New Delhi: Senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader from Nagaland and the party’s only national spokesperson from the Northeast, Mmhonlumo Kikon, has resigned from the primary and active membership of the ruling party. 

Though in his resignation letter to party national president J.P. Nadda, on August 7, Kikon said his decision was “guided by the need to explore new avenues of public engagement and policy work”, sources within the party in Nagaland and Mizoram have cited “a number of reasons” for his departure. 

“It was only a matter of time before he quit BJP. There are a number of reasons,” a senior BJP leader from Nagaland told The Wire.

“Thanks to him and two other MLAs, BJP could enter the Nagaland Assembly for the first time in 2014 with more than one member. He, along with two other MLAs from the National Congress Party (NCP) had defected to the party then. BJP till then had failed to win not more than a single seat in our state elections. And yet, the party’s national leadership never fully backed Kikon when he, as the BJP MLA, took on important issues around corruption about which the Naga youth were very upset about,” the leader said.

“For instance, the issue of police recruitment under the Naga People’s Front (NPF). Its home minister was then Y Patton. Instead, with help from party leaders outside of Nagaland, Patton could join the BJP, and is today the party’s home minister in the current coalition government. This had upset a lot of youth in Nagaland and Kikon was never consulted,” they added. 

In 2017, when Kikon was a BJP MLA, he had raised the issue in the state assembly, and had sent a set of questions to the home department seeking answers over the recruitment process. He had then confirmed to this correspondent that he was receiving “threats”, without naming the home minister, who also belongs to the Lotha Naga community. Local media reports had then stated that he had received text messages from Patton’s supporters to withdraw the questions. 

While in the first state government in 2017, of which BJP was a part, Kikon served as a cabinet minister for six months, in the second government (in 2020), he was not given a ministership and instead made an advisor to the government for information, science and technology.

The same year, with the rise of Nadda as the new national president, Kikon was made a national spokesperson, the first Naga to hold such a post, and the only national spokesperson for the BJP from the Northeast. 

A BJP worker from Mizoram who had “worked closely” with Kikon during his term as the party prabhari (in-charge) of the state in 2020-21, told The Wire over phone, “On hearing about his resignation, I felt sad because he worked very hard to help the party set up stronger roots in Mizoram. Doing that for the BJP in a Christian majority state was not easy. No politician who can win an election was willing to move to the BJP. He would camp in the state for days together. Kikon being a Christian, and seen supporting BJP, eventually helped the party’s reputation among some of our voters.” 

He claimed, “You may have seen a new party president announced for Mizoram this June. Picking up someone like K Beichhua was actually Kikon’s suggestion to the national leadership and yet, it was not worked upon, till a non-northeast person (Devesh Kumar) was brought in and the same suggestions were made and Delhi acted.” 

Kikon, the first in the state’s history to have won from the Bhandari assembly segment for two times in a row, had unsuccessfully fought on the party’s ticket from the constituency in the 2023 assembly elections. The seat had gone to the NPF. 

When contacted, Kikon refused to comment, saying, “I would request you to quote only from my resignation letter sent to Nadda ji.” 

In the letter, Kikon wrote, “I believe the time has come for me to take a step back and recalibrate my journey. My decision is guided by the need to explore new avenues of public engagement and policy work, which I believe will allow me to continue contributing to society in different ways.”

An alumnus of St. Stephen’s College and an ASPEN fellow, Kikon, during his decade-long stint with the BJP, stood out for holding up the party’s interests in many fora, both within and outside the Northeast. 

Also a poet and an author, his book, Her Majesty’s Headhunters, published by Penguin Random House in 2023, was widely acknowledged as a credible narrative on not only the siege of Kohima during the Second World War but also about the people of that region bordering Myanmar.

Note: A sentence has been added to a senior BJP leader's quote since publication.

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