The key to the Bharatiya Janata Party’s game plan for victory in Assam’s legislative elections in the spring of 2016 rests essentially on two very different figures: Sarbananda Sonowal, the Youth Affairs and Sports Minister at the Centre, who is the new President of the BJP in Assam, and Himanta Biswa Sarma, a long-time Congress leader who knows the in and outs of Congress, local politics as well as government systems as few others.
Facing them is Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi of Congress, battling an anti-incumbency factor (having won three straight elections) and an array of party veterans. The Asom Gana Parishad of former Chief Minister Prafulla Mahanta is barely regarded as a major contender but two major parties which are regarded as crucial to either side’s success or failure are Badruddin Ajmal’s All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF) and the Bodoland Peoples Party which has held power in the Bodoland Territorial Council in Western Assam for a decade. While there are efforts by Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, riding on his recent success, to stitch the first three into an electoral alliance and thus unitedly dent the BJP’s chances, the Bodoland party has not made up its mind, having shared power with the Congress on earlier occasions.
Assam is a complex vortex of numerous competing ethnicities, linguistic and political groups with many large minority groups but few majorities. Thus, while Hindus continue to be the overall majority, the 2011 Census report said that Muslims comprised 34.2 percent of the overall population. Hindu groups are subdivided into many factions spread over diverse geographical areas and ethnic loyalties.
This is where the Sonowal-Sarma combination comes into play: Sonowal is a shrewd organizer of student politics and popular protests through his earlier innings in the influential All Assam Students Union and as an MP from the Asom Gana Parishad. He has enviable networks among youth groups but held his first non-organizational post when he was appointed to Prime Minister Narenda Modi’s Council of Ministers last year.
That time, the BJP was on a high not just nationally but also in Assam, having captured not less than seven of 14 Parliamentary seats in the state, its best tally ever, crushing Congress heavyweights such as Pawan Singh Ghatowar and BK Handique, both Central ministers.
Translated into assembly seats, the party had technically registered gains in 66 legislative seats or over double what it won in 2009. The Congress hold fell to 22 from 61. But politics is not that simple in Assam. The task appears simple but is profoundly challenging in a complex state where every few kilometres, ethnic, religious and social lines change.
This is where Sarma comes in: as Gogoi’s one-time chief aide and trouble-shooter, he knows, more than anyone else, how the Congress leadership thinks and its possible strategies, its strengths and weaknesses. He is a deft analyst of election trends and the ebb and flow of issues in different constituencies. Today, he is bitterly divided from his mentor and has even filed a defamation suit against the veteran leader. This is a far cry from the time when Gogoi reposed so much trust in him that he would frequently send his adviser to Delhi to convey sensitive messages about political matters in Assam to the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress President Sonia Gandhi.
The trust factor began to change when Gogoi’s son, Gaurav, was brought into the Congress Party. The Chief Minister defended the move saying that Gaurav had every right to aspire to a leadership role as did anyone else and could not be blocked just because of his lineage. The younger Gogoi and Sarma saw political rivals in each other; Sarma was deeply offended by what he regarded as his mentor’s lack of faith and was allegedly tailed closely by sleuths.
After many months of speculation, Sarma finally walked over to the BJP and is now marshalling the anti-Congress forces as its chief campaigner. He clarified one of the planks of his strategy, that of dividing the Congress: “The state government is suffering from anti-incumbency and we will have to bring in (Congress) people who are free of anti-incumbency. We cannot risk transferring of anti-incumbency from Congress to BJP.” The former right-hand man and his right-wing allies are shaking the once-apparently unassailable Congress bastion.
However, given Assam’s complicated politics, many eyes are also on a person who has battled Congress for years and is bitterly opposed to the BJP as well: AIUDF founder Ajmal, who won three Lok Sabha seats last year, says that he is for a “Mahagatbandan formula” and has not set any condition on an alliance with Congress and the AGP to deny power to the BJP. His seat ratio in the Assembly rose from 10 on debut in 2006 to 18 in 2011. Not only is Ajmal a smart politician but also a hugely successful perfume baron and a cleric. He has cannily picked Hindus, Muslims and tribal candidates in various elections and has campaigned against the politics of discrimination that the Hindu right-wing has spewed against Muslims of Bengali origin.
Indeed, recent judicial pronouncements on alleged Bangladeshi immigration into the state, a highly emotive issue, as well as a report claiming that Muslims would be a majority later this century in Assam, are being used extensively by the BJP and its right-wing cohorts to drum up communal feelings. The ‘Bangladeshi’ phrase is used often as a pejorative without discriminating between Muslims of Indian origin and settlers from outside, without regard to facts but only to sweeping rhetoric. Part of this resulted in a communal horror in 1983 in which thousands died, a majority of them local Muslims. Attacks on Muslim groups and Bodos in western Assam in recent years also have sharpened cleavages and concerns. Such fears are likely to help Ajmal and the Congress mobilize the minority vote.
The BJP would need to see how its clear gains in Upper Assam in the Lok Sabha elections, especially among the tea garden and Nepali communities, would balance this. The anti-Muslim stand may rebound on the party: its welcome to Hindu migrants from Bangladesh is strongly resented as is its failure to protect ‘Assam’s interests’ despite proclamations that it would oppose any border deal with Bangladesh. Yet, Mr Modi himself pushed through the historic land agreement, apart from providing a $ 2 billion line of credit and launching bus services between Dhaka and North-eastern cities.
The Prime Minister courageously chose statesmanship above politics. The question is whether this will work against the BJP or in its favour. The author is Director of the Centre for North East Studies and policy Research at Jamia Millia Islamia and one of the region’s most respected authors, analysts and commentators
| Edited By: Sanjoy Hazarika |Source: DNA |Updated: Dec 25, 2015, 06:45 AM IST
