Assam Elections 2016: Real test for BJP starts now

There is a telling detail in the Assam assembly election result. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) emerged the first-time victor with 60 seats in a House of 126 and its share of votes polled stood at 29.5 per cent, tantalisingly behind outgoing Congress’s 26 seats with 31 per cent vote-share. This is due to the inbuilt anomaly of the difference between the votes polled and seats won in a First Past The Post system. But with its allies, Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) polling 8.1 per cent of votes and 14 seats, and the Bodo People’s Front winning 12 seats and 3.9 per cent votes, the BJP-led alliance scooped up 86 seats and a vote percentage of 41. 5 per cent. There is a temptation to contrast this figure with the combined percentage share of votes polled by the Congress and the All India United Democratic Front’s (AIDUF) 13 per cent and 13 seats which would add up to 44 per cent and 39 seats. The anomaly cannot be dismissed as an inherent flaw of the system. The BJP-AGP-BPF coalition would have to keep in mind that they need to respect the people who did not vote for them.

What has excited the BJP and the political observers is the fact of the right-wing party’s victory in the state. The reasons are obvious. The BJP had been hoping to win a big victory for a long time. It was indeed crestfallen when it could not make it in the last assembly elections in 2011 as it had fervently hoped. This time round things seem to have fallen in place for the BJP. The win in the Lok Sabha election of 2014 has been of great significance, though this has not been the case in the other recent state assembly elections, especially in Delhi and Bihar. Secondly, it had found two able and energetic leaders in the ground, Sarbananda Sonowal and Himanta Biswa Sarma. Both of them have won their political spurs as members of the All Assam Students Union (AASU), which had led the successful anti-foreigner, anti-outsider agitation in the early 1980s, and which led to the successful emergence of the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP). The BJP had been a strident supporter of the AASU-led agitation. With the foreigner/outsider issue coinciding with the Indian Hindu and Bangladeshi Muslim divide, it was a natural hunting ground for the right-wing Hindutva party. But it had to bide time for three decades before it could come into its own. The BJP had to wait for the marginalisation of the AGP for it to strike out. It was necessary for the BJP to find local leaders, to find acceptability among the people. The hard work of party president Amit Shah and the putative charisma of Prime Minister Narendra Modi would not have been sufficient to steer to victory.

The key question that remains is whether the BJP would learn to carry the 30 per cent Muslim population of the state, or if it would want to persist with communal polarisation that it had ostensibly indulged in during the election campaign. There is reason to believe that the BJP will moderate and modulate its Hindutva rhetoric and accept the obligations of governance which would require to deal fairly with the Muslim population, and display sufficient tact in grappling with the issue of the prickly Bangladeshi infiltrators issue. The fact that the Modi government had eagerly settled the boundary issue by swapping the enclaves is a sign that the party understands the imperatives of governance.