Pradyut Bordoloi's volte-face: From chairing Congress chargesheet against Himanta to BJP induction

When Pradyut Bordoloi sat down to author a 20-point charge sheet accusing the Bharatiya Janata Party of corruption, broken promises and fostering fear among minorities, few would have imagined that the same man would, weeks later, be photographed shaking hands with Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma at a BJP joining ceremony in New Delhi.

That is precisely what happened on March 18.

Bordoloi, the Nagaon Lok Sabha MP who chaired the committee that prepared the Congress's blistering indictment of the BJP-led Assam government, a document unveiled by Priyanka Gandhi in Guwahati on February 19, formally crossed over to the ruling party, dealing a significant blow to a Congress already haemorrhaging leadership ahead of the state assembly elections.

The charge sheet he helped craft accused Sarma's administration of "rampant corruption," illegal wealth accumulation by ministers and their families, and a failure to deliver on key promises, including Scheduled Tribe status for six indigenous communities and a wage hike for tea garden workers. The BJP had dismissed those allegations as politically motivated. The man who made them has now joined the party he was attacking.

The optics could scarcely be worse for Congress.

Nobody has captured the strangeness of the moment more pointedly than Congress MP Rakibul Hussain, who made clear that the charge sheet was not a collective party exercise — it was Bordoloi's own work.

"He had even prepared a detailed chargesheet against the government, which was released to the public by Priyanka Gandhi. That document was his own work and strongly targeted the government. But now, he appears to be siding with Himanta Biswa Sarma — which raises serious questions," Hussain said.

Hussain went further, listing the specific attacks Bordoloi had personally levelled against the Chief Minister — on corruption, unemployment, governance failures, schemes such as PM Sampada and Jal Jeevan Mission, tribal dignity and associated controversies.

"All of this was prepared by Pradyut Bordoloi himself — this was not our work," he said pointedly. Hussain, himself no admirer of Sarma, added a remark that underlined just how striking the reversal was: "Personally, I have been a critic of Himanta Biswa Sarma, but Pradyut Bordoloi used to criticise him even more strongly than I did. His language was more forceful than mine."

The charge sheet, in other words, was not a document Bordoloi reluctantly put his name to. It was, by his own colleague's account, a project he owned and drove — one that publicly asked: "Who is Himanta Biswa Sarma?" The man posing that question is now a member of Sarma's party.

Bordoloi resigned from the Congress a day before his formal induction into the BJP, submitting his resignation to party president Mallikarjun Kharge. In an emotional address to reporters, he described his departure as a painful rupture from a lifelong association. "Today, I have abandoned one of the most important principles of my life, and I am not happy with it," he said, adding that he had grown increasingly isolated within the Assam Congress and felt repeatedly disrespected despite decades of service.

Priyanka Gandhi, speaking to reporters on Wednesday, March 18, offered a measured but telling response. "It is very unfortunate. I think he was upset over one ticket allocation, and we wish we had a chance to have a conversation about it," she said. The admission that the party's candidate screening process may have driven away a sitting MP lays bare the depth of the internal crisis.

The reaction on the ground was swift and visceral. At the Margherita Block Congress Committee office, workers tore down and removed Bordoloi's posters from the Congress Bhawan within minutes of the news breaking. At the Rajiv Bhawan in Nagaon, his constituency, agitated workers went further — burning banners bearing his image and raising slogans against him. One worker said the exit felt like a family betrayal. "If there were differences, they could have been resolved through discussion," he said.

Bordoloi is a four-time MLA from the Margherita constituency and a former cabinet minister. His defection follows that of former Assam Congress president Bhupen Kumar Borah, who joined the BJP less than a month ago. Together, the two departures have stripped the party of significant organisational and parliamentary weight at the worst possible moment. With Bordoloi gone, the Congress has lost one of its three sitting MPs from Assam.

There is, however, a separate and more intimate political drama unfolding in the shadow of his exit. The Congress has already fielded Bordoloi's son, Prateek Bordoloi, as its candidate from the Margherita assembly constituency — the same seat his father once held. The younger Bordoloi, who serves as co-chairman of the APCC Social Media and IT Cell, has spent months building a grassroots presence in the area.

Notably, when workers tore down the senior Bordoloi's photographs in Margherita, the son's posters were left untouched — a deliberate signal from the cadre that they are attempting to separate the two. Yet the political damage is hard to contain. The BJP now has every incentive to use the father's switch as a campaign weapon against the son, questioning the family's loyalties and the Congress's credibility in a constituency it is counting on.

Assam's 126 assembly constituencies go to the polls in a single phase on April 9, with counting scheduled for May 4. The BJP is seeking a third consecutive term. The Congress, meanwhile, must now fight that battle while simultaneously explaining why the man who spent months compiling its most detailed case against the ruling party has decided, in the end, to join it.