GUWAHATI: The upcoming polls in three states of the Northeast will be a battle for survival for the Congress, which once ruled the entire region but has got reduced to a shadow of its glorious past. The Congress’ slide in the Northeast began after the BJP’s emergence as a powerhouse in 2014. Simultaneous elections in the 60-member Assemblies of Nagaland, Meghalaya and Tripura are expected in February. As it appears now, Congress is not in the race to power in any of the states. It lacks leaders after many of them embraced the ruling party or other parties over a period of time amid the BJP’s juggernaut.
The Congress does not have a single MLA in Nagaland, just one in Tripura and five in Meghalaya. However, the five in Meghalaya were suspended earlier this year by the party’s central leadership for cosying up to the Conrad K Sangma government where the BJP is a component. The Congress had emerged as the single largest party in the 2018 Meghalaya elections but the National People’s Party-led motley alliance kept it at bay by forming the government.
In November last year, 12 of the 17 Congress MLAs, led by former CM Mukul Sangma, jumped ship and joined Trinamool Congress (TMC). Their desertion had relegated the grand-old party to a smaller party and made the Mamata Banerjee-led TMC, the state’s principal opposition party overnight. Shillong MP, Vincent H Pala is now the Congress’ lone prominent face in the Christian-majority state. The Congress will not, perhaps, have a single MLA by the time it goes to elections as the five suspended legislators have more or less ditched the party and are likely to contest the polls on the tickets of other political parties.
In Tripura, Sudip Roy Barman is the Congress’ only MLA. He had won the last election on the BJP’s ticket and was inducted into the ministry but he resigned from the Assembly and the party in February this year after falling out with the then CM Biplab Kumar Deb.
Later, he won a by-election, necessitated by his resignation. The Congress had failed to win a single seat in the 2018 Tripura elections, which the BJP swept, decimating the Left. The Congress had also drawn a blank in the Nagaland elections in 2018. “So what if we have one MLA? Atal Bihari Vajpayee had just two MPs but he went on to become the PM,” said Tripura Congress chief Birajit Sinha.