Guwahati: Manipur Deputy Chief Minister Yumnam Joykumar Singh of the National People’s Party (NPP) lost to Bharatiya Janata Party’s Raghumani Singh in Uripok constituency by a margin of 909 votes Thursday.
This is a big blow to the NPP, which contested 38 of the total 60 assembly seats with the hope of increasing its influence in the region. It had contested just nine seats in the 2017 polls.
The national party — which is helmed by Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad Sangma — put up a fierce fight against the BJP, which it had allied with after the 2017 elections.
A former IAS officer, Raghumani Singh entered the fray for the first time this election.
According to the Election Commission of India (ECI) website, the BJP has won in 20 seats in the state and leading in 12 more, while the NPP has won in 3 and is leading in 5 seats.
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An important seat for NPP
Incidentally, the NPP was formed in 1989 in Uripok — located in the capital city of Imphal — at a meeting where Nongthombam Ibomcha Singh was elected its president.
Till 2012, the seat was won by candidates of the Congress or its offshoots formed by dissidents. In the 2017 state assembly elections, Y Joykumar Singh, a former DGP of the state, managed to wrest the seat from the incumbent Congress MLA Laishram Nandakumar Singh by a margin of 345 seats.
Effectively, Joykumar Singh and the three other NPP MLAs who had won in 2017 were given cabinet positions after the party formed an alliance with the BJP.
With 21 seats, the BJP had come in second and managed to form government after forming alliances with the NPP, Naga People’s Front and Lok Janshakti Party.
Joykumar was appointed deputy CM and BJP’s Biren Singh was elevated to the position of chief minister. Trouble started brewing between the coalition partners after Joykumar was stripped of all his portfolios back in 2019.
(Edited by Gitanjali Das)
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