Former Meghalaya Chief Minister Mukul Sangma and 11 other Congress legislators shifting loyalties to Trinamool Congress (TMC) in Meghalaya have left the grand old party further marginalized in the Northeast. The Congress, which emerged as the single largest party in the last Assembly polls in Meghalaya held in 2018, is now left with only five legislators when the next Assembly polls are due in 2023. The development is not limited to the state of Meghalaya and is seen as part of the larger political manoeuvring of replacing Congress with TMC as the principal party in the block of a non-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) opposition ahead of 2024 Lok Sabha polls. The TMC retaining power in West Bengal with landslide victory under the leadership of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has emboldened this political aspiration articulated and strategized by election strategist Prashant Kishore to help expand the party's base pan India. The high-command culture of the Congress has little space for regional Satraps like Mukul Sangma in party's policymaking and final decision even in respect of state units is taken by a coterie of leaders known to be in the good book of the Nehru-Gandhi family. This allowed the political space for the TMC to woo disgruntled Congress leaders into its fold towards achieving its political ambition. Differences cropped up within the Congress party following the appointment of senior Congress leader and Member of Parliament Vincent H Pala as the Meghalaya Pradesh Congress Committee President and speculations were doing rounds since then about Mukul Sangma joining TMC. The image of Congress becoming a divided house among the general public, even after former Congress Chief Rahul Gandhi met both Sangma and Pala to end the differences, helped the ruling National People's Party (NPP) and its ally United Democratic Party win all the three seats in which bye-elections were held. The NPP and its allies including the BJP have nothing much to worry about over the merger of the 12 Congress legislators with AITC for now as it has only left the opposition bench in the Meghalaya Assembly divided and weakened. The electoral setback convinced Sangma and his followers to jump ship to TMC. The TMC has also forayed into Assam and Tripura and its performance in the Tripura municipal polls in which the party is locked in a fierce battle with the ruling BJP will be a pointer if it is closer to its political ambition of setting the narrative of the party replacing Congress as the major opposition party in the country or end up weakening the opposition. Mukul Sangma citing the failure of the Congress party to play the role of the main opposition party in the country as one of the primary reasons for joining the TMC is seen as the efforts by Mamata Banerjee's party to set this narrative ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. The political fate of TMC notwithstanding, the Congress has to swallow the bitter pill that its failure to strike a chord with regional aspirations in the Northeast has led to the party losing ground in the region which was once its stronghold. The NPP, on the other hand, has expanded its footprint in the region having won seats in Arunachal Pradesh and Manipur apart from wearing the crown in Meghalaya. Marginalization of the Congress in Assam in the 2021 Assembly elections and recent Assembly by-polls and emergence of NPP and TMC as the new pan-Northeast players, the electorates in the region will now have more options to choose rather than shifting between Congress and BJP as the two main political camps when it comes to electing their representatives to the Lok Sabha. The TMC game plan of growing at the cost of the Congress throws up the possibility of opposition parties being divided into two political camps with Congress and left parties and their close allies in one camp and regional parties like TMC, Aam Admi Party, Samajwadi Party which are desperate to have a pan-India footprint in the other. The Congress has lessons to learn from the latest political development in Meghalaya that desertion of party leaders in different states to TMC will push the party to a stage in which it will have less bargaining power in the event all opposition parties decide to have an electoral alliance to take on the BJP and its allies in the next Lok Sabha polls. Ahead of the Lok Sabha polls, the TMC emerging as the major opposition party in Meghalaya has indicated that 2023 Assembly elections in the north-eastern state are poised to be triangular. The Congress in the northeast faces the daunting task of retaining its position as one of the key players in the electoral politics of the region. Electoral politics being a game of possibilities and numbers, it is, however, too early to say the final word.