SHILLONG — UDP president Metbah Lyngdoh is currently dealing with a political number he has already seen before, except this time it has arrived wearing his party’s colours.
In 2021, when Lyngdoh was Speaker, 12 of Congress’s 17 MLAs joined the Trinamool Congress. The group crossed the two-thirds threshold under the Tenth Schedule, and the merger was recognised. At the time, two-thirds was apparently a useful number.
Five years later, eight of UDP’s 12 MLAs have joined the BJP. That is, inconveniently, two-thirds again.
UDP has responded by issuing show-cause notices to three of the eight, suspending them after they failed to respond and seeking the disqualification of all eight under the Tenth Schedule. The eight have submitted merger papers to the Assembly, arguing that the same two-thirds provision protects their move.
UDP, meanwhile, says the party itself has not merged. Its name stays. Its flag stays. Its symbol stays. The only thing that has changed is that eight of its 12 MLAs now belong to a different party.
Metbah has seen this arithmetic before. The awkward part is that this time, it has come back to his own doorstep.
