The BJP’s historic mandate in the North-East has exposed the entrenched political model that was prevalent in various States for several decades. However, an unprecedented change is in the offing now
The recent triumph of the BJP in Assembly elections in the North-East represents an important movement of national consolidation. These elections have revealed how the North-East, for the last several decades, had been craftily manipulated to meet political gains and reap the resultant benefits of corruption in an atmosphere of intimidation. This has been the entrenched political model of the region which the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) had been trying to challenge since the 1970s.
It was due to the sustained decades-old groundwork of the RSS and political determination of the Modi Government towards the North-East since 2014, that brought the BJP to power in almost all North-East States. Since 2014, the BJP’s average vote share in this region has grown from 3.9 per cent to an impressive 27 per cent.
With the latest election results, it has become evident that the BJP is making significant inroads into the Bengali and even non-Hindu votebanks. It has significantly shored up its political support base in Assam, Tripura and Nagaland.
In Tripura, it completely vanquished the 25-year-old spell of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), securing 35 seats, and reducing the CPI(M) to just 16 seats. From a vote-share of 1.3 per cent in 2013, the BJP’s vote-share has gone up to 41.7 per cent.
Similarly, the progress in Nagaland too has been impressive. The BJP won 12 seats on its own. Its vote-share, which was just 1.8 per cent in 2013, increased to 15.3 per cent this year. In Meghalaya, the BJP’s vote-share jumped from 1.27 per cent in 2013 to 9.6 per cent, five years down the line.
Besides these immediate results, the overall rise of the BJP in the North-East has seen a similar trajectory. In other States like Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur and Assam, its vote share has risen since 2014. This rapid and expansive success of the BJP cannot just be due to anti-incumbency or rejection of the Congress.
Consider the demography of the North-East — while 34 per cent of the population in Assam is Muslim, in other States, Christianity dominates. Nagaland and Mizoram consist of more than 85 per cent of the Christian population — Meghalaya about 74 per cent and Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh have around 30 per cent to 40 per cent of Christian population.
In this mostly Christian-dominated region, the BJP’s expansion of foothold shows how the nationalist integration of the country under shared culture and principles is underway, with development taking a new meaning and no longer being confined to material sops or politics of socialist redistribution. Focus is on individual and social well-being which is linked to the progress of the nation.
The reason for the BJP’s victory is not due to its promise of the Seventh Pay Commission, better jobs or a skillful balancing of Bengali and tribal populations in Tripura — the Congress had already done all of this and a lot more in its heydays of power, yet, it did not manage to win the kind of support the BJP did.
In the complex politics of the North-East until recently, the close chain connecting the State, the militants, the dominant religious bodies and national parties, shed a lot of light on how the region was deliberately kept deprived, restless and obstructed from integration into mainstream India.
The BJP’s success further reinforces how the North-East was historically first marginalised and then, its marginality was further exploited for votes by political parties that claim to pander to marginalised interests — a model of functioning which operates by first creating victims and then exploiting victimhood in a manner that passes off under the garb of compassion and affirmative action.
It is noteworthy that the victory in Nagaland and the ability to become a part of the Government in Meghalaya happened despite a sustained hostile campaign by the Church to exhort the people to not vote for the BJP. But better politics trumped these efforts.
In Nagaland, personal interest of Prime Minister Modi ensured that the Naga accord, signed with the rebel militant Naga outfit, NSCN (I-M), roped in the latter in such a way that a substantial amount of potential electoral machinations were minimised.
Besides personal efforts of Modi and other top leaders of the BJP and the RSS, they adopted a strategy of not responding to negative propaganda and, instead, focused on cracking tough equations by ensuring the revival of tribal figures like Rani Gaidinliu, and by reminding them of their own worships, which often flowed from Hinduism’s Vaishnavite, Shaivite and Tantric variations.
Apart from this sustained effort at integration, corruption and intimidating tactics of former Governments in Tripura only helped the BJP succeed. Manik Sarkar’s personal image notwithstanding, the killer machine of CPI(M) cadres was virtually indirectly ruling the State and rigging elections through strong-arm tactics, bribery, booth-rigging and other methods. Ignored by national media, cut-off from the Union Government, the primitive electoral machinations in Tripura were neither resisted nor reported. But despite losing a number of its own cadres, the BJP resisted this system and the people, who were earlier scared to raise their voices, responded.
In all likelihood, the Bengali-tribal divide and the resultant bogey of past insurgency was overplayed by the media, which conveniently forgot that the CPI (M) leadership had kept the tribals artificially subdued to control insurgency, giving rise to formations like the IPFT.
After all, keeping alive the artificial suppression, mutual divisions among warring tribes and insurgency against India have been the hallmark of North-East politics. An unprecedented change is only being seen now.
(The writer is with the Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies and writes for The Resurgent India Trust)
