Why CEC Gyanesh Kumar deserves credit for a “clean” Assam election

Assam goes to the polls on April 9, and the most remarkable feature of this election is how little it looks like one. Over the past week, I drove nearly 600 kilometres across the state, from Kokrajhar, in the west, to Sivasagar, in the east, passing through Jorhat and Nazira along the way. In the entire stretch, I counted exactly three large hoardings. There were no oversized cutouts of political leaders gazing benevolently or menacingly—as you want to see—at traffic, no banners slung across intersections imploring voters to choose this candidate or that, no posters papering the walls of tea stalls and government buildings. 

I passed a few small meetings, a candidate addressing a hundred or two hundred people in a clearing, but even these were strangely bare, unmarked by the usual bunting and party regalia. It was as though the election were happening in a whisper.
With barely 10 days to go before polling, there is no palpable excitement in Assam, no animated arguments about who will win or what the big issues are. The common voter appears, in a word, indifferent, or, at the very least, unperturbed. 

Even in Jorhat, one of the most closely watched constituencies in the state, where the Opposition’s chief ministerial candidate Gaurav Gogoi is locked in a high-profile contest against the BJP veteran and sitting MLA Hitendra Nath Goswami, the streets betray an unusual calm. I arrived expecting to be greeted by the visual cacophony of rival campaigns. Instead, I found neither candidate's face staring down at me from a single hoarding.

Even when large rallies of star campaigners are organized or road shows conducted, crowds do turn up, but without the customary forest of placards and party flags. After these events disperse, the collateral damage to the surroundings, the litter of torn banners and trampled posters that typically marks an Indian election rally, is conspicuously minimal. Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma’s road shows continue to draw massive crowd, yet even at these gatherings, one can hardly spot a banner or poster. 

My initial assumption was that this austerity reflected the financial weakness of the Opposition parties. But even the ruling BJP, which has commanded the lion’s share of political donations in recent years, is exercising visible restraint on outdoor publicity. On April 1, I drove toward the public rally of Priyanka Gandhi Vadra in Nazira and did not encounter a single large cutout of any Congress leader until I was within a hundred metres of the venue. Reporters covering Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s rally in Gogamukh, Dhemaji, the same day, told me the story was much the same there.

All of this is a stark departure from the last Assam election. And the credit belongs to Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar and his team.

Election officials on the ground have been relentless in enforcing campaign protocols. There is a strict prohibition on placing publicity material on public property, no writing on walls, no 360-degree bombardment of party slogans. In their place, Election Commission vehicles circulate through constituencies with 360-degree cameras mounted on their roofs, recording everything. Cash movement is under intense scrutiny: my vehicle was checked at least a dozen times during my 1,000-kilometre drive, including the return leg to Guwahati.

Every candidate is permitted to spend a maximum of Rs 40 lakh on the campaign. This is the cap mandated by the Election Commission of India for assembly elections in larger states, and it is the reason parties and candidates are managing their expenditure with extraordinary caution, particularly on anything that leaves a visible trail. Candidates grumble that the cap is unrealistic, especially given the ECI’s rule that all expenses exceeding Rs 10,000 must be routed through traceable banking channels. 

But the complaint does not quite withstand scrutiny. In the 2025 Bihar Assembly elections, an analysis by the Association for Democratic Reforms found that winning candidates reported an average expenditure of just Rs 24,30,000, with nearly 42 per cent of elected MLAs declaring expenses well below 61 per cent of the cap. The spending limit, it turns out, is not really the problem. The accounting is. And where accounting is enforced, visible expenditure vanishes.

What has emerged, instead, is a quieter, more intimate style of campaigning, driven partly by regulation and partly by resourcefulness. In Kokrajhar, Hagrama Mohilary, the chief of the Bodoland People’s Front, is going house to house, relying on village and municipal-level meetings rather than mass rallies. I watched his wife, Sewli Mohilary, herself a candidate and reportedly a wealthy one—her declared assets include more than 30 cars—address a gathering of about a hundred people, without a single flag or banner in sight. 

In Sarbhog, I visited the home of Manoranjan Talukdar, the CPI (M) candidate, one afternoon and found none of the frenetic bustle that typically marks an election campaign headquarters. His BJP rival and sitting cabinet minister Ranjeet Kumar Das was out campaigning in Golkaganj, but later explained to me his plan to divide his constituency into small geographical pockets and visit each booth personally. 

In Dhekiajuli, another BJP candidate and cabinet minister, Ashok Singhal, has not printed any publicity material at all. Instead, he plans to address at least one lakh people directly via social-media platforms on April 5, with party workers ensuring that those one lakh people are seated in homes and community centres, watching on screens of various sizes.

In Jorhat, Gaurav Gogoi has been conducting small meetings with a lean entourage. His party workers, along with some professional recruits, are going door to door, making the case that the Himanta Biswa Sarma government has been harmful to the state’s economy and social harmony. The strategy is built on crisp, direct messages delivered at the doorstep. 

In Sivasagar, candidates are operating with the precision of a military logistics exercise: an advance team assembles a crowd in a village before the candidate arrives and begins speaking. As the address begins, the team departs to ensure that the next audience is already gathered and waiting before the candidate reaches the next stop. No time is lost.

This efficiency is not merely tactical ambition. Candidates had less than two weeks to campaign between the last date for withdrawal of candidatures and the final day of campaigning, a compressed window, again thanks to the Election Commission’s schedule. The Opposition has argued that the truncated campaign period favours the ruling party, which enjoys the advantages of incumbency and organizational depth. 

But this election will also serve as a test of which party possesses the organizational muscle and the strategic ingenuity to deliver a crisply packaged message directly to the voter in the available time. In terms of the visible publicity campaign, at any rate, Gyanesh Kumar’s Election Commission has engineered something that Indian elections rarely achieve: a level playing field.

Footnote: I asked a senior BJP leader, only half in jest: “Isn’t this Election Commission supposed to be helping you win? Why aren’t you doing a high-voltage campaign?” His honesty was refreshingly direct. “Even if the ECI were designed to help us,” he said, “we’d still need to look clean, so the Opposition can’t point to discrepancies. For argument’s sake, let’s say we managed to buy off the visible government officials working for the Commission and manning those cameras. What about the ones we don’t know about, the ones mingling with the public? Better to be cautious than to face chaos later.” 

It was perhaps the most honest expression of electoral intent I have ever come across, not a pretension to play fair, but a practical strategy to win on the ground.

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

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