Shillong, May 27 : A day after Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) candidate Agatha K. Sangma won the Tura bypoll by a resounding margin, a dejected, despondent Congress admitted that it was indeed a “bad defeat” and “unexpected”.
With Lok Sabha elections only a few months away, the Congress is worried that the party might not win both the seats — Shillong and Tura — in the present state of affairs.
Senior Congress leader and Union tribal affairs minister P.R. Kyndiah is currently representing Shillong Lok Sabha constituency.
Meghalaya PCC president O.L. Nongtdu today said the party expected over a lakh votes for the Congress candidate, Zentih Sangma, the brother of senior Congress leader Mukul Sangma.
“It was a bad defeat for us and we never expected this,” Nongtdu said.
The party also did not expect that the candidate would be defeated in his Rangsakona constituency. In the just concluded Assembly elections, too, the NCP’s Adolf Hitler Marak defeated Zenith, a former minister.
Of the total 24 Assembly segments, the Congress candidate could perform better than Agatha only in three constituencies, the plain areas of Rajabala and Mahendraganj, besides Ampati which is Mukul Sangma’s constituency. Though the Congress had raked up the Meghalaya Board of School Education issue and dynasty politics, those could not influence the voters.
The Congress will meet soon to assess what went wrong, Nongtdu added.
According to the NCP and other alliance partners in the Meghalaya Progressive Alliance (MPA), the victory of the NCP candidate would further strengthen the unity of the party.
After a thin margin of only one vote secured by the MPA candidate Sanbor Shullai in the election to the deputy Speaker’s post, Mukul Sangma had predicted that the government would fall within two months.
However, playing down the comments of Sangma, president of the NCP’s Meghalaya unit, W.R. Kharluki, said MPA was committed to complete the full five-year term. He also said the victory had brought more unity to the MPA and the dream of the Congress to form a government in the state would never be fulfilled in this term.
Telegraph India
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