This election season has seen the Bharatiya Janata Party and its regional allies losing MLAs to each other. A day after gaining eight legislators, including two Ministers, in Arunachal Pradesh from the BJP, the National People’s Party lost two of its MLAs in Nagaland to the Nationalist Democratic Progressive Party.
The BJP, the NPP, and the NDPP are part of the North East Democratic Alliance family, an anti-Congress forum. The three have been partners in the People’s Democratic Alliance government in Nagaland headed by the NDPP.
On Wednesday, Nagaland’s NPP legislators Imnatiba and L. Khumo merged with the NDPP.
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Minus the NPP, the PDA is now a three-party alliance with the support of an independent MLA. The third party is Janata Dal (United).
The development followed the NPP’s decision to field its candidate, O. Tinu Longkumer, for the by-election to the Aonglenden Assembly constituency. The PDA partners had earlier decided to field NDPP’s Sharingain Longkumer as the consensus candidate.
“We welcome the NPP lawmakers to our fold. Their merger will help the PDA offer a more stable government and focus on all-round development of the State,” Nagaland Chief Minister Neiphiu Rio, a senior leader of NDPP, said.
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Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad K. Sangma, who is the NPP president, did not react to the Nagaland development. But a senior party leader said the party would get over this “temporary setback”.
With both its MLAs in Nagaland gone, the NPP is in the ruling coalition in two north-eastern states now. While it heads the alliance government in Meghalaya, it is a minor partner of the BJP in Manipur.
The NPP, meanwhile, announced the names of candidates for five of the 14 Lok Sabha seats in Assam. These seats are Silchar, Tezpur, Kaliabor, Jorhat, and Dibrugarh. The party intends to field candidates in all the 25 seats across the eight north-eastern states. EOM