It was an unusual site in Parliament on Monday morning when Bharatiya Janata Party president Amit Shah and Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived for the second part of the Budget session. They were welcomed by a group of BJP members of Parliament and felicitated before they walked inside Parliament.
Union ministers Rajnath Singh, Nitin Gadkari and Ananth Kumar led the group of MPs to felicitate the Prime Minister and the party chief for the historic performance of the BJP in the Assembly elections in northeastern states of Tripura, Meghalaya and Nagaland, whose results were declared on Saturday.
BJP members felicitate PM @narendramodi at #Parliament for party's success in recently held Assembly elections in three North Eastern States pic.twitter.com/YEpTFmtwnZ
— Doordarshan News (@DDNewsLive) March 5, 2018
Among the group of MPs were Smriti Irani, Vijay Goel, Jitendra Singh, Prakash Javadekar, Giriraj Singh, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, Kiren Rijiju, Piyush Goyal and Suresh Pradesh.
In the Assembly elections in the northeastern states, the BJP performed exceptionally well by ousting Manik Sarkar-led Left Front government in Tripura and toppling the Congress government in Meghalaya with help of allies.
In Tripura, the BJP and its ally Indigenous People's Front of Tripura (IPFT), a tribal-dominated party, together won 43 out of 59 Tripura constituencies. The BJP on its own won 35 seats, four more than the half-way mark, while its ally IPFT won eight seats.
Following the defeat, Manik Sarkar, who governed the state for almost two decades, resigned as the Chief Minister of Tripura. He was asked by the Governor to continue as the caretaker CM of the state until the new government was sworn in.
The results of the Tripura elections witnessed the decimation of the CPM government in one of the last remaining Left bastions, where the party was in power for 25 years.
The BJP, which had no MLAs in the outgoing Assembly and polled just 1.5 percent votes in the 2013 elections, losing deposits in 49 of the 50 constituencies it contested, secured over 42 percent of votes.
The Congress, which had 10 members in the outgoing Assembly, drew a blank this time.
