How Congress has become a Muslim-only party in Assam

In the weeks before Assam voted on April 9, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) acquired two of the Indian National Congress’s better-known faces. Bhupen Kumar Borah, a former Assam Congress president, crossed over in February after three decades in the party. Pradyut Bordoloi, a two-term member of parliament and a former minister in the Tarun Gogoi cabinet, followed on March 18, barely three weeks before polling day. Both men reached for the same word to describe what they were leaving behind: humiliation.

The backroom version of events was less politely framed. Both, the whisper went, had been crowded out by Rakibul Hussain, the Congress’s Lok Sabha winner from Dhubri Assam in 2024 and the dominant voice in the state unit. Hussain’s writ, the complaint ran, also extended over the state president, Gaurav Gogoi, and the All India Congress Committee’s Assam in-charge, Jitendra Singh. Bordoloi made the subtext explicit on his way out, accusing Imran Masood, a member of the party’s screening committee for Assam, of dismissing his concerns about a candidate’s alleged criminal links as a fabrication.

The chief minister, Himanta Biswa Sarma, himself a Congressman until 2015, did not waste the opening. The Congress, he announced, had become a Muslim party in which no self-respecting Hindu leader could survive. The line was, of course, useful packaging: the BJP has spent a decade casting itself as the shield of indigenous Assam against illegal Muslim migration from Bangladesh, and every Hindu defector reinforced the script. By May 4, the slur had also acquired the awkward shape of an arithmetic fact.

A party that has won 10 of Assam’s 16 assembly elections since Independence, often by handsome margins, has been reduced this time to 19 seats, its weakest performance ever. Of those 19 legislators, 18 are Muslim, returned almost entirely from Muslim-majority constituencies. The roll call now reads Aftab Uddin Mollah from Jaleshwar, Baby Begum from Dhubri, Mohibur Rohman from Mankachar, Abdur Rahim Ahmed from Chenga, Rekibuddin Ahmed from Chamaria, and so on down a familiar list. The label Sarma applied in March now describes, with discomfiting accuracy, the parliamentary party.

Outside that arc, the rout is near-total, and most embarrassingly so in upper Assam, the heartland of Ahom politics and the Congress’s preferred theatre for the contest. The sons of two former chief ministers, both Ahoms, lost on their home turf. Gaurav Gogoi, son of the late Tarun Gogoi, was beaten in Jorhat by 23,182 votes by Hitendra Nath Goswami, a five-time MLA. Debabrata Saikia, the leader of the opposition in the outgoing assembly and son of another late chief minister, Hiteswar Saikia, lost Nazira, a constituency his family had practically owned, by a still more punishing 46,701 votes.

More than the dynastic embarrassment, the verdict gutted the opposition’s grandest design—the “three Gogois”. In March, the Congress had signed an alliance with Akhil Gogoi’s Raijor Dal and Lurinjyoti Gogoi’s Assam Jatiya Parishad (AJP) to put three Ahom leaders together against what they cast as Sarma’s politics of fear and infiltration. Gaurav was the alliance’s chief-ministerial face. Akhil, an activist, had won Sibsagar in 2021 from inside a jail cell on sedition charges. Lurinjyoti, a former general secretary of the All Assam Students’ Union, had built the AJP out of the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act protests. The pitch was that an Ahom triumvirate anchored in upper Assam would together do what the Congress alone could not. By Monday evening two had lost, Gaurav in Jorhat and Lurinjyoti in Khowang. 

This was precisely the terrain on which Sarma, neither an Ahom nor an upper Assamese, was supposed to be vulnerable. The opposition’s pitch had been that an Ahom front would reclaim its patrimony from a Brahmin from Nalbari. Instead, a former Congressman has now shrunk his old party, in his home state, into a pocket of 19 Muslim-dominated constituencies, with no sitting legislator left among the Ahoms, the tea-tribes, the other indigenous Assamese-speaking groups, or the Bengali Hindus.

The new house, then, divides almost cleanly along religious lines. Of the 24 opposition members, 22 are Muslim. The ruling alliance’s roster doesn’t have a single Muslim. The mirror-image consolidation suggests the chief minister’s communal flourishes, including his much-criticised exhortation to customers to pay less to “Miya” vendors than to Assamese ones, were costly to civic temperature but not to the BJP’s tally. Sarma made a wager that polarisation would pay. The wager has paid.

There is, finally, a regional footnote. The same day’s verdict in West Bengal returned it just two seats in a 294-member assembly, both held by Muslim MLAs. In two of eastern India’s biggest states, then, the Grand Old Party finds its entire parliamentary face, by accident or by acquiescence, exclusively Muslim. The caricature Sarma offered in March was crude. It was also, courtesy of a campaign the Congress did not know how to fight, a forecast.