Six reasons why the BJP will win Assam on April 9

Assam goes to the polls on April 9, and a journalist’s job, strictly speaking, is not to predict results. I am going to do it anyway. What follows is not clairvoyance but the product of more than two decades covering Assam’s politics and of what I have witnessed on the ground over the past couple of months. Call it electoral analysis or informed speculation, but here is my prediction: when results are declared on May 4, the NDA, led by the BJP, will win comfortably.

This conclusion rests on several clear factors. But before arriving at them, it helps to understand the electoral landscape as it stands.

The BJP, Asom Gana Parishad (AGP), and Bodoland People’s Front (BPF) have announced candidates in 125 of Assam’s 126 seats. The BJP is fielding candidates in 89 seats—one ticket is yet to be announced—while the AGP is contesting 26 and the BPF will fight 11 seats in the Bodoland Territorial Region (BTR), the autonomous tribal council area in lower Assam. The BPF’s fortunes in that region will depend on how effectively the United People’s Party Liberal (UPPL), the BJP’s intermittent ally, challenges it. 

The relationship between these parties is a case study in the transactional nature of Assam’s coalition politics. In 2016, the BPF was a loyal BJP ally. But when the Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC) went to polls in 2020, the BJP backed the UPPL, a newly emerged force in Bodo politics, over the BPF, even though the BPF had emerged as the single largest party. Together with the UPPL, the BJP formed the government in the BTC. A bitter BPF split with the BJP ahead of the 2021 assembly elections and allied with the Congress. The BJP went to those elections with the UPPL. Then came the 2025 BTC polls, in which the BPF demolished the UPPL, and the BJP, ever pragmatic, embraced the BPF once again. The UPPL technically remains in the NDA but keeps threatening to quit. It is contesting the assembly elections alone in the BTR.

On the other side, the Congress has so far announced candidates in 87 seats. In another 21 seats,  the two allies—Raijor Dal (RD) and Asom Jatiya Parishad (AJP)—are contesting. Apart from these two, Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM), Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) Liberation (CPIML), and All Party Hill Leaders Conference (APHLC) have also joined the Congress alliance. Crucially, the Congress has no alliance with the AIUDF this time, a significant departure from 2021, when the two parties fought together and won 45 seats between them.

The BJP first came to power in 2016 with 60 seats. With allies AGP and BPF, the NDA’s tally stood at 86, and Sarbananda Sonowal became chief minister. In 2021, the BJP retained its 60 seats and raised its vote share from 29 per cent to 33 per cent. However, the NDA’s total fell by 11 seats, largely due to the AGP’s slide from 14 seats in 2016 to nine in 2021. Crucially, the party leadership replaced Sonowal with Himanta Biswa Sarma, a 2015 Congress import, as chief minister.

Now, why is the BJP set for a hat-trick in 2026?

The map has changed: The first and perhaps most structural reason behind my prediction is delimitation. In 2023, Assam’s 126 assembly constituencies were redrawn. Twenty-six new constituencies were created. Twenty-three went off the map. Six were restructured into three. Seats reserved for Scheduled Tribes increased from 16 to 19, those for Scheduled Castes from 8 to 9, and seats in the BTR rose from 16 to 19.

But the most consequential impact of delimitation has been on Muslim-dominated areas. Earlier, Muslim voters could meaningfully influence the outcome in roughly 35 seats. That number has now been reduced to 24. These constituencies have historically gone to the Congress or the AIUDF. According to the 2011 census, Assam’s Muslim population stood at 34 per cent; it is estimated to be above 40 per cent now. Because the overwhelming majority of Muslim voters support the Congress or the AIUDF, the Congress has traditionally earned a substantial vote share, not far behind the BJP’s. In 2021, for instance, the Congress won nearly 30 per cent of the vote, compared to the BJP’s 33 per cent. Yet the Congress could convert that into only 29 seats against the BJP’s 60. And those 29 seats came from just 13 of Assam’s 35 districts. With Muslim demography now locked into fewer constituencies, that already poor vote-to-seat conversion rate is likely to worsen.

The challenge does not end there. Without an alliance with the AIUDF, the core vote banks of both opposition parties will split. A “friendly contest” between the Congress and the Raijor Dal in two Muslim-dominated seats—Goalpara East and Gauripur—could end up hurting both. The RD also faces an internal test: how it accommodates leaders like Sherman Ali, who joined from the Congress just before the polls. If denied a ticket, Ali could contest as an independent from Mandia, further fragmenting votes and complicating the contest.

Meanwhile, the BJP’s ally AGP is fielding 13 Muslim candidates out of its 26, some of them turncoats from the AIUDF with their own electoral base. In such a scenario, Muslim votes are likely to fragment across multi-cornered contests, creating deep uncertainty for the Congress and its allies. The NDA is not even counting on these 24 seats. Any opposition setback here is simply a bonus.

Governance and Grassroots: What, then, is the picture in non-Muslim areas? Several factors work in the BJP’s favour: Chief Minister Sarma’s formidable personal popularity, the visible record of his government in infrastructure development, an expansive architecture of beneficiary schemes, and a sustained polarisation over illegal immigration from Bangladesh.

Sarma’s personal popularity must be seen to be believed. During his Aashirvad Yatra across upper and lower Assam, people of all ages and communities turned out to catch a glimpse of him, to touch him. These were ordinary citizens enamoured with the image of a man who delivers on his promises. While all of this has given the BJP a powerful narrative, it is the organisational machinery of the BJP and the RSS, and the party’s considerable financial muscle, that takes this narrative to every prospective voter, every booth. This is where the BJP holds a massive edge. The Congress is structurally weak at the booth level while the BJP’s penetration at the grassroots has only widened with each election cycle.

The Politics of Polarisation: More consequentially, polarisation over the immigration issue is at its peak. Immigration from Bangladesh, and the attendant threat of demographic change, of erosion to language and culture, is among the most emotive issues in Assam, and it works electorally. Sarma’s constant invocation of Miyas, Muslims of Bangladeshi origin, has stoked that fire among indigenous voters.

In the past, the BJP could rely on an easy villain: AIUDF chief Badruddin Ajmal, whom Sarma routinely cast as the face of a demographic takeover, warning that Ajmal would one day become Assam’s chief minister. The prospect alarmed indigenous voters because Ajmal is widely seen as a champion of immigrant-origin Muslims. But with no Congress-AIUDF alliance this time and the AIUDF’s diminishing stature, that narrative has lost its sharpest edge. Sarma has found a replacement: his former friend and Congress colleague Rakibul Hussain. And he has used the resentment of some Congress leaders towards Rakibul to the BJP’s advantage. Before defecting to the BJP, Bhupen Bora, the former Assam Congress president, and Pradyut Bordoloi, a two-time MP and former minister, publicly blamed Rakibul for their humiliation within the party. Sarma seized the moment, declaring that no self-respecting Hindu can survive in the Congress.

The Congress, for its part, often helps the BJP sharpen its polarising narrative. During the screening committee’s deliberations on candidate selection, Priyanka Gandhi arrived in Assam accompanied by Imran Masood, a figure known for his incendiary polarising rhetoric. Bordoloi blamed Masood for the humiliation and the flawed ticket distribution that followed. Each such episode hands the BJP another talking point.

The Psychological Edge: The defections of Bora and Bordoloi will not, in themselves, add much to the BJP’s electoral arithmetic. Bora last won an election in 2011. Bordoloi lost the 2016 assembly election from his home constituency of Margherita and subsequently moved to the Nagaon Lok Sabha seat in central Assam, a Muslim-dominated, demographically safe seat for the Congress. But the damage these departures have inflicted is perceptual. They have made the Congress look like a house in disarray on the eve of battle.

Sarma has compounded this by frequently boasting in public about having moles within the Congress, offering timelines for the exits of senior leaders and claiming he would effectively decide at least 30 Congress tickets in Assam. These claims have seeded suspicion within the party and eroded the faith of ordinary voters. What made Gaurav Gogoi and the Congress leadership appear most helpless was the spectacle of their turning up to persuade Bora and Bordoloi to stay—under full public glare—only after both had already struck their deals with the BJP. In doing so, they looked desperate and defeated, and they made the quitters look larger than they are.

An untested Opposition alliance: On paper, the six-party Congress-led alliance looks quite formidable. But of these five had only two seats in the last assembly. Their impact are limited to certain pockets and organisational strength is very poor. Consider the seats where the Raijor Dal (RD) and AJP are contesting as part of their arrangement with the Congress. Of the 21 seats, six are newly delimited. One lies in the BTR, where neither party has real traction. Another is a Muslim-dominated seat where the principal contest is with the AIUDF, not the NDA. In three of the remaining new seats, the BJP-AGP combine enjoys a clear advantage.

Among the 15 existing seats, two are minority-dominated, again placing the contest primarily against the AIUDF or AGP. Of the remaining 13, one is already held by the RD. That leaves just 12 seats where the alliance is in a direct fight with the BJP-AGP, and 15 if the new constituencies are included.

But elections are not merely arithmetic; they are also about chemistry. This is an untested alliance with uncertain on-ground transferability, and all three partners lack the organisational depth to match the BJP-RSS’s formidable machinery.

Yet, there is genuine hope among anti-BJP voters that the coming together of the three Gogois—Gaurav of the Congress, Akhil of the Raijor Dal, and Lurinjyoti Gogoi of the AJP—will consolidate the Ahom vote in upper Assam and inflict serious damage on BJP tallies. The fact that Sarma is a Brahmin from lower Assam is already a sore point in upper Assam, where Ahom voters had delivered significant swings in at least eight assembly seats in previous elections. But delimitation may come to rescue here too as the exercise has substantially reduced the Ahom community’s ability to swing outcomes. Consider this: most of the constituency redrawing in upper Assam occurred in districts where the Congress or other non-BJP parties had their stronger base.

The Zubeen Question: And finally, will Zubeen Garg’s death become an issue in this election? It will matter roughly as much as the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), 2019—the very law against which the beloved icon had taken to the streets—mattered in the 2021 assembly elections. That year, the people of Assam had protested emotionally against the CAA but still voted for the BJP, the party that enacted the contentious law. Zubeen Garg is an emotional issue for the people of Assam, far more intense than the CAA ever was. But that will not swing electoral decisions. People remain opposed to the CAA, yet it is not the singular factor deciding their ballot. For the uninitiated, Assam’s opposition to the CAA was never about religion. The people of Assam protested because they did not want any illegal immigrant from Bangladesh to be granted citizenship in their state. Whether that immigrant is Hindu or Muslim has never been the point.

Yet for all these advantages, there is a telling weakness. The BJP has failed to nurture enough winnable candidates from its own ranks. Of the 88 candidates announced so far, at least 30 are imports from the Congress, the AGP, and smaller regional or tribal formations. This carries its own risk: murmurs are growing among old-timers in the BJP that they are being sidelined by newcomers. The party’s top two leaders—Sarma and Sonowal—are themselves imports from the Congress and the AGP, respectively. Some turbulence in select constituencies is inevitable. How the BJP manages it will depend on the discipline of an organisation that has, until now, run itself with considerable internal rigour.

(Kaushik Deka is the Managing Editor of India Today Magazine and Editor of India Today NE)