New Delhi: After a promising start in the 2018 assembly polls in Mizoram, the Zoram People’s Movement (ZPM) has registered its first crack. The Zoram Nationalist Party (ZNP) quit the six-party regional alliance on September 3.
As per local news reports, ZNP walked out of the alliance claiming that the ZPM was being run “in a dictatorial style”.
“There is a lot of disparity and inequality within the party and we tried our best to fix it but we have failed,” a news report in Mizoram Post quoted Sanghluna, the ZNP principal spokesperson, as saying. He said ZPM “has left behind its policy of a new movement (Kalphung Thar).”
It should be noted that in 2014, ZNP had entered into an alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party. However, having not found many takers for the party in a Christian-majority state, it later walked out of the alliance.
In August 2017, ZPM was constituted with the coming together of three regional parties – ZNP, Mizoram People’s Conference and Zoram Exodus Movement. Later, three other local parties – Zoram Reformation Front, Mizoram People’s Party and Zoram Democratic Front – joined hands with it. Together, they came under one electoral symbol to contest the 2018 polls.
In those polls, while the BJP tried hard to enter the 40-member state assembly, it failed to move its tally beyond one. With anti-incumbency stacked against the decade-old Congress government of LalThanhawla, the regional formulations were looked at by a majority of the voters as an option.
Though Mizo National Front (MNF) was the main opposition, many voters were not really in favour of it only because of its closeness to the BJP that propagates Hindutva. MNF is a member of the BJP’s North East Democratic Front (NEDA). This led the MNF to maintain a distance from NEDA in the run-up to the polls, and also not enter into an electoral alliance with the BJP.
In the November 2018 elections, MNF’s conscious effort to keep an electoral distance from the BJP bore fruit. While the MNF won 26 seats to form the government on its own, ZPM too did fairly well considering it had contested the polls as an alliance for the first time. It pocketed eight of the 35 seats it had contested. ZPM president Lalduhoma won both the assembly seats he contested from. In April 2019, MNF won the Aizawl West -1 seat he had vacated, which helped the ruling party take its total tally of MLAs to 27.
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In July 2019, the ZPM had registered itself as a political formation with the ECI. Prior to the formation of ZPM, ZNP, formed in 1997, was recognised by the Election Commission of India.
According to the Mizoram Post, ZNP members, on September 3, accused the Val Upa Council, the deciding body of ZPM, of “interfering beyond their area of authority” as the reason for quitting the alliance. They accused the ZPM party MLAs, legal cell members and some others of pressurising Lalduhoma to agree to extend their term as office bearers.
The Wire tried contacting Lalduhoma, the ZPM president, for a comment but couldn’t get through to him. Any response from him on the issue will be added, if or when received.
The news report quoted ZNP members as saying that the party’s recognition by the ECI as a separate entity “is still valid and will be continued as before”.