Amit Shah’s visit

Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s two-day visit to Guwahati on Thursday and Friday will remain significant for several reasons. Looking from the political angle, his speech at the NDA Panchayat Pratinidhi Sanmilan was the most important, one in which he literally sounded the bugle for the BJP, keeping in mind the next Assam Assembly election, which is hardly eight months away from now. Speaking at the Panchayat rally, Shah declared that the BJP-led NDA would return to power for a third consecutive term in Assam in 2026. His optimism was based on the saffron party’s grassroots strength, in addition to its “uncompromising stand” on infiltration and land encroachment. Shah particularly highlighted the recent drives conducted by the Government of Assam against encroachers illegally occupying thousands of acres of forest land and land belonging to different Xatra institutions across the state. Shah also left no stone unturned in hitting out at the Congress party and particularly targeted Rahul Gandhi and Gaurav Gogoi and accused the Congress of remaining a patron of Bangladeshi infiltrators. Shah’s speech also several times mentioned protecting the indigenous people of Assam from the demographic invasion of people having roots in erstwhile East Bengal/Pakistan and present-day Bangladesh. It is also worth mentioning that while the people have started asking what happened to the BJP government’s promise made ten years ago of driving out Bangladeshi infiltrators, Shah took the opportunity to state that the government will fulfil this pledge “and remove infiltrators not only from Assam but from the entire nation.” The BJP-led government of Himanta Biswa Sarma, on the other hand, utilised the birth centenary of former Assam Chief Minister Golap Borbora to whip up political sentiments among the people by specifically harping on certain important decisions of the short-lived Borbora government. Coincidentally, it was during the short 18-month government of Golap Borbora as Chief Minister that the authorities had discovered that several thousand names of illegal migrants of East Pakistan and Bangladesh origin had enrolled themselves in the electoral rolls of the Mangaldoi Lok Sabha constituency and that Borbora had ordered deletion of those names from the rolls. Other programmes which the Union Home Minister attended included the inauguration of a National Cyber Forensic Laboratory at Golaghat, the newly constructed Brahmaputra wing of the Raj Bhavan in Guwahati, and the laying of the foundation stone and inauguration of various development projects for the Armed Forces in the region.