The Bharatiya Janata Party is not only set to form the government in Assam for a third consecutive time, but on Monday it also notched up its best electoral performance in the state – it was poised to win 82 of the total 126 seats.
The saffron sweep was backed up by its allies, with the Bodoland Peoples Front and the Asom Gana Parishad set to win 10 seats each, according to the Election Commission’s website at 5 pm.
In contrast, the footprint of the Congress has shrunk drastically since the 2021 Assembly elections, when it won 29 seats. The party has been decimated in almost all areas of the state, with all but one of its 19 leads coming from seats with a significant Muslim voter count.
Hindu consolidation
The leading reason behind the BJP’s landslide victory appeared to be a massive Hindu vote consolidation.
“The self projection of BJP as the protector of the Hindus and conflation of Hindu and Assamese identity has helped the party consolidate votes,” said political scientist Kaustubh Deka, who teaches at Dibrugarh University.
The BJP first came to power in Assam in 2016, with a promise to protect jati, mati and bheti – community, land, and hearth. In its second term, that translated to aggressive communal politics, especially from Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma.
In the last five years, Sarma has weaponised the decades-old anxiety of Assamese people that the state was being overrun by outsiders and welded it to the Hindutva suspicion of Muslims.
Sarma led a vitriolic campaign against the Bengal-origin Muslim community in the state, accusing them of being “illegal migrants from Bangladesh”. He also repeatedly projected the Congress as a party that solely worked for Muslims, and accused its leader Gaurav Gogoi of being a “Pakistani agent” .
The label appeared to have stuck, given the Congress’s abysmal performance in Hindu-majority areas in northern Assam, in Upper Assam where the ethnic Assamese communities live, and Sixth Schedule-administered areas like Bodoland and Karbi and Dimasa Hills.
Of the 19 seats the Congress is leading in, 18 are in Muslim-majority constituencies. Congress is leading in one seat where Hindu voters are in a majority – Nowboicha in Upper Assam. The seat has a significant number of Muslim voters. In 2021, the Grand Old Party had won 29 seats, and 16 of the MLAs were Hindus.
Deka, the political scientist, said: “The BJP’s hardline Hindu approach that has pushed for polarisation has met with demographic dividends.”
Welfare schemes and infrastructure
The BJP government’s large network of cash benefits – from the flagship Orunodoi scheme for women to financial assistance for students and graduates – found resonance with voters, as Scroll found on the ground.
“BJP’s ‘developmental’ model has worked for it in different ways,” Deka said. “At a broader level, a section of people feel the party has delivered in terms of building connectivity and necessary infrastructure. At a more minute level, people feel the various welfare schemes are vital and that they cannot afford to lose them.”
A vote for Himanta
As Scroll found on the ground, Chief Minister Himanta Sarma’s popularity was undiminished in the state and even matched that of Prime Minister Narendra Modi – and the results attested to that.
“Himanta Biswa Sarma has been able to use the party resources to build his own standalone image and carve out his own niche in the larger, pan-India BJP landscape,” said Angshuman Choudhury, political observer and researcher from the state.
While the uproar over the death of popular singer Zubeen Garg in Singapore had dented his popularity for a bit last year, Sarma was able to ride out the challenge.
A former Congressman, Sarma’s “ability to provoke defections from Assam Congress also gives him significant leverage”, Choudhury said. “His brazen communal rhetoric is, in many ways, stronger and more explicit than even Modi's. That appeals to more hard-core BJP supporters in not just Assam, but also beyond. ”
Deka, the political scientist from Dibrugarh University, pointed out that Sarma also benefited from the campaign of a “double-engine” sarkar, as the Centre-state “working in tandem” has been a historic reality of Northeast India. “Rallying the campaign around these dynamics played out well,” he said.
Delimitation
As Scroll has reported, Assam has seen one of the most contentious delimitation exercises in the country, which has effectively diluted Muslim representation in the state.
An initial reading of Monday’s results show that delimitation seems to have helped boost the tally of the BJP and its allies, by reducing the effectiveness of ‘Muslim votes’ constituency wise.
In 2021, Assam’s voters had sent 31 Muslims MLAs to the Assembly. This time, Muslim candidates are leading only in 22 seats, as of 4.30 pm.
In Lower Assam, the borders were redrawn in Muslim-majority constituencies to consolidate Hindu voters into a majority bloc. In several of these new seats – for example, Barpeta, Abhayapuri, Goalpara West, Hailakandi – the BJP and its allies were in a dominant position, as of 4.30 pm.
In Southern Assam, the Congress is set to win four out of the 13 seats. In 2021, before the delimitation, Congress and AIUDF alliance had won nine seats out of the 15. Two Muslim-majority seats in the area were scrapped.
An Opposition without a narrative
Finally, the BJP’s triumph has been aided by the Congress’s wipeout in large parts of the state.
While in the 2021 Assembly election, the party had stitched up a strong alliance with the All India United Democratic Front and the Bodo Peoples Front, the party struggled to get an alliance off the ground this time.
Its last-minute pact with the Raijor Dal and the Assam Jatiya Parishad paid no dividends. The former is leading in two of the 13 seats it contested, while the latter is trailing in all 10 seats.
The party also lacked a clear narrative to take on the BJP’s mix of Hindutva and Assamese nationalism and welfare benefits.
The sudden exit of two key leaders Bhupen Bora and Pradyot Bordoloi and infighting within the party contributed to the Congress debacle.
“We didn’t pay attention in getting our house in order,” said a Congress leader.
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