She had been hoping to be the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidate for the Shillong seat at next month’s Lok Sabha election but Fenela Lyngdoh Nonglait was, like many other party members, left disappointed by the high command’s decision not to field candidates in either Shillong or Tura and instead support the National People’s Party (NPP).
Nonglait, a lawyer by profession, only recently joined the BJP but was touted as a potential candidate by South Shillong MLA Sanbor Shullai and others.
“All we can say is that the state BJP, being a national party, has only brought a loss of self-esteem to itself by not filing a candidate in Meghalaya for the MP election,” she told Highland Post. “We already have a BJP vote bank in the state that has increased quite impressively in the last few years. Now that the BJP has taken a decision not to file candidates at the last minute, many BJP party workers and voters are lost and confused.”
Nonglait put the blame for the decision not on the party high command in New Delhi but on the state unit, which, she said, should have done more to convince the central leadership that the BJP had a good opportunity to wrest Meghalaya away from the Congress Party and NPP, which currently hold the Shillong and Tura seats respectively.
Even the central BJP perhaps should have consulted members of the state unit before taking such a major decision as this would have lessened the sense of confusion in party workers, she added.
While the saffron party only received about 1 lakh votes across both constituencies in 2019, the BJP has been working hard at the grassroots to build up support. It failed to increase its meagre tally of two seats in the Assembly election last year but its vote share did increase.
Giving up Shillong and Tura (ostensibly because the NPP has decided to support the BJP in Arunachal Pradesh) without a fight has really hit the grassroots party workers hard, Nonglait maintained.
“There are some party workers who were able to increase the number of BJP supporters in their area from 10 to 100 while others were successful in pushing for massive enrolment in the thousands,” she said, adding that while looking to be a candidate herself, she would have been willing to support anyone from within the BJP who received the ticket.
“All I can say is that I’m not only the one disappointed by this decision but I feel bad for all the party workers who have been able to garner the support of thousands only to see a last moment decision like this being taken. The biggest question mark is where do these supporters now go and why was their consent not taken into consideration,” Nonglait added.
