Pema Khandu’s bastion to witness poll contest for the first time in 20 years

GUWAHATI: The Mukto assembly constituency in Arunachal Pradesh, held by chief minister Pema Khandu since 2011 and his father Dorjee Khandu before that, will witness a contest for the first time in two decades. The Arunachal assembly election will be held simultaneously with the polls for the state’s two Lok Sabha seats on April 11.


Thupten Kunphen, the 57-year-old former abbot of Gaden Rabgyel Lling Monastery in Arunachal Pradesh’s Bomdila, will take on BJP’s Khandu as a Congress candidate in the assembly seat in Tawang district, bordering China. Another monk, anti-dam activist Lobsang Gyatso, was in the running for the seat as a JD(S) candidate but dropped out of the race in deference to the Geshe (an equivalent of a PhD in Buddhist philosophy).

Mukto, with 8,000 voters, has been the bastion of the Khandu family since 1990, when the first assembly election was held three years after the state came into existence. Dorjee won unopposed then. Since 1999, again, the family has won the seat unopposed. After Dorjee died in a chopper crash in 2011, his son Pema took on the mantle and won the byelection that year and the subsequent 2014 assembly election from the seat without a contest.

“I am fighting the election to save democracy. We, as followers of Buddhism, believe in ahimsa (non-violence). Two of our monks died in police firing during a protest against large dams at Tawang in 2016. Development on all fronts has taken a back seat,” Kunphen said.

This was also the protest that brought Gyatso, an unrelenting crusader against big dam projects in the state, into the spotlight. His arrest in April 2016 that had catalyzed a protest by monks at Tawang, which took a violent turn and led to police firing. “I decided not to contest the election out of respect for Kunphen, a former abbot and senior monk,” Gyatso said. The move will also counter a split in anti-BJP votes.

While Khandu could not be contacted, a close aide said the chief minister will come back to power because the people of Mukto have “seen development” under the present BJP government. “The entire state has witnessed progress. Opposition may say anything, but the people are with us,” the aide added.

Other members of the Khandu family are also in the fray — Pema’s younger brother Tsering Tashi is contesting the Tawang seat while his cousin Jambey Tashi is in the running for the Lumla seat. Jambey is also up against a monk, Jampa Thrinly Kunkhap, who is contesting as a National People’s Party candidate.

The issues Pema’s challenger Kunphen and Gyatso have raised — the issue of large dams — have brought several opposition candidates and activists together. They have floated the Tawang Democratic Front to voice protests against ‘vendetta politics’ and big dams that threaten the culture, people and sacred Buddhist sites at Tawang, home to the Buddhist Monpa tribe. Thirteen large dams are planned in Tawang alone, out of over 100 MoUs signed between the state government and different dam developers. Kunphen is one of the signatories of TDF’s vision document, as is Jampa.