<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Just a year after the ruling Progressive Democratic Alliance (PDA) took office in March 2018, the inner rumblings that were heard came to surface when the chief minister Neiphiu Rio effected a minor reshuffle. According to insiders within the coalition, the coalition has been under the shadow of “possibilities” of realignment. Though the PDA coalition is comfortably placed with 34 legislators in a house of 60; yet both the ruling coalitions- Nationalist Democratic Progressive Party (NDPP) and the BJP- are looking at adding more ‘muscle’ to their respective numbers. In this regard, the NDPP appears to have made a big leap after swallowing two former NPP legislators who merged with the ruling party on the eve of the Lok Sabha election. Then the lone JDU legislator also merged with NDPP. These mergers along with retention of the 26 Aonglenden assembly bypoll has taken the tally of the NDPP to 21. The NDPP had won 18 seats in the 2018 election. The opposition Naga People’s Front (NPF) with 26 members has a strong presence. It would be wrong to grudge the opposition from wanting power; after all politics without power is not a desired situation. After the Lok Sabha election when BJP stormed back to power with a brute majority of 303 seats and 352 with the NDA, it was reported that BJP in Nagaland wanted to also propel itself to eminence with its own chief minister. That is when the tempting offer came from the opposition to form a government under BJP. That would mean that either home minister Patton or higher education minister and BJP party president Temjen Imna Along be the projected chief minister. It was also reported that in order to make offer more tempting, the opposition also left choice of portfolios to the BJP. The BJP national however was not warm to the idea. The factor that has worked against this proposal was the earlier scathing attack made by the NPF party president against BJP during the 2018 election. Of course, this does not mean that principle is the holy cow since BJP has itself is poaching in almost every state. Under such ‘potential threats’ it left Neiphiu Rio with hardly any option but to shore up his defences against such possibility. In this regard, Rio has wooed seven NPF legislators on the eve of the Lok Sabha election. The seven NPF legislators, who now face disqualification proceedings, are from ENPO area. It may also be pertinent to note that the NDPP candidate for the Lok Sabha seat won with the barest of margin of around 16,000 votes. According to reports, the state BJP legislators began asking for change in portfolios. Though there is no imminent threat on the NDPP and BJP coalition; yet nothing can be ruled out in politics. This is so because ideology or principles are extinct in today’s politics. Even otherwise also, legislators today are never satisfied. If elected they want to be ministers and if they are made ministers they want lucrative portfolios and then someone sets eyes on the chief minister’s chair. The problem is there are too few lucrative portfolios and Rio is caught in a situation where he cannot please everybody and if he does, he ends up displeasing many. Truly, he is damned if he does and equally damned if he doesn’t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Cycle of re-jig<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[685],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-207812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=207812"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207812\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=207812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=207812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=207812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}