Shillong: The near-complete disintegration of the United Democratic Party (UDP) has exposed deeper vulnerabilities facing regional parties in Meghalaya, Cabinet Minister and National People’s Party (NPP) leader Paul Lyngdoh warned on Thursday. He said the UDP’s collapse stemmed directly from leadership failure and the absence of a functioning collective structure, adding that the episode carries lessons beyond the party’s loss of legislative strength.
The remarks follow a major exodus: 11 of the UDP’s 12 MLAs quit the party, with eight joining the BJP and three, including Lyngdoh, moving to the NPP. Only party president Metbah Lyngdoh remains in the 60-member House. Metbah resigned from the Cabinet on 31 October, and the UDP then withdrew support from the NPP-led Meghalaya Democratic Alliance government, ending an eight-year partnership. Paul Lyngdoh was inducted into the Cabinet in the resulting vacancy and now holds the Tourism, Social Welfare and Arts & Culture portfolios. The NPP now has 36 MLAs and the BJP 10, giving the government a comfortable majority.
Speaking to The Shillong Times, Lyngdoh said any political organisation depends on the quality of its leadership and the leader’s ability to build and sustain a united team. “Everything, any organisation, any team always requires a good captain. A good captain can nurture a good team,” he said.
He was sharply critical of his former party’s internal evolution, alleging that the UDP never developed genuine collective leadership and instead narrowed its focus to individual constituencies. “This has not happened in the UDP. It became absolutely constituency-centric, which is why the inevitable happened,” he said. Lyngdoh framed the crisis as a structural failure: the party could not maintain a shared political identity once constituency interests dominated, and it ceased to function as a coherent organisation capable of holding its legislators together under political pressure.
He suggested the UDP’s plight illustrates the difficulty regional parties face in preserving cohesion when leadership fails to cultivate collective purpose and when the pull of national and larger state parties grows stronger. The UDP, which had 12 seats after the 2023 elections and was once a significant coalition partner, now stands outside the government with a single legislator. Lyngdoh’s critique frames the setback as a cautionary example of what happens when regional outfits lose the internal discipline needed to survive in an increasingly consolidated political landscape.
Original Source: https://theshillongtimes.com/2026/11/06/udps-downfall-an-existential-test-for-regional-parties-paul/
Category: MEGHALAYA
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Publish Date: 2026-11-06 00:18:00
