The Congress party is hell bend for leather to show the discerning public its fantastic ignorance of the Indian parliamentary norms and procedure by calling the present Chief Minister as “unmandated” when the 60-member House has endorsed his leadership. The Constitution provides that an unelected member can head the House/ Parliament provided he/ she gets elected within a period of six months. This has happened before in Nagaland in 1987 when Mr Hokishe Sema was sworn-in replacing Mr SC Jamir, and in 1990 when Mr Vamuzo was sworn-in when they both were not being members of the Assembly. It is no surprise that the Congress party has conveniently forgotten the cases of Congress Prime Ministers PV Narasimha Rao (1991) and Dr Manmohan Singh (2004) who were not members of either Lok Sabha or Rajya Sabha at the time they were sworn in.

Looking at the appointment of Khriehu Liezietsu as Advisor from the jaundiced eyes of the Congress which seems to have been permanently afflicted with the disease, it would appear to the party as if it is an act of “nepotism in the state to greater heights” surpassed only by the Mother-Son duo of its High Command surrounded by a coterie of sycophants grovelling and falling over each other in their mad rush to please the Mother-Son duo!

However, the fact of the matter behind the appointment of Khriehu as Advisor with Cabinet status was due to the demand of the party functionaries who feel that the sacrifice of vacating his seat in the larger interest of the NPF-led DAN Government should not go unappreciated. There was a clamour of demands to reward him for making the supreme political sacrifice at the CEC meeting on June 14 last, and accordingly, the appointment was made. But this political, co-terminus appointment should not be equated in any way with exempting one’s son-in-law, a wheeler-dealer in real estates, from security frisking in all the Airports in the country when the UPA was in power at the Centre!

Having manoeuvred itself to the verge of falling into political oblivion with no allies or helping “Hand” in sight, the Congress party seems to have developed a nasty allergy to political parties flush with allies, for instance, the Naga People’s Front, which has no shortage of politically like-minded parties determined to edge out the Congress party from the political scene in the region and country.

To refresh the memory of the Congress party, as the country slowly limped back to normalcy from the dark era of Emergency imposed by the Congress party, the forerunner of the NPF realised the danger posed by the INC and formed alliance with non-Congress national parties in 1977. Since then, there has been no looking back and with the emergence of BJP to take on the might of the Indian National Congress which had been looting the nation like the ancient marauders, the NPF has realised that the BJP is its natural ally. A regional party like the NPF, to ensure the security, rights and interests of the people, must align itself with national political parties, whether they are in power or not, to stop recurrence of the Dark Years the country went through the Emergency period in the 1970s brought about by the Congress, or the blatant embezzlement of national funds like the country had witnessed under Congress rule for which prominent Congress leaders are still, thankfully, languishing in Jail for their misdeeds.

Rather than recalling the history of the NPF in the late 1990s leading to the “freezing” of the NPF party symbol in the aftermath of the Naga people’s call for solution and not election, which was heeded to by the NPF and other political parties in the State except the Congress party, it would be more relevant in the Naga context if the fact that the Congress party sold out the wishes and aspirations of the Naga people to solve the Naga political problem and went against the clarion call issued by the Naga people as a whole. It is said that human memory is short, but it is not as short as to forget how the Congress party did not want to solve the Naga problem and kept it pending all those years that it was in power here in the State and at the Centre.

Nor is human memory as short as to forget how the present President of the NPCC, sacked unceremoniously from the Congress ministry in 2002, and, seething with anger, when he came to power in 2003, went on to use un-parliamentary words in the Assembly against his former leader which had to be expunged from the records! This same person was again dropped most unceremoniously from DAN I after a short period when his ambition got the better of him, and he slunk, not unlike a canine with its tail between the legs, back to his former leader in abject humility much against his arrogant nature. He more than ate his humble pie: he swallowed back his vomit! And when the Congress leaders realised the need to come together for an early solution to the protracted Naga political problem and came together to join the DAN III in mid 2015, the Congress party in the State was compelled to change its leadership and the present leadership was para-dropped from nowhere. The rest is his story: He started to take revenge on his perceived foes in the shape of his former colleagues and expelled them all from the party. He is now a General without Soldiers!

With elections just round the corner, the Congress party, as expected, is making noises just for the sake of being heard not unlike wolves howling during mating season. But howling alone won’t get the Congress party its mates, for the party is yet to go through an acid test of achieving victory in electoral battle under the leadership of Mr K. Therie.