The repercussions of the Assam verdict are slowly becoming visible across the Northeast. Regional parties in the eight states are increasingly getting drawn, it would seem, to the BJP, which is emerging as the pivot of anti-Congress formations. This could have serious implications for the Congress in the near future. The party, which ruled four of the eight states at the beginning of this decade, has already lost two governments in the region. Manipur, where Congress strongman Okram Ibobi Singh is about to complete three consecutive terms, is headed for polls next year while Mizoram, Meghalaya and Tripura are set for elections in 2018. In all these states, the BJP has been engaging influential local outfits with some success. The Northeast Democratic Alliance (NEDA), the NDA’s local variant, now has 10 parties and is a rainbow of political, ethnic and social interest groups spread across a region that sends 25 MPs to the Lok Sabha. Barring Tripura and Manipur, where the opposition to the ruling CPM and Congress is fragmented, the NEDA seems poised to be the main challenger to the ruling party in these poll-bound states.
The template for the NEDA emerged in Assam, where the BJP, by allying with two major regional outfits, the Asom Gana Parishad and the Bodoland People’s Front, managed to build a broad social coalition that not only consolidated the opposition to the Congress but also articulated regional agendas. The front swept the polls and the BJP’s tally in the state assembly rose from five seats in 2011 to 60 this year. On its own, the BJP’s pan-nationalist Hindutva narrative is likely to have limited traction in the region, where subnationalist aspirations influence and dominate politics. But allying with regional outfits may help the BJP to subsume its ideological predilections under the umbrella of regionalism — as it managed in Assam.
The BJP’s task of alliance building in the Northeast has been made easy by the fact that the Congress is the main opponent of the regional outfits in the region, be it the Mizo National Front, AGP or Naga People’s Front. These parties are also open to alliances since association with the BJP allows them a toehold at the Centre, which exercises enormous influence in the region by controlling the funds flow, and boosts their local profile. A pan-Northeast front could also help negotiate inter-state problems better. However, its sustainability will be contingent on the BJP reconciling, without friction, its Hindutva ambitions with the specificities of local traditions of faith and food.
