Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma met with his Meghalaya counterpart Conrad Sangma at midnight, amid a forecast by exit polls of a hung assembly in the state, several reports emerged on Wednesday.
According to the reports, Assam CM Sarma met with the Meghalaya CM at midnight. This comes a day before the counting of votes for the recently held assembly elections in the three northeastern states of Tripura, Nagaland and Meghalaya.
Meghalaya CM Conrad Sangma, the chief of National People’s Party (NPP), decided to go solo this term in the assembly elections. His party alongside Himanta Biswa Sarma’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been running the state government in Meghalaya under the banner of Meghalaya Democratic Alliance.
Reports claimed that Conrad Sangma and Himanta Biswa Sarma met in an restricted environment at a hotel in Guwahati to discuss the possibility of a post-election alliance between the two parties in Meghalaya.
Following the meeting, Conrad Sangma returned to his hometown Tura in Meghalaya, this morning, people familiar with the matter said.
Assam CM Himanta Biswa Sarma is known as the BJP’s northeast strategist after his big contribution in brining down the Congress government in 2016 and forming the first BJP government in the region.
His meeting with the Meghalaya CM will not have gone unnoticed and speculations will now be rife over a post-election alliance between the two parties to form a government in the state.
However, the meeting is being downplayed at the moment as two friends catching, reported by PTI quoting an unnamed source. PTI quoted the source as saying, “Sangma was in Guwahati last night and Sarma, his friend, came and visited him at the hotel. They had a one-to-one meeting.”
It may be noted that Assam CM Himanta Biswa Sarma also leads the BJP-led North East Development Alliance (NEDA), which has already announced that it will not enter into an alliance with either the Congress or the Trinamool Congress to form a government if such a situation came to the fore.
CM Sarma had said on Tuesday that apart from Meghalaya, he was confident that there will be no hung assembly in Tripura and Nagaland, where elections were held recently.
