Himanta–Pradyut, Akhil–Gaurav: Assam’s Season of Electoral Amnesia

With just 20 days to go before Assam votes on April 9 to elect a new 126-member assembly, the state’s political landscape offers a masterclass in a skill no democracy school can teach: the art of forgetting on cue. Both the ruling BJP and the opposition are demonstrating, with impressive synchronicity, that in Indian politics, yesterday's villain is today’s ally, provided the arithmetic works.

Consider the curious case of Pradyut Bordoloi, the two-term Nagaon MP and former Congress minister who resigned from the Congress on March 17 and joined the BJP the very next day in the presence of Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma. The BJP wasted no time fielding him from the prestigious Dispur assembly constituency in its first list of 88 candidates released on March 19.

So far, so routine in the great Indian tradition of party-hopping. Except that on August 2, 2025, the Assam BJP had posted this rather unflattering assessment of the very same Bordoloi on its social media handles: that he was “one of the most corrupt, manipulative power-brokers Assam has ever seen” who had “plundered the state mercilessly during his tenure”. 

The irony doesn’t end there. Just a month before his defection, Bordoloi had chaired the Congress committee that released a “People’s Chargesheet” against the Sarma-led BJP government, levelling charges ranging from “institutionalised corruption” to “human rights violations”. In other words, the man who drafted the corruption dossier against the Chief Minister is now campaigning under the Chief Minister's banner. And the Chief Minister, who was the subject of said dossier, has welcomed the dossier’s author with open arms. Both gentlemen, it appears, have decided that the social media post and chargesheet were merely a creative writing exercise, not to be taken literally.

Also Read: Six reasons why the BJP will win Assam on April 9

But selective amnesia is not the BJP’s monopoly.

Enter Akhil Gogoi, the firebrand peasant leader and RTI activist who founded Raijor Dal in October 2020 from a prison cell, where he was lodged under UAPA charges during the anti-CAA protests. Gogoi won the Sivasagar seat in 2021, the first person in Assam to win an assembly election from jail without any campaigning. Before he entered electoral politics, Gogoi was Assam’s most relentless gadfly, stinging every government in sight with corruption exposés.

His most spectacular target in that earlier avatar was the Congress government of the late Tarun Gogoi. In January 2011, he accused the then Chief Minister and his family of buying property in the US worth Rs 18 crore. His organisation, KMSS, demanded a CBI inquiry and dared the Chief Minister to reveal the source of the money used to acquire what Akhil claimed were multiple properties in Omaha and Los Angeles. In another contentious episode the same year, he appealed to the people to light lamps in every Namghar praying that Tarun Gogoi was “finished”, an appeal widely condemned as being in appalling taste, since it came at a time when the late Chief Minister was battling some health problems.

Cut to March 20, 2026. In a late-night development at Jorhat, Akhil Gogoi and Assam Congress president Gaurav Gogoi, Tarun Gogoi's son, signed a coalition agreement after weeks of tortuous negotiations. Raijor Dal will contest 11 seats, with friendly contests in two more. And the pièce de résistance: Akhil Gogoi has declared Gaurav Gogoi as the alliance’s chief ministerial candidate, urging the people of Jorhat to vote for the man he called a “capable leader” who would give Assam a “youth leader who has made a mark on the national arena”.

Nobody, apparently, thought it pertinent to ask whether Akhil ever followed up on the Rs 18-crore US property question with Gaurav. Or whether Gaurav asked Akhil about the lamp-lighting business directed at his late father. In the new alliance’s vocabulary, these are presumably filed under “water under the Brahmaputra”. Of course, Akhil Gogoi had a signature flourish in his speeches when targeting those he accused of corruption or misgovernance: he would promise to “throw them into the Brahmaputra”.

The stakes, of course, are enormous. Nearly 2.5 crore voters will choose from 126 constituencies in a single-phase election, with results declared on May 4. Electoral politics, as they say, makes strange bedfellows. What they don’t say often enough is that it also requires an industrial-grade capacity for amnesia. As Assam heads to the polls, the voters may well be the only ones who remember everything.