Itanagar, Oct 19: Meghalaya Chief Minister and National People’s Party (NPP) Chief Conrad K Sangma has urged people and leaders from the North East to come out of position-based mindset and adopt issue-based position. If this can be done, he believes that atleast 50-60% of North East can be resolved.

Addressing a myriad of leaders and intellectuals from the region at the Regional Conclave on the theme “Regional Aspiration, National Outlook” organised by the Arunachal unit of National People’s Party (NPP) on Tuesday at Itanagar, Sangma said people also need to understand the difference between issue and stand.

“Sometimes when we take national stance, our people think that we are against them… when we want to address any issue mostly what happens is we look at our position… For example, the issue of ILP… we say either give us ILP or don’t give it to us… that is our position… But many times we forget that our position is not important… what is important is the issue. Our issue is illegal immigration but we see people shouting slogans of ‘ILP, ILP’ but our issue is not ILP, our stand is ILP… our issue is illegal immigration… that needs to be understood,” he stressed.

“If we only stick to our position… That we only need ILP, or we need work permit system… then we are forgetting the main issue here,” he added.

Sangma said he strongly believes that if they take issue based position, they can arrive at solutions. “I believe that and I also request all my friends here that we need to come out of this position based mindset and we need to take issue based position. Only then can we arrive at solutions. It often happens that people get stuck with their position on an issue and there is lot of confusion because of that… I believe that if for any or all issues we start to think from this angle, I strongly believe that we can solve atleast 50-60% of our problems in the Northeast,” he said.