Massive mandate, no arguments : TINA is alive and kicking
- The Sangai Express Editorial :: March 07, 2012 -

It is a massive mandate, with a capital M. The Congress juggernaut continues. In many ways the election to the 10th Manipur Legislative Assembly has scripted many records.

For the first time, a second repoll was ordered in five polling stations. For the first time in the history of Manipur, a single political party has crossed the 40 seat mark, with the Congress winning 42 and the MPP and the CPI failing to open their account, trashing all pre-poll analyses and calculations.

For the first time, Manipur Legislative Assembly will see three women legislators at a time. In as much as the excellent showing of the Congress must have taken even those sitting at Congress Bhawan by surprise, the ‘nil’ score notched up by the MPP must have also shocked the people and political parties alike.

The other package is the much better show put up by the Trinamool Congress and the Naga People's Front on their debut show, though technically it is not a debut entry to the electoral battle of Manipur for the Trinamool Congress, given that its candidate won the Konthoujam AC by election in 2011.

It is not the MPP nor the MSCP nor the CPI, three political parties which have had a long presence in the State and even went on to head or be a partner in the Government at one point of time or the other, but the TC which has come out second best to the Congress winning 7 seats.

The NPF too has done creditably well winning 4 out of the 12 seats in which it contested, given the fact that this is the first time it has entered the electoral arena in Manipur.

So what are the factors that drove the people to vote overwhelmingly in favour of the Congress ?

In the absence of any issues which grabbed pole position in the run up to the election, the answer to this question would be hard to come by.

However what is abundantly clear is the growing significance of the TINA (There Is No Alternative) factor, a factor for which the last rites have been performed with panache at Delhi and in other parts of the country a long time back.

TINA is an anachronism in this age of coalition politics, but the fact that it remains such a significant factor in Manipur is a telling statement on how the understanding and significance of a strong Opposition has been sold to the Devil which may be understood and viewed as sucking up to those who sit on the chairs of power or occupy Ministerial berths.

In many ways the dud of a performance put up by the MPP and the NCP, which together formed the Opposition profile in the last Assembly, is the fuel that propelled the people to give them the marching order for their abject failure to perform as the Opposition, during the travails that Manipur went through in the last five years.

Whether this disillusionment should have been targeted against the Opposition or the Congress which headed the SPF is a different matter, but a hard hitting message has already been rung out.

That the coming together of four political parties, the MPP, JD (U), NCP and the CPI (M) under the People's Democratic Front umbrella failed to inspire any confidence is there for all to see and the expansion of the PDF to the People's Democratic Alliance, consisting of ten non-Congress political parties was nothing much more than a poor attempt at cobbling up some rag tag army of desperadoes.

The bluff was clear enough to the people. That all the political parties, maybe with the exception of the Left parties and the NPF, were pretenders, who would not hesitate to sup with the Congress is something which did not go unregistered in the consciousness of the people.

It is a tragedy that the Opposition parties failed to make issues out of the many travails that Manipur witnessed in the last five years, notably the punch that was delivered on the consciousness of the people by the July 23 BT Road killings in 2009 as well as the inept handling of the 121 days of economic blockade by the Congress led SPF Government.

The Congress has bested its 2007 performance, but the uncomfortable question of whether this mandate would be translated into governance and accountability refuses to go away.

Remember the tenure of the Congress in the 9th Assembly. For Manipur not to take the road of the last five years again, the need for an effective Opposition is the need of the hour and it is not always numbers that count to make an effective Opposition.

That the result is also some sort of a referendum should not be lost on the people who matter.