Congress in Assam

While the BJP and its allies—Asom Gana Parishad and Bodoland People’s Front—have registered a thumping landslide victory in the just-concluded high-voltage election to the 16th Assam Legislative Assembly, the Congress party has witnessed a significant never-before transformation. The party’s electoral presence has shrunk almost exclusively to those constituencies that are dominated by immigrant Muslims having roots in erstwhile East Bengal/Pakistan and present-day Bangladesh. It is significant to note that while the list of successful candidates belonging to the BJP-led alliance does not have even one Muslim, as many as 18 out of the 19 seats that the Congress party has won have returned Muslim candidates. This result has already triggered intense debate, with critics as well as its political opponents describing the party’s current standing as a “Muslim-only” outfit. Some have also compared it to the notorious Muslim League, which had, in the crucial juncture of India attaining independence, sought to slice away Assam and merge it with East Pakistan. Several factors contribute to the shift. Looking back, one will find that the support base of the All-India United Democratic Front (AIUDF)—a political party formed by perfume tycoon Badruddin Ajmal in the backdrop of the Supreme Court scrapping the notorious IM(DT) Act on July 12, 2005—had started shifting towards the Congress in the 2024 Lok Sabha election. Ajmal himself had lost his Dhubri seat to Rakibul Hussain of the Congress. Since 2005, Muslim votes have been divided between Congress and the AIUDF. But this time, a significant section of minority voters shifted entirely to Congress. Simultaneously, the BJP worked hard to assure the indigenous communities of Assam of its commitment to protect “jati-mati-bheti” from the onslaught of the massive demographic invasion. This helped the BJP secure a strong, unified mandate among the indigenous, tribal, and tea-garden communities, apart from all sections of Hindus, including the Hindi-speaking and Bengali-speaking settlers. The strong stand taken by Dr. Himanta Biswa Sarma to free land from the clutches of the suspected illegal migrants in the past five years helped in driving this assurance better. What also worked is the well-crafted narrative centering round the alleged Pakistan connection of Congress leader Gaurav Gogoi, an allegation that the latter could not dismiss assertively. This issue particularly squeezed the Congress out of its former strongholds in upper Assam. The constituency delimitation exercise of 2023 also played a crucial role, an exercise that redrew the constituency boundaries to focus more on demographic identity, an issue that the Congress had no scope to tackle.