There will be a torrent of politicians wanting to join the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) after the June 4 results to the Lok Sabha election, BJP MLA and state cabinet minister Alexander L Hek said.
The BJP is expected to win a third term in charge and Hek expects this to have a positive effect on party membership in Meghalaya, which has so far been lukewarm and even hostile to the Hindu nationalist party. He had campaigned for the BJP in New Delhi, trying especially to woo voters from the North East living in the national capital, and he confidently predicted that the saffron outfit will win 400 seats in Parliament this time around.
So unwelcome is the BJP (Hek is just one of two MLAs the party has in the state) that its support for the National People’s Party (NPP) candidates in Meghalaya’s two Parliamentary seats may have harmed, not helped, its ally.
This seems to be especially true in the Tura seat that encompasses all of Garo Hills. So much so that NPP party leaders are genuinely worried that their candidate, incumbent MP Agatha K Sangma, will lose her hold on the seat, which has been in her family for decades. They have maintained that the NPP never sought BJP support but that it was the latter that chose to back it.
While the Garo community is largely Christian, Garo Hills also has a large Muslim population in the plains belt, neither of which are warm to the BJP. The Chief Minister, the NPP supreme, had also tried to lure BJP supporters by stating that a vote for the two NPP candidates would be a vote for Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the BJP.
Hek, though, rubbished the idea that the BJP support would have hurt the NPP’s chances. He also denied that the state BJP did not give its full support during campaigning; Hek insisted that he had campaigned for the NPP Shillong candidate Ampareen Lyngdoh in his constituency.
When asked whether it is true that BJP workers did not receive logistical support from the party leadership to work for the NPP, Hek said that it was not the duty of the BJP but the NPP as the party that contested the election to arrange the logistic support and the NPP did so.
