In 2016, the first BJP government in the Northeast was installed when the party dislodged the Congress after a 15-year run by the late Tarun Gogoi. After 10 years of dramatic changes across the region and the state, some things remain: 11 of the BJP’s candidates for the coming state election are former Congress MLAs from the Gogoi government the BJP had toppled.
The dramatic tale of Himanta Biswa Sarma is now a part of political folklore. Once the late CM’s blue-eyed boy, Sarma turned sour on him after he inducted his son Gaurav into politics. He quit the Congress — where he had been part of all three Tarun Gogoi governments — in 2015 to help strategise the BJP’s historic win the following year. Weeks after he joined the BJP, nine other Congress MLAs followed suit.
This circle of Congress MLAs and leaders around Sarma has grown consistently since then. Three of the most prominent members of his Cabinet once he slaked his ambition and assumed the Chief Minister’s office in 2021 are also Congress MLAs of that time who followed him to the BJP over the years: Ajanta Neog, who was also a minister in the final Tarun Gogoi government, and Pijush Hazarika and Jayanta Malla Baruah, who were young first-time MLAs in that last Congress government.
Pradyut Bordoloi’s entry into the BJP now cements this circle of influence even further, as the seniormost Congress leader from that time to follow in the CM’s footsteps. Like Sarma and Neog, he too was Tarun Gogoi’s minister, and even after the Congress government in the state collapsed, he was a Lok Sabha MP from the party. Leaving after over four decades with the Congress and a slew of party positions — including, distressingly for the Congress, as the head of its manifesto committee for the Assam election — and leaving a secular image behind, Bordoloi has cited his old relationship with Sarma to rationalise his decision to join a dispensation he has zealously criticised over the years.
Bhupen Borah, who had been appointed the Assam Congress president after the party’s debacle in the 2021 election, had also joined the BJP last month.
Now Bordoloi and Borah are among the BJP’s 88 announced candidates, and among 11 of those were Congress MLAs in the 2011-2016 term. The other nine are Sarma himself, Neog, Hazarika, Malla Baruah, Kamalakhya Dey Purkayastha (who also joined the BJP earlier this month), Pallab Lochan Das, Rupjyoti Kurmi, Sushanta Borgohain, and Bolin Chetia.
While Sarma has said that the party’s list recognises and platforms young first-time candidates — he named Pabitra Rabha from Boko, Himanshu Shekhar Baishya from Palasbari, Munindra Das from Behali, Rishiraj Das from Ronganodi, Rupali Langthasa from Diphu and Dhiraj Gowala from Titabor as examples — he continues to cultivate and nurture this circle of Congress alumni.
Two more of the former Congress MLAs from the 2011-2016 government — Pradan Baruah and Kripanath Mallah — are currently Lok Sabha MPs from the BJP. This coterie that wields influence in the BJP has been frequently cited as a source of grievances for members of the “old BJP”, those who had been affiliated with the party long before this group came in. In recent years, this has led to the flight of BJP veterans Rajen Gohain and Ashok Sarma.
Bordoloi’s candidacy from the Dispur has also led to outrage from the sitting BJP MLA there, Atul Bora, an Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) veteran who joined the BJP in 2013. Bora has alleged “betrayal”.
A pattern
This pattern of former Congress leaders being key to the rise of the BJP is also true of the two other Northeastern states in which the Congress has given way to the BJP since then: Arunachal Pradesh, where the BJP is led by Pema Khandu, and Manipur, where the party is led by N Biren Singh.
But in Assam, the continuous stream of prominent leaders to the BJP serves another purpose for Sarma: a flexing of power to assert that not only in the BJP, but his sphere of influence extends deep into the Congress. What makes Bordoloi and Borah’s departures from the Congress a sore point for the Opposition party is that Sarma had been taunting the party for quite a while now, not simply predicting but declaring that the two leaders would join him.
The next leader he is now making this assertion about is Debabrata Saikia, the Leader of the Opposition in the Assam Assembly and the son of former CM Hiteshwar Saikia, under whom Sarma joined the Congress. The message he constantly seeks to deliver is that he continues to be privy to the inner dynamics of the Opposition party, which is now led by his bete noire Gaurav Gogoi, in order to undermine it.
Of course, what is starkly different between the Congress MLAs of 2011-2016 and the BJP’s candidate list is the absence of Muslim candidates. In a state where the 2011 Census pegged the Muslim population as around 34%, the BJP has not fielded a single Muslim candidate this time. It will leave that to its regional ally, the AGP, to which three sitting Muslim MLAs from the AIUDF have jumped ship in the last couple of weeks.
