The native voice

The Congress and BJP have dominated politics in Goa and Manipur for a long time. In the last few years, the BJP has taken over the pole position from the Congress and formed coalition governments with smaller parties. In office, however, the BJP has sought to contain the smaller parties and thwart their ambitions for a greater role in state politics, something that the Congress too had done when it headed governments. This tendency of the national party, the big brother in state politics, to stifle the smaller, regional players, has forced the latter to make their voice distinct and heard. Outfits like Goa Forward Party and Goa Suraksha Manch were formed as a platform to articulate regional aspirations and did attract voters though they could not find sufficient traction to end the dominance of the national parties. Even the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party (MGP), the original regional face of Goa that headed the government in the state in the 1960s, has seen a minor revival. In Manipur, the National People’s Party (NPP) is attempting to emerge as an independent regional voice by contesting 39 of the 60 assembly seats. The NPP, which heads a coalition government in neighbouring Meghalaya, wants to be seen as a secular, Northeast voice, and is fighting polls independent of its senior ally, the BJP. In fact, former Lok Sabha Speaker P A Sangma had revived the outfit in 2013 with the agenda, One Northeast, One Voice. In 2017, the NPP won four of the nine seats it contested in Manipur. A new, interesting entrant in the fray in the Kuki tribe dominated hill districts of Manipur is the Kuki People’s Alliance (KPA). The emergence of KPA suggests that this tribal minority, which has been home to a violent insurgency, is exploring a new agency to assert their rights and aspirations within the framework of democratic politics. This is a trajectory that many insurgency affected areas — in Mizoram and Tripura, for instance — have followed in the past. Parties like the NPP and KPA have also indicated that as regional voices they are better placed to highlight local concerns — for instance, the popular demand for the repeal of Armed Forces Special Powers Act — than the national parties, which prefer to subsume them under the rubric of national security etc.

The claim to represent regional aspirations rather than fidelity to any political ideology also allows these parties to freely negotiate with the national parties post results. However, the willingness to compromise for office may also diminish their potential to emerge as pole parties in the manner the Dravidian parties or the Shiv Sena could in their prime.