From being a party with no political presence in Manipur till its formation of a state unit in 1980, the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has come about not by ideology or an alignment to its core Hindutva belief systems but because it is in power at the Centre. It took the party 15 long years to bag a single seat in the 60-member Manipur State Assembly. The maximum number of MLAs representing the party stood at six till the Assembly elections of 2017, when it emerged as the second political party with 21 seats, behind the Congress’s 28. But it was the BJP that went on to form the government instead of the Congress, which emerged as the single-largest party. In fact, even at the time of the 2017 Assembly elections, coming on the heels of three consecutive terms with Congress at the helm, the BJP candidates were mostly former Congress and All India Trinamool Congress MLAs.
Cut to 2022 and the BJP in Manipur is bursting at its seams with imports from different political parties, leading to a long delay in its announcement of electoral candidates, with such intense scrutiny over who would make it and at whose cost, that various fake lists were being circulated on social media and leaked to the media in the run-up to the actual candidate list that came out on 30 January.
With 11 former Congress MLAs making it as party candidates – at the cost of others who had contested as bonafide BJP candidates in the earlier election or who had been working towards a ticket as party workers – there is a huge churn amongst the public at large, leading to angry outbursts.