March 23, 2024 was a perfect day for the National People’s Party (NPP) and a not so perfect one for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Meghalaya. One does not know what it means for the National People’s Party (NPP) to get the “back up” of the BJP for the Shillong and Tura Parliamentary seat, but one can certainly deduce that for the Party workers of the BJP a great load has been taken off their shoulders – perhaps the kind of deliverance that has never been experienced before, nor thought off as a possibility knowing that the party in power at the Centre would normally throw in its weight and build on its presence in the State.
The delay in announcing a candidate for the two seats in Meghalaya was causing more than just a tone of excitement as the build up to the election rallies is already strident and shrill. And candidates from other parties, not just the unsympathetic ones, have registered distress at the BJP’s decision to back out – they were looking forward to the sporting accusations and counter accusations and the soft target that the BJP presents the regional parties with as the BJP had become synonymous with dismantling churches, and idols of Jesus and Mary.
And though everyone knows that the BJP is not involved in these acts, no campaign of the regional parties would spare the party this criticism. And though this strategy is used with the greatest spite it is used with a good deal of mirth as well because the elections allow one to switch from a tragic to a comic mode instantaneously. No other platform offers this effect and this last minute back out has somewhat dimmed the excitement of the criticisms and cartoons that normally are associated with an election.
What the other parties were looking forward to and what they had probably already prepared in their arsenal of criticism must now be folded up and kept for some later date. Surely they are registering the greatest distress at what must strike them as a most crude game spoiler and an oversimplification of the profound and somewhat hardhearted strategy that a national party has come out with, because now the only contestants in Meghalaya are local parties that have nothing they can promise by way of development and progress on their own except by stating that they will move the Centre for whatever the State needs and wants. And to be honest, even among the three State parties that will vie for the people’s votes only the NPP has any real presence at the Centre.
Yet if one recognises the irony of any of the “stay away” reasons (which I may not be able to deal with in this article) of the BJP from the MP elections in Meghalaya and if one adds to it the hopelessness of the BJP contesting the elections in Meghalaya because of the recent anti-Christian attitude of the states of Assam and Tripura where the BJP is in power, and the fact that what preceded these two factors was the dismal performance in the State elections of 2023, when the BJP’s heaviest heavyweights turned up for the candidates and still the party could only come up with only two MLAs, who would have won anyway, then one might well not be surprised that the only way the party could save face in this MP election was to tie up with the NPP because the NPP is certain to win at least one seat in the State, and in this way, it is apparent that the BJP would come out with more than just a face saving result.
As to what it means when the BJP says that it will “back up” the NPP candidates is anyone’s guess which I believe even the State BJP leaders will have no say in. What is happening here is no different from what is happening in other states – Bengal, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, etc where the BJP is constantly churning out incredible formulas for an agreeable seat sharing policy. What is happening here apparently indicates, if one examines minutely, that the Party finds comfort by clutching onto any straw like a drowning man would.
It would be grotesque, of course, to deny that the BJPs chances at the polls this time out are, to put it mildly, riddled with confusion, the arch reason being that the party has not been trying to project itself all these past five years but has instead sought to promote Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The party, throughout India, is unclear whether to claim the benefits that have accrued to itself or to the Prime Minister. In everything that was done to provide for the people, the credit has been given to the Prime Minister and not to the party, that has been the party’s strategy, and whether this strategy will turn out to benefit the party or the Prime Minister is being witnessed at present and will be witnessed even more in the days to come.
The party cannot make promises of its own on any matter and this is the paradox that it has set for itself. This approach is causing problems to the party men as the inertia that this approach creates on the party workers (BJP) is no minor issue as the superficial person may imagine; it is rather a very decisive act that, in the strictest sense, promotes a repression within the party. It is responsible for the fact that what the party members learn and absorb enters from the exterior and not from within their inherent talent and consciousness. The individuals’ personal political opinion is to be in hibernation – mute and silent, probably even forgotten. This has probably led the man in whom this apparatus of solving issues at the spur of the moment is damaged – defunct. He becomes a dyspeptic – the kind that never does anything completely.
This precisely is the long story of what is going on in politics and power at the moment with the BJP, and perhaps there is something in this for the Khasi – Pnar politician to learn. The task of becoming a politician, with the right to be called a politician, evidently embraces and presupposes as a preparatory task that one first makes a person to a certain degree uniform – like among like – essentially calculable and predictable notwithstanding the stupidity and idiocy involved in it.
However judging from the attitude of our Khasi-Pnar politicians most are not straight jacketed individuals and are definitely not predictable, and therefore cannot be placed at the culmination of this process of becoming a politician from whom the fruit of political maturity bears fruit for the society and the party. Basically the Khasi-Pnar politician cannot be considered as a trustworthy politician.
In politics, morality and custom, are essentially a means to an end, a means to becoming liberated and autonomous from the social customs one is born into and instead developing into an independent person liberated from morality of custom and society, in short the person who has his own independent will and the right to make independent promises and in a way matured (as a person). This emancipated individual now is capable of making promises of his own because of the awareness of a superiority that is innate in the person and which the person knows is totally lacking in those who do not have the confidence of making promises.
And in politics, the person learns to master self (self control), and in the process the person earns mastery over the circumstances that the person is confronted with. And in this respect there are signs that Conrad Sangma, the leader of the NPP, has mastered this requirement of self-becoming and is aware of the extraordinary privilege he has from the responsibility he shoulders. He has now matured into a politician who is capable of making promises like a sovereign – reluctantly, rarely, fastidious of trusting, whose trust is a mark of distinction, who gives his word as something that can be relied on because he knows himself to be strong enough to maintain it in the face of accidents whilst the rest of the feeble windbags that form the bulk of the “Kakistocracy” make promises without any idea of how to go about fulfilling the promises they make.
It is probably in recognising that Conrad Sangma has matured as a politician that the BJP leaders decided on backing up the NPP instead of the United Democratic Party (UDP) or the Voice of the People Party (VPP), or their own State party members. In him they see the ability he has to stand as a security for himself and his party with pride. And this is something the Khasi-Pnar politicians must learn.
