The Northeast: Where Disparate Hopes Collided

BJP's poll performance in Assam & Arunachal Pradesh cannot be attributed to the same reason. Similarly, Congress victories in Nagaland & Manipur were driven by different passions

- PRADIP PHANJOUBAM

THE nation is settling to the reality of a new political equation in New Delhi in which the ruling BJP, though still the single largest party, is significantly short of the majority mark in the Lok Sabha. For many, this denouement was a shock. For many others, it came as a welcome catharsis. Neither had expected the result, especially with exit pollsters making it seem like a foregone conclusion that a landslide victory awaited the ruling party, bettering its past records.

If election predictions can go wrong, so can results analyses. It will hence be prudent not to forget that the political battle cries and passions were very different in each state. This is expected in a vast country with multifarious regional political landscapes. The electoral battle at the Centre, fought on the grand theme of what India's way forward should be, was in this way an aggregate of myriad smaller local battles in states fought on local issues.

This dichotomy is often sought to be sublimated thus: in the case of national parties, they become national parties with local outlooks, and regional parties become ones with a national outlook. With no single party as a clear winner, this collage of regional political aspirations is becoming even more relevant in the current Lok Sabha.

Even within the subregion of the Northeast, the stakes fought for in each constituent state were for most part very different. Hence, the BJP or the Congress winning or losing in Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura, Meghalaya, etc cannot be attributed to any single agenda or manifesto. As on the larger canvas of Indian federalism, here too is a case of a hundred flowers blossoming together, although often this harmony in diversity has seen dangerous frictions.