P A Sangma is a confident father. The former Lok Sabha Speaker and NCP national general secretary doesn't think daughter Agatha K Sangma will have any difficulty retaining the Tura Lok Sabha seat. Otherwise, he wouldn't have left her alone for most of campaign in Meghalaya's Garo Hills.

This is Sangma's fiefdom and he knows the surname works like magic here. Thirty-one years after he was first elected to the Lok Sabha, Sangma's sons James and Conrad are both MLAs while daughter Agatha was elected to the Lok Sabha last year.

This was evident during the 2008 Tura Lok Sabha bypoll when Agatha's transition from a Delhi-based lawyer to an MP went off smoothly. In fact, she retained the seat for the family with a massive margin of one lakh votes.

Today, just Sangma's wife and his elder daughter are away from the, often turbulent, world of Meghalaya politics. Conrad, who last year became the state's youngest finance minister at 30 in the then Meghalaya Progressive Alliance coalition Government, assures that his mother and eldest sister Christie will be looking after the businesses of the Sangma Group of Companies.

As the senior Sangma decided to contest the Assembly election last year and prop up his 27-year-old daughter from the Tura seat he vacated, his political detractors, especially the Congress, accused him of unleashing “dynastic politics” in Meghalaya. They said Sangma had turned the NCP— which he floated along with Sharad Pawar after breaking away from the Congress—into a family enterprise in the state.

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