How Modi Has Helped Gogoi Fight Anti-Incumbency

"The tumult and the shouting dies; The Captains and the Kings depart". The ballots have been cast. The ballot boxes, filled to the brim with Electronic Voting Machines, have been sealed. The turnout has been unprecedented - between 82%-85% of the electorate in Assam has voted. Now, there is to be a tension-filled pause of five weeks before the voting machines are opened and the outcome revealed. The pause might be the appropriate time for a stocktaking of the issues thrown up in this bitterly fought election - without gazing into the crystal glass to predict who has won. We will know that next month.

The single most important issue has been illegal immigration that has been the central issue in Assam for the better part of a century, and which has, from time to time, as in the Assam Agitation of the late 70s- early 80s, rocked the state. Late at night, hours before his first Independence Day Address on 15 August 1985, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and the leaders of the All-Assam Students Union hit upon an agreed mechanism to settle this deeply divisive controversy: the setting up of a Tribunal to identify all those who had illegally entered the state from neighbouring Bangladesh after 25 March 1971, the date that marked the start of the Joy Bangla movement that resulted in the ousting of the East Pakistan government in December 1971. The Tribunal was envisaged as the fulfillment of the AASU demand for the "detection, disenfranchisement and deportation" of the illegal entrants.

Moreover, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi decided to immediately terminate the tenure of the duly-elected state Congress government and hold fresh elections. This he did despite knowing full well that in the prevailing political atmosphere, the Congress was bound to lose, giving way to a new government led by the victorious student agitators. Thus, this high act of statesmanship virtually amounted to inviting the next government to implement this key component of the Assam accord. Not only had Prafulla Mohanto and his students won their point, they had also, in their party political incarnation as the Asom Gono Parishad (AGP), won the right - and duty - of getting going with their agenda.

In the event, the AGP government was a disaster. Its leaders almost immediately started quarreling among themselves. Their immaturity was revealed in a total failure of governance. The electorate was soon thoroughly alienated. The AGP government passed quickly into history. Hitendra Saikia of the Congress returned as Chief Minister in the election that followed and did more to detect, disenfranchise and deport illegal immigrants, while fully protecting those entitled to stay, than the AGP had ever succeed in doing. It is this discredited AGP that the BJP has picked as its principal partner in the just-concluded Assam elections.
 Meanwhile, bowing to a 2005 Supreme Court decision on a petition filed by the BJP's prospective candidate for Chief Minister, Sarbananda Sonowal, formerly of the AGP, Congress campaigners have been pointing to the remarkable progress scored in updating the National Register of Citizens (NRC) under their overall aegis of the Gogoi government that will definitively determine who is a legal resident and who an illegal immigrant.

While the final result of the NRC updating will be known only after the election, the electorate has been asking itself whether to trust the tried hands of the Congress to act on the NRC's findings, or to entrust this to the untried hands of the BJP-AGP combine. The decision turns on a crucial point highlighted by the BJP, especially Narendra Modi. He has loudly and publicly proclaimed that as India is the "only home of the Hindus", no illegal Hindu immigrant from Bangladesh will be forcibly deported. Thus, under a BJP-AGP state government, the exercise will be limited to targeting Muslims, including millions of Assamese Muslims who apprehend harassment despite having lived in Assam for decades - even centuries - and know no other land.   
 This has inevitably alarmed the Muslim voter who constitutes an estimated 34 per cent of the electorate. It also means that those Assamese who have lost their land, their properties and their job prospects to Hindu immigrants will now have to lump it. Gogoi's campaign has underlined this.

Modi's stand has also brought to the forefront the rift valley between the secular, progressive forces in Assam who see that their future lies in maintaining the composite traditions of the Brahmaputra and Barak Valleys, and those wishing to privilege the majority community over all others. That is the larger question mark hanging over not just Assam but over India as a whole. This has greatly increased the salience of the "third force", Maulana Badruddin Ajmal's All-India United Democratic Front (AIUDF). Ajmal says he is against both the Congress and the BJP and hopes to be the "deciding factor" over who gets to form the government - and at what price.
 Gogoi refused to ally with Ajmal, asking, "Who is this Ajmal?" to which Ajmal retorted, "Who is this Gogoi?" Congress circles comfort themselves with the thought that Ajmal could not possibly ally with Modi to form a government in the state. Yet, we know that notwithstanding her misgivings, Mehbooba has done so in J&K. Will Ajmal do the same? Much depends on what his bargaining power is after the results are known.

The other great unknown is Hemant Biswas Sarma, Gogoi's right-hand man who is credited with crafting the Gogoi strategy that got him more seats in his third successive Chief Ministerial bid than he had won in even his first. Sarma has now defected to the BJP, but is bitter at Sonowal being projected as the BJP's preferred choice for Chief Minister. If Sonowal were to beat the odds and become Chief Minister, Sarma will prove as much of a thorn in the BJP's side as he has proved himself to be when he was with Gogoi. No wonder Gogoi is glad to be rid of him.
 Personalities apart, the second major issue is Modi's promise of good governance against Gogoi's proven record of outstanding performance. The BJP have been busy denigrating Gogoi's achievements but cannot deny Gogoi having taken laggard Assam's growth rate above the all-India average. The achievement has been most pronounced in agriculture at a time when Modi's two years have been marked elsewhere in the country by acute agrarian distress. The Congress points too to the completion of several major projects in Gogoi's 15-year tenure, and his having brought others to near-closure that Modi has been busy inaugurating and claiming as his own (such as the Assam Gas Cracker unit and infrastructure for the recently held South Asian Games).

More, the BJP is yet to answer the charge that if they can find 1,000 crores to try to win the Bodo vote, why can't they find an equivalent amount for the tea community? Moreover, where, asks the Congress, are the funds promised for flood relief? What has happened, Gogoi asks, to Assam's entitlement to special status funds under the Gadgil-Mukherjee formula? Or to the Backward Regions Grant Fund inaugurated by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at Barpeta in Assam (when I was the Minister concerned)? Just abolished by Modi and Jaitley! So too have they dismantled the North-East Industrial Investor Programme. "Now that is gone," bemoans Gogoi. "Who will come to invest in the North-East?" Another question to which no satisfactory reply is forthcoming is what happened to Modi's 2014 promise of tribal status for six Assamese communities, including the Chief Minister's own Tai Ahom community?

Thus, countering anti-incumbency, which is as apparent in Assam as in other states where a single party has ruled for long, is the unfulfilled promises that characterized the Modi blitz in 2014. The chickens are coming home to roost because of Modi's excessive election rhetoric in 2014 when he promised Paradise to Assam but has failed to come through. To return to the earlier fundamental question: how will the Assamese voter choose between Modi's heady promises  and Gogoi's solid record of good governance? The contest, as Gogoi insists, is not between him and Sonowal (who is this Sonowal?!) but between Modi and himself.

Will 2016 prove more akin to 2011 that saw Gogoi take the lion's share to 79 seats - or is it more akin to 2014 when Modi swept all? That is the question whose answer lies locked up in the EVMs that will be opened only after all five states have gone to the polls.

(Mani Shankar Aiyar is former Congress MP, Rajya Sabha.)

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