Verdict Northeast: What it means for national and regional scene

Assembly elections in the smaller states of Northeast India have probably never garnered the kind of attention that the recently-concluded polls in Tripura, Nagaland and Meghalaya did. For the first time in memory, national leaders descended on remote outposts, with entourages in tow, to battle over constituencies where winning candidates rarely poll over 10,000 votes. The Delhi media lavished attention. After the results came in, the Prime Minister himself addressed a party gathering to celebrate the Bharatiya Janata Party’s triumph in these small states.

There was only one reason for all the attention: the BJP’s desire to colour the map of India saffron.

Love them or hate them, but the truth of the matter is that no one with even the most cursory interest in Indian politics ignores the BJP. The party’s determined foray into the Northeast made these elections the spectacle they became. At the end of the day, the BJP’s superbly-organised machinery, which has penetrated into the grassroots even in rural areas of most states of Northeast India, won the day, defeating the Left in a direct contest of two opposing ideological cadre-based forces in Tripura. It is a remarkable victory. The BJP also performed surprisingly well in Nagaland, a state where over 90 per cent of the population is Christian, and devout. There, it went from one seat to 11, and was leading in one other when this article was written. It improved its tally in Meghalaya from zero to two, and even this small number may be sufficient to ensure it wins a place in the next government in the state, where the elections have produced a hung Assembly.

It would, however, be incorrect to extrapolate from this that the BJP is now in pole position to win the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. That would be a case of inferring too much.

To start with, these are Assembly elections. As every political observer knows, state polls and Lok Sabha polls are very different kettles of fish. This is true even in the larger states of the Indian mainland. In the small states of Northeast India, it is even more so. Here, barring Tripura and to some extent Assam, ideology is not really a big deal in mainstream politics. In most other states, the place for the ideologically committed, for decades, was civil society organisations or even, in some cases especially in Manipur, the militant underground. Electoral politics, it was understood, was a power and money game. The party label was not that important; the individual was what mattered.

Though there are winds of change, this is still largely the case in Meghalaya and Nagaland. Elections, especially in Nagaland, are about personalities and money. The dominant personalities are three former chief ministers, Neiphiu Rio, TR Zeliang, and Shurhozelie Liezietsu. Their party affiliations are secondary; Mr Rio, for instance, only joined his new party, the National Democratic People’s Party (NDPP) in January, barely a month before the polls. He led the party in the elections, and there is little doubt that without him, the NDPP’s score – it won 16 – would have been significantly lower. The BJP’s impressive tally owes much to its timely recruitment of strong candidates from other parties, a feat that would have been considerably harder if the party was not in power at the Centre.

In Meghalaya, the main poll battle was between the Congress led by Chief Minister Mukul Sangma and the National People’s Party led by Conrad Sangma. The BJP was a bit player. Both the two seats it won went to candidates who joined the party in January. Moreover, there have been BJP MLAs from both those constituencies in the past as well, so it was not a case of breaking fresh ground. AL Hek, who won the Pynthormukhrah seat, had won it as a BJP candidate in the past before switching over to the Congress last time, and winning. He returned to the BJP this time and retained the seat. It is likely that he may have won even as an independent candidate.

The real achievement as a party in Meghalaya was the NPP’s, which went from two seats to 19. This was a considerable achievement for the young Conrad Sangma, who was leading the party’s poll efforts for the first time. His illustrious father former Lok Sabha Speaker PA Sangma, who founded the party a couple of months before the 2013 Assembly polls, passed away in 2016. This was the first real outing for the NPP as a party. It has managed to establish itself across the three different regions of the state, the Khasi, Garo and Jaintia Hills. The political situation in the state is very fluid since the numbers – Congress has an effective strength of 20 and NPP 19, both well short of the majority mark of 31 – have thrown up a hung verdict. However, it is possible that the NPP may end up as the principal ruling party leading a future coalition, perhaps not immediately, but in the not too distant future.

The victory in Tripura was the only one among the three that the BJP can justifiably claim for its own. There, its cadres, ably marshalled by state in-charge Sunil Deodhar, and backed by the Sangh organisations and the wiles of Himanta Biswa Sarma and Ram Madhav, put in a tremendous effort to unseat the Left Front led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) which had been in power for 25 years. The BJP came from literally nowhere – 49 of its 50 candidates had forfeited their deposits in 2013 – to reduce the Congress, which was the traditional opposition in the state’s bipolar polity, to zero, and leave the ruling CPI(M) far behind. The slogan that caught people’s imagination there was “chalo paltai”. Let’s change. After 25 years of Left rule, change was something that a lot of people, particularly the tribals and youth, were clearly looking for.

The impact of their defeats on the Congress and the Left cadre’s morale may be considerable, and the victories will doubtless boost the BJP cadre’s zeal. Apart from that, there is little impact that the polls could be expected to have on the national scene. Nagaland sends one MP to the Lok Sabha. Meghalaya and Tripura send two each. There is no reason to expect whoever becomes the next chief minister of these states would be able to sway electoral outcomes in places such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, or even in West Bengal, which share the Bengali language with a large chunk of Tripura’s population.

The consequences of these election results will therefore be felt not elsewhere in India but in the states that went to polls. For one thing, the people of these states ought perhaps to be grateful to the BJP: that the party’s determined entry into the Northeast has taken the region out of its peripheral place in the national imagination, and placed it in the political limelight, at least for a day.

For states long used to political neglect on account of their featherweight status in the Lok Sabha, this day may herald a new beginning replete with challenges and opportunities.