Shillong, Nov 12: Newly elected NPP legislator from Mawryngkneng, Pyniaid Sing Syiem, has slammed the opposition Congress for trying to mislead the people of the constituency by playing with their religious sentiments.

Syiem, who is also the chairman of the KHADC, said there are few polling stations from where NPP was defeated in the just concluded bypolls.

“When we postmortem on the reason, we find that they (Congress) tried to mislead (the people that) if you vote for the NPP candidate, the churches will be closed down. This is something which is not acceptable,” he told reporters.

Stating that the Congress is not willing to accept the mandate given by the people of the three constituencies, Syiem said, “We have seen through their statements, that the Congress is not accepting defeat but it alleged that NPP or UDP in MDA are using other means to win elections, which is nothing like that in as far as our own constituency is concerned.”

“In fact we thought that we are losing (because during the election campaigns) many of them are making lots of baseless allegations against the NPP and the MDA government.

However, we have left it to the wisdom of the people and we congratulated them for making a wise decision by putting their faith in us in order for change to come in the constituency,” he added.

The newly elected legislator further stated that it would be pointless to debate on the allegation about the use of money power. “The reason being the fact that it was the Congress who started vote buying in Mawryngkneng in 2003 so people know about it and we don’t need to say anything,” he said.

He further assured that the NPP’s top priorities would be to extend the best services to the people of the constituency and the state as a whole through various developmental activities.