BJP brought 93 northeast MLAs into saffron fold in 8 years

GUWAHATI: Pitching camp from one state to another in the northeast, the BJP’s saffron brigade has brought into its fold 93 legislators from other parties in the last eight years, a number which is more than twice the strength of the legislative assembly of Mizoram.
The switch-over of five JD(U) MLAs in Manipur late on Friday was BJP’s 15th snatch in the region, since the one in Nagaland in 2014, when three NCP MLAs changed their loyalties.
BJP’s most aggressive takeover of legislators has been in Arunachal Pradesh. Twice, in 2003 and in 2016, BJP has formed governments in this frontier state without going into election. Congress being the oldest party that has been in power for maximum period of time in the region happened to be the most preferred choice of BJP when it announced the region would be made Congress-mukt.
32 of 93 defectors are from Congress
Of the 93 legislators who embraced BJP since 2014, 32 of them are ex-Congressmen.
Much before the break-up in Bihar, BJP has been quietly acquiring JD(U) MLAs in the region-six of them in Arunachal in 2019 and five on Friday in Manipur.
In recent years, BJP has also opened its doors for legislators from TMC, which is relatively a new player in the region. As many nine former loyalists of Mamata Banerjee are now governed by BJP's ideologies. In fact, BJP's first government in the region was not through an election but by engineering a defection of 36 legislators that saw the fall of the ruling Congress in 2003. The BJP government led by Gegong Apang however lasted for just 42 days.
Barring the short-lived exercise in Arunachal, BJP lacked any appeal until Narendra Modi arrived in the national scene in 2014 and northeast suddenly became the saffron party's most fertile nursery. Come 2016 and Assam provided BJP the perfect start and just few months before the assembly election, it roped in Himanta Biswa Sarma from Congress, a move that went on to become the biggest game changer for the party in the region.
Just seven months later, Sarma made his first move to install BJP's second government in the region with a surgical strike that saw ruling Congress fall after it lost 32 of its MLAs in the house of 60, first to People's Party of Arunachal and finally to BJP in matter of 48 hours.
BJP replicated the Assam model in Manipur and before the 2017 election, it set its eyes on Congress strongman and at that point of time N Biren Singh, who was also then CM Ibobi Singh's challenger. After the election Manipur too fell on BJP's lap.
BJP's biggest battle was in Tripura in 2018 where for the first time in the country it was directly pitted against the Left, which had till then been in power for four consecutive terms. With the electorate looking for a change, BJP for once did not have to bank on snatching legislators from other parties. Barring Nagaland to some extent, the other two Christian-majority states of the region, Mizoram and Meghalaya have so far not seen the aggressiveness of BJP in terms of poaching legislators.