Shillong, Feb 7: With 42 candidates of the party in fray for the upcoming 2-phase Manipur Assembly polls, National People’s Party (NPP) national president and Meghalaya chief minister Conrad K Sangma is confident that his party will cross the double digit figure in the upcoming polls.

“We are confident that we will cross the double digit figure. We hope we will do far better than what we did last time,” Sangma told reporters.

The elections for the 60-member Manipur Assembly will be conducted in two phases on February 27 and March 3, with counting of votes on March 10.

In 2017, the NPP contested only nine seats in which it won four seats and emerged as kingmaker. Without NPP’s support, the BJP would not have been able to form a coalition government.

When asked if the BJP would spoil his party chances, Sangma however said, “I don’t want to say anybody is spoiling anybody’s chances or it could be the other way saying NPP is spoiling the BJP’s chances, I don’t think we are looking at it that way.”

He further made it clear that the NPP is an independent party and is fighting every election on its own.

“In some constituencies we are fighting with Congress, in some constituencies we are fighting with BJP and in some constituencies we are fighting with NPF so it depends from constituency to constituency and let’s see how things go but as I said I expect that NPP will do far better than last time,” he said.

NPP not team-B of BJP 

Meanwhile, the NPP chief also maintained that the NPP is not B-Team of the BJP.

“I don’t see any reason for anybody to make that statement because we have been very clear, we have stood our grounds wherever we needed to, we have challenge stands which the BJP has taken sometimes when we feel it goes against our ideologies and when it goes against the interest of our people and our state and our region so just because we work in a coalition with them, to tag us a B-team is completely incorrect,” he said.