Profiles | Phangnon Konyak |
Soon after S. Phangnon Konyak was elected unopposed Nagaland’s first woman Rajya Sabha member on March 24, Pradesh Congress Committee president Kewekhape Therie was quoted as saying that Nagaland’s 60 legislators destroyed the image of “the Christian State”.
Mr. Therie was targeting the “Hindutva” BJP, Ms. Konyak’s party and minor partner in the coalition government headed by the Nationalist Democratic Progressive Party. But many attributed his statement to the general perception that women have no place in the State’s “money- and muscle-powered” politics. Nagaland has not had a single woman MLA since it attained statehood in December 1963.
Ms. Konyak, president of the BJP’s State Mahila Morcha, will be the first woman to represent Nagaland in the Rajya Sabha but not the first MP. The trendsetter was Rano M. Shaiza, who won the State’s lone Lok Sabha seat as a candidate of the United Democratic Party in 1977.
But the BJP leader’s elevation to the Upper House is seen as a bigger political statement, partly because she belongs to the Konyak community.
Thirteen of her tribesmen were killed in a botched ambush by an elite unit of the Army and subsequent violence at Oting on December 4 and 5, 2021. Another was shot in Mon, her hometown. Her election underlined the increasing clout of the BJP in the State with the allies deciding not to field their own candidates. It also made the BJP come across as a party that gives more space to women, who invariably outvote men in Nagaland’s elections. In the 2018 Assembly election, 86.04% of the women cast their votes as against 81.68% of men. In the 2013 election, the number of women electors was 2.24% higher.
Joining BJP
The BJP had named Ms. Konyak as its Rajya Sabha candidate a few days after the Nagaland government, directed by the Supreme Court, decided to conduct the elections to the urban local bodies (ULBs) with 33% reservation for women in keeping with the 74th Amendment of the Constitution. This was perhaps coincidental for Ms. Konyak, who had joined the BJP in 2017 when the State government’s bid to hold the ULB polls with the 33% quota for women triggered widespread violence.
Ms. Konyak, 44, hopes her election to the Rajya Sabha would encourage women in Nagaland to “achieve the impossible” and break one glass ceiling after another. She has “many areas to focus on” during her stint in Parliament, including following up on the investigation into the Oting incident to ensure the victims get justice.
Friends and acquaintances say Ms. Konyak’s forte is patience, perhaps imbibed from her mother who retired as a teacher. She is also known to troubleshoot — a quality that came to the fore during her 16-year stint as the chief functionary of an NGO called Walo Organisation in Mon district — like her father, a retired administrative officer. Her activities with the NGO included creating awareness of, and undertaking intervention programmes concerning, health, education, gender parity and promotion of agriculture.
Ms. Konyak had “no political affiliations” before joining the BJP in 2017. But she had a fair idea of politics in the national capital as the vice-president of the Delhi unit of the Tuensang Mon Students’ Union from 2002-03. That was before she obtained her Master’s in English literature from Delhi University.
Later, she had a taste of local-level politics as an adviser of the Konyak Students’ Union, a member of the Board of Directors of the Nagaland State Cooperative Bank, the president of the Kohima unit of the Eastern Nagaland Women’s Organisation and a member of the State-level Selection Committee for the Juvenile Justice Board and Child Welfare Committee of Nagaland, and from other assignments.
When she decided to take the political plunge, the BJP was her obvious choice. “I was interested in joining a national party. The growth trajectory of the BJP and its organisational set-up interested me,” she says. A devout Christian, she hopes her association with the party would translate into economic, social and political growth for everyone, especially for women, in Nagaland.
