The Congress in Cachar received a significant pre-election boost on Sunday when at least 325 cadres — predominantly from the AGP and a handful from the TMC — formally joined the party ahead of the Sonai constituency election.
The mass joining ceremony was held at Indira Bhawan in Silchar, with AICC observer Vikash Upadhyay, district Congress president Sajal Acharjee, and Sonai Congress candidate Aminul Haque Laskar welcoming the new members into the fold.
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The defections are directly linked to a controversial candidate selection in Sonai. The AGP fielded Karim Uddin Barbhuiyan Saju — an MLA who recently resigned from his previous party — as its candidate for the seat.
The decision did not go down well with a significant section of the AGP's local base. In protest, a large number of party workers chose to leave and have now pledged to work for Congress candidate Aminul Haque Laskar's victory instead.
The most striking voice among the defectors was Ayesha Sultana Chowdhury — a central committee member of the AGP and chairperson of the Assam Minority Council — who did not hold back in her criticism of the party's current leadership.
"The regional party had sacrificed the ideology of the party in exchange for power and profit," she said after formally joining the Congress.
Chowdhury directed her sharpest criticism at AGP president Atul Bora, accusing him of betraying the party to protect his ministerial position. She alleged that the BJP has effectively "completely hijacked" the AGP — a party that was born out of the six-year Assam agitation and built on a distinct regional identity.
The Sonai seat carries its own layered political context. Following the 2023 delimitation exercise, the constituency now has a voter composition of over 80 percent Muslim voters — a demographic shift that has significantly altered its electoral calculus.
In an ironic twist, Congress candidate Aminul Haque Laskar himself is a former BJP MLA who left the party after the delimitation reshaped Sonai's boundaries and voter base.
The contest in Sonai is shaping up as a multi-cornered fight, with Sunday's mass defections adding fresh momentum to the Congress campaign in a seat that has seen considerable political churn in recent months.