New Delhi: In continuation of the tradition of getting “elected unopposed” to the Arunachal Pradesh assembly, chief minister Pema Khandu – along with four other candidates from his current party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – have entered the next assembly even before the state goes to polls on April 19.
The last date for nomination of candidates to the state polls ended on March 27. Since no candidate from the opposition parties stood against these BJP candidates, it cleared the deck for them to enter the 60-member assembly before the elections are held.
No opposition candidature has ensured that Khandu, an MLA from Mukto in the Tawang area, wins that seat for the fourth time; Jikke Tako the Tali seat for the second time; first timer Techi Rotu the Sagalee constituency; and Nyato Dukam the Taliha seat for the second time in a row.
Mutchu Mithi, who like Pema Khandu is the son of a former chief minister, had been winning from his family stronghold, the Roing seat, since 2014. Recently, he moved to the BJP from the Nationalist People’s Party (NPP) and has now won that seat for the third time after the deadline for filing nomination papers ended yesterday. Unlike in 2014 and 2019, Mutchu was elected unopposed this time.
Highlighting this peculiar phenomenon noted in the state during elections, The Arunachal Times, in a report on March 27, pointed out that though the Apatani Youth Association president Tapi Mali filed his nomination papers from the People’s Party of Arunachal (PPA) ticket against the BJP candidate Hage Apa in the Ziro Hapoli seat, his candidature was recalled by the regional party “without citing a reason”.
“When inquired by The Arunachal Times, PPA working president Kaling Jerang said, ‘PPA needs to rebuild its image. We have been very particular with the issue of ‘credibility’ this time. It was a serious reconsideration as ‘bad defeats’ could be avoided.’”
“With this development, it is apparent that BJP is set to sweep the entire state barring few constituencies,” the Itanagar-based daily said.
The tradition of ‘elected unopposed’ was noted in the 2019 assembly elections too. In three seats – Along East, Yachuli and Dirang – the legislators were ‘elected unopposed’. All those seats had gone to the BJP, which went on to form a government in Arunachal Pradesh with Pema Khandu as the chief minister. In those polls, Pema Khandu had faced opposition after several years. Since his father, chief minister Dorjee Khandu, died in an air crash in 2011, Khandu had otherwise been ‘elected unopposed’ from his father’s constituency, Mukto, both as a Congress and BJP candidate. His father too had entered the assembly seat ‘unopposed’ from Mukto on Congress ticket several times in a row.
In 2019, in an attempt to break out of that mould, Pema Khandu was challenged by two monks from the Tawang monastery – Thupten Kunphen (from Congress) and Lobsang Gyatso (Janata Dal United). It was the first time in 20 years that anyone had dared to stand against the Khandu family in Mukto.
Gyatso had been an anti-dam activist too while construction companies from the Khandu family had been building dams in the ecologically sensitive area. In 2016, Gyatso was thrown in jail for opposing big dams in the Tawang area.
Gyatso, however, decided to withdraw his nomination in the 2019 elections in reverence to the senior Lama Kungpen, a Congress candidate from Mukto. Kungpen had then told the Times of India, “I am fighting the election to save democracy. We as followers of Buddhism believe in ahimsa (non-violence). Two of our monks died in police firing during a protest against large dams at Tawang in 2016 (Pema Khandu was the state chief minister then). Development on all fronts have taken a back seat.”
The newspaper had reported that Mukto had 8,000 voters and “has been the bastion of the Khandu family since 1990, when the first assembly election was held three years after the state came into existence”.
Khandu went on to win the 2019 elections for the BJP and continued to become the state chief minister.
In the 2014 assembly elections, the tradition of ‘elected unopposed’ was witnessed in a much bigger manner. Then Congress chief minister Nabam Tuki and Pema Khandu were among 11 party MLAs to be ‘elected unopposed’. Soon, most of those MLAs left the Congress to join the BJP.
Tuki, who had been winning the Sagalee constituency since 1995 for the Congress, seemed to have lost his traditional seat with the BJP candidate Techi Rotu, a first-timer, ‘elected unopposed’ from the seat this March 27.
