After being in the works for several years, collapsing multiple times, and a last-minute making of amends sealed with a hug, a Congress-led Opposition alliance featuring the Raijor Dal and the Assam Jatiya Parishad (AJP), two regional parties, was finally sealed last week, a little over a fortnight before Assam votes for its next government.
With the leaders of all three parties, co-incidentally all sharing the Gogoi surname, contesting from seats in proximity to each other in Upper Assam, a key question in this election is whether this alliance can make a dent in the region’s political map.
Upper Assam (eastern Assam) consists of the districts of Charaideo, Dhemaji, Dibrugarh, Golaghat, Jorhat, Lakhimpur, Majuli, Sivasagar, and Tinsukia. In 2021, the Congress won only five seats — Nazira, Titabor, Mariani, Thowra (all in the Jorhat-Sivasagar belt), and Naiboicha in Lakhimpur — out of 34 in the region, while Raijor Dal chief Akhil Gogoi won Sivasagar in the party’s political debut. A few months after the BJP returned to power, the MLAs from Mariani and Thowra, Rupjyoti Kurmi and Sushanta Borgohain, defected and retained their seats in bypolls.
It was a near wipeout, and with an election two weeks away in which the BJP appears confident and commanding, the Opposition hopes that the outcome will be different this time. This is particularly true of the key Ahom belt, where “the three Gogois” — they belong to the politically significant community — are contesting from.
Gaurav Gogoi, the current Assam Congress president and Lok Sabha MP who is the Opposition’s “CM face”, is carrying the political legacy of his father, the late CM Tarun Gogoi. He is contesting the state elections for the first time and is in the fray from Jorhat. Akhil Gogoi is the president of the Raijor Dal, which was formed in the aftermath of the anti-CAA protests in Assam. He is a former peasant leader with a long history of grassroots organisation and is seeking to retain Sivasagar. Former All Assam Students Union (AASU) leader Lurinjyoti Gogoi, who formed the AJP, also in the CAA aftermath, is contesting from Khowang. He has yet to register an electoral win.
“It’s very straightforward, the votes won’t be divided between the parties this time,” said Krishanu Baruah, a Congress leader from Jorhat. This was a particularly sore subject after the 2021 election, where the AJP and the Raijor Dal were in an alliance and the Congress led an alliance with the AIUDF and the Bodoland People’s Front. The calculations after the elections showed that in 14 seats — 11 of them in Upper Assam — the votes of the AJP or Raijor Dal, or both when the two parties contested against each other, were more than the BJP’s victory margin.
These numbers have become something of a mantra, not just among the parties themselves but also among supporters.
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In Azarguri village in the primarily rural Khowang constituency, where Lurinjyoti is making a bid for his first win, retired schoolteacher Tarun Ram Phukan (71) believes that “for progress, the government should keep changing” even as he recounts the numbers from the last few elections.
“As a party that was just formed about 100 days before the 2021 election, the AJP got more than 9,000 votes here. Lurin campaigned here when he contested for the Dibrugarh Lok Sabha seat in 2024 too and he did quite well here. Without the division of votes, he might have an edge,” said Phukan. Lurinjyoti is going up against the two-time BJP MLA Chakradhar Gogoi.
Beyond the arithmetic, in Sivasagar, Raijor Dal organising secretary Amlan Gogoi said they were holding coordination meetings with the other parties to contest as a united front.
“After the alliance talks had collapsed earlier this month, we saw that a lot of people who wanted a viable political alternative were unhappy, because in their minds, there needed to be a united challenge to the BJP’s consolidation of votes. We are doing coordination meetings with the other parties, our polling agents will work together and we are trying to help each other. In the Thowra (now the Demow constituency) by-election in 2021, our candidate got 20,000 votes and the Congress got 6,000. Now, because of the seat-sharing arrangement, there is a Congress candidate there, but our by-election candidate accompanied him when he went to submit his papers,” he said.
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However, Rintu Goswami, a lawyer and political observer from Jorhat, said the 2021 numbers might not be an accurate gauge of the current situation.
“I doubt that these calculations stand true today because the votes that were cast for the Raijor Dal and the Assam Jatiya Parishad at that time were made during an anti-CAA wave. It was an emotional moment and there was a regionalist surge in favour of them. I don’t think that necessarily means that those votes would transfer to the Congress, or vice versa. Where I think the alliance will actually translate to more is Lower Assam, where the Raijor Dal has built up some support among minority voters there over the years and would have diverted some votes away from the Congress,” he said.
Gauhati University political science professor Akhil Ranjan Dutta agrees that the footprint of the Raijor Dal is increasing in the region. “With their organisational work, and some leaders such as MLA Abdur Rashid Mandal joining, it has become an option there, so the alliance will help out in minority constituencies,” he said.
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