THE exposure of unprecedented corruption in the corridors of power and an uncertain peace process that seeks to exclude the hardline ULFA military wing chief Paresh Barua, has cast a shadow over the poll prospects of Assam’s – and India’s – ruling Congress party, as it seeks a return to power for the third successive term in the northeastern state. A regional magazine, The Northeast Today, which is owned by the Tripura Maharaja Pradyot Kishore Manikya (a young Congress leader), has Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi on its cover, dressed in cricket white flannels pumping the air – a symbol of success – with the caption screaming ‘hat-trick’. The Maharaja would have done well to add a question mark after hat-trick because the road the Congress has to tread to return to power in Assam is full of thorns – mostly created by its own failings during a full decade in power.

Corruption in Assam and at the Centre has seriously undermined the Congress’ credibility as a ruling party all over the country. The opposition, however divided in Assam, has tried to replicate the opposition strategy in the national Parliament by systematically playing up the ‘corruption card’ to put the Congress on the defensive. The aggression of the Congress ministers, specially Health Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, in effect threatening the opposition with ‘dire consequences’, has only undermined the democratic credentials of the Congress. At least six ministers, implicated by the NIA in the Rs 1000 crore NC Hills scam, are under a cloud because they are also linked to other scams waiting to tumble out of the closet.

Assam has found an anti-corruption crusader in Akhil Gogoi, and his Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti (KMSS) has successfully mobilized the rural masses for the first time in the state’s contemporary history. This adds a new dimension of class to the state’s predominantly middle class oriented political process, long dominated by the planks of ethnicity and regionalism. Gogoi’s thrust on land and livelihood issues has been sharpened by his relentless use of RTI and other legitimate means of exposé to unravel corruption in high places. As a result, the upsurge in public anger, specially in the rural outback, is likely to cause serious erosion of the Congress vote banks in the Assamese and tribal dominated areas, where people are simmering with resentment over the culture of loot gripping the administration during the last ten years of Congress rule.

The Congress is aware of the Akhil factor – and its spin doctors are working overtime to portray him as ‘a paid opposition agent’, handled and run by AGP leader and former chief minister Prafulla Kumar Mahanta. It has in turn tried to rake up the LOC scam that surfaced during Mahanta’s time to push the opposition on the defensive, but that has not worked. The Congress is unable to answer why its government has not moved against Mahanta and others accused in the LOC scam for a whole decade that it has been in power.

 

As the issue of corruption works against the Congress, so does its failure to provide relief and rehabilitation to the millions rendered homeless by acute river erosion. In Rohmaria (Dibrugarh district), villagers complaining of losing land and livelihood have stopped the state-owned company, Oil India, from commercially exploiting crude found in the area for more than a decade. The region has suffered huge erosion and scores of villages have just vanished into the merciless Brahmaputra. That Rohmaria falls in the assembly constituency of the state Water Resources Minister, Prithvi Majhi, has not helped the homeless, landless and jobless villagers to get any relief.

A poor defence of the IMDT Act that led to its scrapping by the Supreme Court has upset the Muslims of East Bengali origin, who constitute nearly one-third of the state’s electorate. Pilot projects to update the National Register of Citizens has led to violence in Muslim dominated areas like Barpeta and that is precisely the kind of uncertainty that Badruddin Ajmal’s Assam United Democratic Front (AUDF) will look to exploit to undermine the Congress in the minority-dominated areas of western, central and southern Assam.

 

In 2006, many Muslims were unwilling to vote for the AUDF because they were sceptical about its survival and felt it would go the way of the United Minorities Front (UMF) of the 1980s. Now the same doubting Thomases may vote AUDF because they buy its argument that the Congress has less than adequately defended their interests. Maulana Ajmal’s thrust on creating a ‘strong minority plank’ that can dictate the terms of coalition formation may appeal to many Muslims, and if that happens, all the gains of the AUDF will be at the expense of the Congress.

The Congress may yet emerge as the single largest party because a substantial section of the Assamese approve of the peace process started with ULFA, rather with its moderate section. Nevertheless, it is true that hardline leaders like Paresh Barua and Jiban Moran, though in a minority, still enjoy the loyalty of the armed fighters regrouping in Myanmar. Many have expressed doubts about the durability of a peace process that leaves out the big troublemakers, and there is a fair share of the Assamese who see the peace process as a poll-time drum that is beaten just before elections (as in 2001 and 2006) to whip up public support for encashment in ballot boxes.

Also, the Centre’s decision to start the peace process exclusively with ULFA has upset other tribal groups, including the militias who claim to represent the embattled ethnic groups. They have a point, as negotiations with ULFA are likely to determine the political future of Assam. As the process is not only about the rehabilitation of its activists and leaders, it would only be fair to include representatives of other ethnic groups in the process as well. Assam is a polyglot and multi-ethnic state, and doing a deal with one always tends to upset the others.

The Congress may still emerge as the leading party in a house of 126 in the two phased state elections in April, benefiting obviously from the lack of a mahajot (grand opposition alliance). But if the BJP improves its position substantially by exploiting its growing support amongst the upper caste Hindu Assamese and Bengalis, and should the AUDF eat into the minority vote banks of the Congress in a big way, the Congress may well be in trouble. It may still cash in on its support amongst the ‘tea tribes’, but other tribes like the Bodos are likely to vote for their regional parties.

 

If the Congress fails to win more than 40 seats in the 126 member house, it may not be able to form a stable government, even if it were to cobble together one by taking advantage of being the single largest party that will give it the first chance at forming government. In such a situation, it will be forced to fall back not just on the Bodoland Peoples Front, but also the AUDF to form a government. That is when Maulana Ajmal will turn out to be a Shylock and drive a hard bargain with the Congress, which may include who will be the next Congress chief minister of Assam, knowing his less-than-friendly relations with Tarun Gogoi.

The factional feuds and leadership clashes within the Assam Congress are likely to further weigh down the party, with indications that some powerful ministers will try to ensure the defeat of factional rivals if they are uncomfortable with the emerging equations after seat allotments. Since Tarun Gogoi is unwell and may not continue in office much longer even if he manages to lead the party to perform a hat-trick, the knives are out and some powerful ministers are already jockeying for the top job.

 

In view of the obvious Congress decline in major electoral segments across Assam, it would be foolish to imagine that the opposition cannot pull it off unless it presents a united front. With the Congress crumbling under its own misdeeds, it is not difficult to imagine even a disparate and inchoate opposition to numerically outwit the Congress and its allies and run a coalition on the basis of a minimum political understanding of not rocking each other’s boat. Powerful Congress ministers are already cultivating potential allies amongst smaller parties so that they become important players in a coalition and can leverage themselves for the top job, while undermining the possibility of an opposition coalition at the same time.

Much finally depends on the Asom Gana Parishad. Its showing in the last few elections has been poor and it was overshadowed by the BJP during their alliance. The BJP has successfully hijacked the Assamese regional agenda and used it to boost its own acceptability in a state where illegal migration from neighbouring countries has been a serious political issue for the last thirty years. The AGP top guns have so far failed to live down their ‘squabbling hostel boys’ image even as the party faced marginalization. But it seems to be staging a comeback of sorts in the Assamese political imagination by hitting the streets and blocking proceedings in the assembly on the issue of corruption. If the AGP manages to do somewhat better than before in the Assamese dominant areas, it will seriously upset the Congress apple cart. However, were it to just end up splitting the upper caste Assamese votes, it will help the Congress in many constituencies.

If the AGP and the BJP together manage forty seats, they cannot be written off as serious contenders because the Bodo parties might swing away from the Congress and the AUDF may silently support the coalition from outside on the understanding that the coalition will not push an anti-infiltration agenda. That, however, ultimately – if not in this election – will work to the Congress’ advantage. The BJP will loose as much credibility as the AGP did during its two terms in power were it not to push the anti-infiltration agenda hard enough when in power. Its growing appeal to the upper caste Hindu Assamese and Bengalis will suffer. But if it pushes the agenda too hard, it will upset the AUDF, forcing it to go back to the Congress.

 

Important social realignments are also taking place in Assam. The Muslims of East Bengali origin, who preferred assimilation into Assamese society as ‘Na-Asamiya’ in the years before and after the Partition, are now beginning to assert not merely their Muslim, but also their Bengali identity. Several groups representing these Muslims have in recent weeks asked them to indicate Bengali as their primary language in the Census. They argue that despite their stated intent to assimilate, the Assamese no longer accept them as one of their own, and instead hound them out as miyas (Muslims) and then Bangladeshis. So they argue, why not assert their Bengali linguistic identity?

There is a shrewd political calculation in that move – if the 30 per cent plus East Bengali Muslim population indicates Bengali as its mother tongue, they will boost the total number of Bengali speakers to well over forty per cent of the total population (because the 12-13 per cent Bengali Hindu population already return Bengali as their mother tongue). With more and more tribal groups not stating Assamese as their mother tongue any more and with the Na-Asamiyas resurfacing as Bengalis, it is Bengali and not Assamese which will then be the dominant language in Assam.

 

The AUDF has, however, asked Muslims to state Assamese as their mother tongue, thereby reasserting the Na-Asamiya identity; but in many places in western Assam, Ajmal’s followers have run into trouble with young hotheads in the community who are determined to assert their Bengali identity and stage a return to roots in some ways. If this shift becomes more pronounced, it will surely affect the politics and social equations in Assam in the years to come.

The Assam agitation did raise the serious issue of illegal and continuous migration in the state, but its excesses also ruptured the age-old Assamese nationality formation process by alienating not only the tribals but also the Na-Asamiyas. Unless that unique nationality formation process, which sustained voluntary assimilation, is restored, the ethnic Assamese is in danger of being marginalized in his own land. A process of marginalization that started with the territorial reorganization of the North East and truncated Assam physically, will now be reinforced unless the nationality formation process is restored.

If it wanted its political support base to be rooted on firmer foundations, that is something the Asom Gana Parishad should have taken upon itself to restore. By aligning with the BJP, the AGP failed to play that role and ended up playing second fiddle to the national party and competing for the same acre of green grass – upper caste Assamese votes. In this, the AGP leaders may have a lot to learn from Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress.

Mamata dominated the alliance with the BJP as she now dominates the Congress. She parted ways with the BJP when she realized that the support of Bengal’s large Muslim population (one-fourth of the state’s population) would be crucial. But in dealing with both the BJP and Congress, she retained the political initiative by determining the agenda of state politics through a calculated strategy of popular agitations on emotive issues like land acquisition.

In fact, she is the first Bengali rebel Congress leader (the lineage is long – Chittaranjan Das, Subhas Bose, Ajoy Mukherjee, even Pranab Mukherjee for a while) who has reduced the Congress to the position of a ‘junior partner’ in Bengal. Regional parties often have a limited turf to play on – and limited issues to play with – and unless they defend their distinctiveness zealously, they are likely to be eaten up. The AGP is realizing that only now.

If the Congress loses its banyan tree kind of a political appeal of being an all encompassing political platform for multi-ethnic Assam, and if the AGP fails to take over that plank, the Catalonian effect will undermine Assam’s relative political and social stability in the years to come. Considering Assam’s sensitive demography and the innate conflicting homel and claims of its battling ethnicities, the AGP – and not the BJP – is the appropriate replacement for the Congress. But if events do not so work out, the demise of the Congress may well be accompanied by all the attendant risks of durable disorder.

 

* Subir Bhaumik is the author of Troubled Periphery: Crisis of India’s North East and Insurgent Crossfire: North East India.