Assam: Congress, Gogoi, Madani accused of playing ‘pawns of opportunism’

Staff reporter

Guwahati: The state Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Tuesday alleged that a conspiracy to disrupt Assam’s social harmony was hatched during a dinner meeting in Delhi on July 23.

Addressing reporters at the party headquarters, Atal Bihari Vajpayee Bhawan, BJP spokesperson Ranjib Kumar Sharma claimed that Rajya Sabha MP Arsad Madani was a “sleeper cell of the Congress.” He pointed out that although Madani entered the Upper House as a joint candidate of the Samajwadi Party and Congress, he had long been aligned with Congress politics, campaigning extensively for Congress-backed candidates in several states during the last Lok Sabha elections.

Sharma accused the Assam Congress of “hypocrisy” for attempting to portray Madani as a “BJP agent,” saying his political affiliations were evident. He further alleged that Assam Jatiya Parishad (AJP) president Lurinjyoti Gogoi had abandoned his earlier regionalist stance and had now become a “blue-eyed boy of 10 Janpath,” acting as a vocal propagandist for Congress’s “communal polarization strategy.”

Calling this shift an “ideological decline” and a matter of “deep political shame,” Sharma claimed that Madani’s arrival in Assam was part of a premeditated communal design. He alleged that during the July 23 dinner, attended by senior leaders of the Congress, Samajwadi Party, National Conference, and others, a blueprint was drawn up to politicize the issue of eviction of illegal encroachers in Assam, with the aim of sparking communal unrest.

Citing subsequent events, Sharma pointed to the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind’s meeting in Delhi on August 21, which demanded the resignation of the Assam Chief Minister, followed by civil society meetings in Guwahati involving Dr. Hiren Gohain and Ajit Kumar Bhuyan. He also referred to speeches by Syeda Hameed in Guwahati and Delhi, which the BJP alleged promoted “anti-Assam propaganda,” just before Madani’s visit to the state.

“These developments were not accidental but part of a sequential, pre-planned design that originated from the July 23 dinner,” Sharma asserted.

Concluding his remarks, the BJP spokesperson said that despite these “conspiratorial maneuvers,” the people of Assam had rejected Congress’s “agenda of division and appeasement,” and that leaders like Arsad Madani and Lurinjyoti Gogoi had reduced themselves to “mere pawns in Congress’s chess game of political polarization.”

 Also read: Assam CM: Madani should feel the consequences of land grabbing

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