When I entered the 2023 election, the political mood felt divided between dissatisfaction with the incumbent government and hesitation about what could realistically replace it.
There was a sense that the government had not done enough on issues that mattered directly to people: roads and infrastructure, development in remote areas, tourism, and long-standing concerns around the Assam-Meghalaya border. At the same time, the ruling National People's Party retained something difficult to manufacture in politics: familiarity and a sense of ownership. Conrad Sangma was still widely viewed as a son of the soil, even among people who believed the government had fallen short.
The opposition space, meanwhile, was fragmented.
Congress had history and an organically established support base, but its organisation and leadership were visibly weakened. Trinamool Congress had arrived with scale, resources and a new political proposition, but its biggest challenge was also immediately apparent: it had to overcome the perception of being an outside party entering Meghalaya.
Then there was the Voice of the People Party.
VPP was different. It felt native to the political mood of the state. Its appeal was rooted in local identity and a proposition that Meghalaya could be governed differently. Yet even people who liked VPP were often unsure whether a new party could actually translate that support into government.
That uncertainty, more than any single issue, defined the election.
A campaign cannot be transplanted
Working on the Trinamool Congress campaign gave me an unusual view of what happens when a national-scale campaign approach enters a state with an intensely local political culture.
We changed the scale and style of campaigning.
Large public rallies, extensive communication, sharper issue-based campaigns and a much more intensive campaign machinery brought a different energy to Meghalaya's electoral landscape.
But Meghalaya also taught me the limits of scale.
A campaign can create visibility. It can create momentum. It can ensure that a party is heard in places where it was previously absent.
What it cannot easily do is manufacture a political proposition that people instinctively feel belongs to them.
That distinction became particularly important in Meghalaya.
The state may be small geographically, but politically it is deeply fragmented. Khasi Hills, Jaintia Hills and Garo Hills are not simply different regions on a map. They have different histories, social structures, languages, political cultures and electoral instincts.
The distance between Shillong and Tura is not merely measured in kilometres.
It is measured in how people understand politics.
That is why I came away believing that there is no single Meghalaya election.
There are 60 different elections taking place at the same time.
The candidate often matters as much as the party
One of the clearest lessons from the ground was the importance of individual candidates.
In a state where political relationships are often deeply personal and constituencies are relatively compact, voters know their candidates. They know their MLAs. They know who has been around, who has delivered, who can access power and who can be trusted to represent the constituency.
Party identity matters, but it often arrives through the candidate.
For an established regional party like NPP, that identity was naturally embedded in the state's political landscape. For VPP, it was being built organically from the ground up.
For TMC, this was much harder.
The party could bring resources, campaign machinery and visibility, but it still had to overcome a fundamental question in the minds of voters: does this party belong here?
That question cannot be answered by advertising.
It has to be answered by political credibility.
The border changed the political conversation
One moment that particularly stayed with me was the impact of the Assam-Meghalaya border issue.
The border dispute was already an established political issue, but the violence around the disputed border, particularly the incident at Mukroh, gave it a much more immediate emotional dimension during the election period.
This was a reminder that campaigns do not always control the issues that ultimately define them.
A single incident can change the emotional temperature of an election.
And when that happens, months of campaign planning can suddenly have to respond to a new political reality.
Meghalaya was never a two-party election
Another mistake would be to read the election simply through the NPP versus opposition lens.
The presence of UDP, HSPDP, VPP, TMC, Congress and local candidates meant that many constituencies were multi-cornered contests where the distribution of votes mattered as much as the aggregate support for a party.
VPP was particularly interesting.
Its 2023 result was modest in seat terms: four seats. But it received more than 100,000 votes, around 5.5% of the statewide vote, despite contesting only 18 constituencies.
That was easy to underestimate if you looked only at the final seat tally.
But electoral influence is not always proportional to the number of seats won.
A party can be important because of where its votes are concentrated, whose votes it takes, and how it changes the arithmetic of individual constituencies.
Rajabala offered an almost perfect illustration.
TMC's Mizanur Rahman Kazi defeated NPP's Md Abdus Saleh by just 10 votes.
Ten votes.
In an election where thousands of votes can be cast in a constituency, the difference between winning and losing can sometimes be smaller than the number of people in a room.
That is what makes constituency-level analysis so important.
What the statewide result misses
The final result was straightforward enough: NPP emerged as the largest party with 26 seats, while UDP won 12, TMC and Congress won five each, and VPP won four.
But the more interesting story was underneath it.
TMC's votes were drawn substantially from the existing Congress space. TMC and Congress together polled roughly 27% of the vote, against NPP's 31%, underscoring how a more consolidated opposition could have materially altered the electoral arithmetic, even if the votes were not perfectly transferable.
VPP was able to attract support from multiple established parties, including NPP and TMC. Regional parties remained highly relevant. And in many constituencies, local factors could override the broader state narrative.
The election also demonstrated something that I think is often missed when Meghalaya is viewed from outside the Northeast:
political trends in the state can emerge well before they become visible in the national conversation.
VPP was a particularly good example.
It was already building a distinct political identity in 2023. Yet a party like that can be easy to dismiss from New Delhi because it does not fit neatly into a national electoral narrative.
For anyone analysing Meghalaya, that is a mistake.
What Meghalaya taught me
My biggest takeaway from Meghalaya was simple.
Digital campaigns and communications matter enormously in modern elections. But communication cannot substitute for political authenticity.
People are remarkably sensitive to whether a political narrative feels natural or manufactured.
You can build a bigger rally.
You can reach more people.
You can run a more sophisticated communication campaign.
You can put a campaign message in front of almost everyone.
But if the proposition itself does not feel organic to the voter, scale can actually create more scrutiny rather than less.
Meghalaya taught me that the most effective campaigns are not necessarily the ones that impose the strongest narrative on an electorate.
They are the ones that understand the narrative already forming among the people, and then find a way to organise, sharpen and amplify it.
That, ultimately, is the difference between campaigning at people and campaigning with them.
And in Meghalaya, perhaps more than anywhere else I had worked until then, I learned that there is no substitute for understanding the story of every constituency before attempting to tell the story of the state.
Source: Election Commission of India results, 2009 onwards. Method and limits