NPP rises in Manipur, but party face Joykumar trips

The NPP’s Manipur face and erstwhile deputy chief minister in the BJP-led coalition government, Joykumar, who has been a bete noire of CM N Biren Singh, lost his Uripok seat by a margin of 909 votes at the hands of BJP candidate Khwairakpam Raghumani Singh.

The former state DGP, Joykumar took a political plunge when he joined the BJP in 2015. Ahead of the 2017 polls, when the saffron party denied him a ticket, he defected to the Conrad Sangma-led NPP and contested the election from Uripok on its ticket, wresting the seat from Congress legislator Laishram Nandakumar Singh.

Subsequently, as the BJP formed a coalition government in the state after taking the NPP and the Naga People’s Front (NPF) on board, Joykumar was appointed as the deputy CM and given the finance portfolio.

“Politics is something I was contemplating as I was nearing retirement. Politics is usually associated with people who are uneducated, corrupt… I wanted to prove it was different,” Joykumar had recently told The Indian Express.

When Congress stalwart Okram Ibobi was the CM, both Biren, then a minister, and Joykumar were his closest aides. Biren left the Congress and switched to the BJP ahead of the 2017 polls.

Joykumar had a mixed track-record as a police officer, with the state witnessing a spike in extra-judicial encounters when he was at the helm of its police force.

As Cabinet colleagues, Joykumar’s relations with Biren soured, with the former emerging as one of the CM’s biggest critics. During the first Covid-induced lockdown in 2020, he openly criticised Biren’s assurance of food security under the National Food Security Act (NFSA). Soon afterwards, Biren stripped him of his portfolios. Later that year, Joykumar and three other NPP MLAs threatened to pull the plug on the Biren government, which was saved after the BJP leadership intervened.

Ahead of the current elections, the pan-Northeast NPP, which is leading a coalition government under Sangma in neighbouring Meghalaya, decided to step out of the BJP’s shadow and fight it on its own.

In the run-up to the polls, Biren also targeted Joykumar, calling him “corrupt”, and the latter hit back at the CM.

In his recent interview with the Express, Joykumar had said that his stint as a minister was “uncomfortable”, even as he blamed Biren’s “dictatorial attitude” for it. “It is not so much with the BJP, but with Biren Singh. He does not know how to rule, like a dictator…we were never consulted about anything,” he had charged, adding that the NPP would be open to allying with the BJP if required, but he would “not accept Biren as CM”.

On his part, Biren also wanted that Joykumar’s fate is sealed in this election. “The BJP gave special focus on their campaign in Uripok…their candidate was a retired bureaucrat and popular, yes, but a lot of resources were spent on the campaign too,” said an Imphal-based academic and political observer, who did not want to be named. “For Biren, Joykumar was a thorn and now he has been taken out.”