The Nationalist Peoples’ Party (NPP) headed by former Lok Sabha Speaker Purno A Sangma secured 10 of the 29 seats in the recently concluded elections to the Garo Hills District Council. The results were a blow to the cocksure attitude of the Congress Party. Perhaps one of the reasons why the voters rejected the Congress is because the outgoing Executive Council of the GHADC had been utterly corrupt and those charges of corruption were sought to be buried in the mumbo-jumbo of legalese. Further, the elections which should have been held in March 2014 were postponed three times on the plea that the number of seats in the Council would be increased to 40 as per the tripartite agreement signed between the militant outfit – Achik National Volunteers Council (ANVC), the Government of India, and the Meghalaya Government. This increase in the number of seats requires first an endorsement by the Union Cabinet followed by a parliamentary amendment to the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution. The Ministry of Home Affairs had written to the Meghalaya Government that it need not postpone the Council polls on this issue and that the amendment for seat enhancement would come in due time. Since the truce with the two factions of the ANVC was actually initiated by the present Congress- led Government headed by Mukul Sangma, his inability to raise the number of seats before the district council elections was seen as his Party’s inability to deliver. Hence it was no surprise that in Zigzag which is virtually a pocket borough of the Chief Minister and his MLA wife it was the BJP candidate who stole the show.
The BJP has for the first time won any seat in the Garo Hills District Council. Out of six candidates set up by the Party only one was elected.This is a salutary win for the saffron party. A week prior to the polls, the BJP national spokesperson in charge of Meghalaya, Nalin S. Kohli had stated that the BJP has only set up six candidates for the polls and that the Party was testing the waters and charting out a roadmap to the 2018 assembly polls. But once the results were declared on October 15 and the BJP candidate Bhupendra P Hajong won his seat Kohli and the State BJP was jubilant. Kohli stated that the results were a clear rejection of Congress and its “politics of non- performance.” Kohli informed a section of the media that NPP and the BJP are working jointly to stake claim in forming the next Executive Council. Are the political winds now blowing in a different direction in a state that has always been seen as a Congress bastion?
