By Dr. Gyan Pathak
Assam is the only state out of the five scheduled for election in April-May, where BJP led NDA is in power, while in the other four – West Bengal, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Puducherry – it hopes to increase its presence, to a significant level only in West Bengal though publicly claiming to throw CM Mamata’s TMC out of power. Obviously, BJP’s highest stake is in Assam, which made the party to resort to no hold barred politics in the state.
BJP has highly communalized the political atmosphere of the state on the eve of election in the line of Hindu-Muslim divide, has brazenly prevented SIR through a subservient Election Commission of India (ECI) while it is being carried in all poll bound states/UT, has been trying to break the opposition ranks especially Congress.
For decades, the issue of Bangladeshi Muslim infiltrators has been rocking the state political scene. BJP has been raising the issue of Bangladeshi Muslim infiltrators across the states in the country, in every election, and has been saying that electoral rolls must not have names of the illegal immigrants. It is only on this logic they are supporting the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in every state barring Assam. Why? The answer should not surprise anyone, which lies in the fact that Assam has over a million of Hindus who are unable to give proof that they are citizens of India. Majority of these Hindus are BJP’s voter support base, and therefore it is not in a position to face the SIR in Assam.
Let the data of the 2019 National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam speak of itself. It had excluded over 19 lakh people from the final list, out of them Muslims were only about 7 lakh. Even around 60,000 Assamese Hindus were among excluded persons. The data represented individuals who struggled to prove their citizenship by the 1971 cut-off date.
Had the SIR been conducted in Assam, BJP will have lost, with exclusion of the all non-citizens, including its Hindu support base. One can see it clearly in the data itself, which might be one of the reasons, for which BJP leadership at the Centre impressed upon the subservient ECI not to conduct SIR in Assam. BJP wanted to eliminate from the SIR only those who they believed not theirs but opposition’s support base. ECI aligned with the BJP wish, and conducting SIR in all states, but Assam.
Nevertheless, ECI announced that Assam will receive a separate order for the SIR, citing the state’s unique citizenship provisions under the Citizenship Act and ongoing Supreme Court-Monitored citizenship verification process for National Register of Citizens. For other states ECI says it has a mandate to prepare an electoral roll free of non-citizens. It shows the double standard of the ECI, just a convenient way to follow the BJP’s wish. The issue has since been raised in the Supreme Court of India but nothing has come out yet. There is no SIR for Assam, which will clearly benefit BJP, while SIR in other state will again clearly benefit BJP.
No hold barred political strategy of BJP in Assam does not end here. The party has been trying to highly communalized the political atmosphere of the state. One of the most prominent flashpoints is the use of “Miya rhetoric”, a term often applied to Bengali-origin Muslim communities in Assam. It is being used by BJP leader and CM Himanta Biswa Sarma. The narrative has become central to debates over eviction drives, citizenship, and land rights, and has been highlighted in media as a key polarizing issue on the eve of the election. This issue has pushed the issues like development and governance in the rear.
Political tensions and polarization are rising with parties increasingly invoking identity, community and “threat” narratives in their public statements, which is a clear shift towards emotionally surcharged identity politics in the state on religious lines. Media in general and social media in particular is full of such communal rhetoric and images and videos.
The latest political development is the BJP’s trying to breaking opposition rank, especially Congress, which is the chief opposition in the state. Former Assam Congress president Bhupen Kumar Borah have resigned from the Congress and announced he will join the BJP on 22 February, which is a significant blow to the opposition. When one sees this development in the light of CM Himanta’s statement that Borah is the Congress’s last Hindu leader, the communal overtone makes everything clear. There are other political shifts also in which MLAs from Congress and AIUDF are reported to be joining AGP, which is one of the BJP’s allies in NDA. The operation breaking opposition rank is likely to continue. Allegation is that the ruling BJP is intimidating the opposition leaders into submission by taking action against them through investigating agencies.
The delimitation order of 2023 has changed the constituencies of the state, and the first election held after it was Lok Sabha Election 2024. BJP has 64 MLAs out of 126 in the Vidhan Sabha, while its ally in NDA, AGP has 8 and UPPL has 7 seats. The Lok Sabha election 2024 result shows that BJP had got lead in 75 assembly segments, showing improvement.
Nevertheless, Congress has also shown improvement from 22 seats in assembly to lead in 31 assembly segments. This means BJP’s gain was due to loss of AIUDF, that has 15 seats in the outgoing assembly, but had not got lead in any of the assembly segment. It is here, BJP finds itself a little troubled on account of potential resurgence of the Congress. (IPA Service)
