BJP's triumph in N-E exposes Cong failure

The results of the recent Assembly elections in Tripura, Nagaland and Meghalaya, as they began to be available on Saturday, dramatically underlined the speed with which the BJP has spread itself politically across the Northeast. Equally striking was the defeat of the CPI(M), which had been in power in Tripura for a quarter century riding principally on the spotlessly clean image of chief minister Manik Sarkar, and the fate of the Congress, which drew a blank in Nagaland and Tripura. In Meghalaya, it appeared likely that the Congress may not return to government if the regional parties can join hands with the BJP — whose own tally is low in this state — to push ahead of it.

Except in Tripura, where the saffron party tore its way into the erstwhile red bastion on its own strength, the BJP hasn’t individually won too many seats in Nagaland and Meghalaya, but will be in government in Nagaland, thanks to local alliances, and may make it to power in Meghalaya too. After coming to power at the Centre, the BJP has pushed hard to form governments across the Northeast and succeeded in doing so even in Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh through considerable skulduggery, including the misuse of the governor’s office. This highlighted a central feature of the politics in the Northeast — that other than Assam and Tripura, the rest tend to throw in their lot with the party in power at the Centre in the hope of getting resources that are often diverted from budgetary purposes by politicians.

Assam, of course, is not a state with a small Assembly, unlike the other six, and is not subject to the pulls and pressures that often bedevil such states. In Tripura, the ideological component had come to dominate over the years as the state, with an overwhelmingly Bengali-speaking population, tended to follow the broad West Bengal model. Thus, in Tripura, for the first time in the country, two cadre-based parties, the CPI(M) on the Left and the BJP-RSS on the Right, came into direct clash and the latter won overwhelmingly. The saffron party filled the space once occupied by the Congress, which had long stopped playing the role of an Opposition party, and was roundly rejected by voters. The CPI(M) also suffered due to a long period of incumbency.

It’s noteworthy, however, that the Left voting percentage was practically the same as the BJP’s, underlining the peculiarities of the first-past-the-post system electoral system that we have copied from the British model. Given India’s diversities and electoral complexities, the Northeast results tend not to colour the political mood elsewhere in the country. But the reverse is also the case. Even so, the Congress’ poor political management was shown up in these polls, specially in Tripura and Nagaland, and earlier in Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh.