Earlier, in the 60s and 70s, there were many Mizo officers, and they ultimately became chief secretaries,” the source said, adding that to meet the NGO’s request, a Mizo would have to be “transferred” from another cadre, which was a difficult task.
Apart from Sharma, there has been one other non-Mizo chief secretary—Arvind Ray, an AGMUT cadre IAS officer of the 1984 batch—who was appointed as the chief secretary in 2019. It is unclear whether Ray had an understanding of the Mizo language.
An MNF politician said that while he did not want to comment on the NGO’s protest, the state’s multiple requests should be heeded by the Union Home Ministry.
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