A loss of one seat in the Lok Sabha elections of a whole region cannot, on the face of it, be a great upset for a party. The Bharatiya Janata Party’s 2019 total of 14 seats out of 25 in the Northeast is now 13, and its partners in the National Democratic Alliance lost a couple of seats too. Neither was the Congress’s growth overwhelming, but its victory in both the Manipur seats was certainly dramatic. The Inner Manipur seat in the Meitei area, which the BJP had been confident of winning, went to a first-time Congress candidate, and in Outer Manipur, the Kuki-Zo and Naga area, the BJP-backed Naga People’s Front candidate also lost to the Congress. The people’s message was unmistakable — against the mismanagement and callousness of the state government run by the BJP and its allies and the Centre during the year-long, blood-soaked ethnic conflict. The warring sides evidently found shared hope in the Congress and that, too, after the Kuki-Zo’s initial decision to boycott the elections. The Congress, again, won the Nagaland seat, defeating the state government alliance’s BJP-backed Nationalist Democratic Progressive Party, presumably because of concerns about secularism, tribal rights and the values of Christian society.
In Meghalaya, the National People’s Party, a BJP ally in the state government, lost to the Congress in Tura, while the Congress lost the Shillong seat. The new, unallied regional Voice of the People Party won this, as notable a victory as that of the unallied Zoram People’s Movement in Mizoram. The ZPM defeated the BJP-supported Mizo National Front in the Lok Sabha as earlier in the assembly. The BJP kept Tripura’s two seats and held on to its nine in Assam. There its allies, the Asom Gana Parishad and the United People’s Party, Liberal, each won a seat in two gains for the NDA. But the Congress won Jorhat, which the BJP had marked as a prestige seat. It also won in Dhubri and Nagaon, both dominated by the largest minority community, while it lost Barpeta, apparently because delimitation made it a majority-community prevalent area. Polarisation helps the BJP in Assam, keeping its seat count high. But a sharp delineation of people’s choices can be discerned in the shifts and changes, not just in the fractional increase of the Congress’s seats, but also in the success of regional parties, however new.
