South Shillong constituency, one of the five general seats in the 60-member Meghalaya Assembly, has been witness to some party hopping.
First, sitting MLA and Meghalaya NCP chief Sanbor Shullai switched sides from NCP to BJP in December last year just before Prime Minister Narendra Modi flagged off BJP's campaign in the state with a rally at Shillong's Polo Grounds.
Now former Meghalaya minister Manas Chaudhuri who moved over from Congress to the BJP in May 2017 is back in the Congress and will contest against Shullai on a Congress ticket.
Chaudhuri was hoping for a BJP ticket but sitting MLA Shullai joining the party scuttled his plans. In the 2013 Assembly elections Shulai had defeated Chaudhuri with a margin of 1145 votes.
Chaudhuri was the editor of the state's oldest English daily The Shillong Times for three decades and he started his political career as an independent candidate following his brother and NCP MLA Ardhendu Chaudhuri's death in a helicopter crash in 2004. He represented the Mawprem constituency as an MLA for two terms. First winning the 2005 bypoll and then the 2008 Assembly elections as an independent candidate. Chaudhuri was minister for higher education in the short-lived Meghalaya Progressive Alliance coalition cobbled together in 2008. He contested and lost the 2013 elections, this time on a Congress ticket.
Laban was one of the first three seats that the BJP had won in the Meghalaya Legislature in the 1998 Assembly elections. The BJP had held on to the seat in the 2003 elections but the demise of the party's popular face in Meghalaya and two-time MLA TH Rangad in July 2003 cost the party dear. Even though BJP retained the seat in the by-poll following Rangad's death with his wife Jopsimon Phanbuh being elected the MLA, the party lost the seat to NCP's Shullai in 2008.
In the 2013 Assembly elections BJP was the distant fourth in the newly created South Shillong seat, attracting only 13% of the total votes polled.
All the 60 Assembly seats in Meghalaya go to the polls on February 27 and the results will be declared on March 3.(Follow News18.com’s coverage of the Meghalaya Assembly elections 2018 here)
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