The Bharatiya Janata Party's notable performance in the elections to Assam's urban local bodies (ULBs) held earlier this month has been described as a "sweep" by some, as a "surge" by certain others. The truth, as is often the case when hyperbole is used to describe electoral performances, is the casualty here. For, the truth lies elsewhere.
The BJP's accomplishment was good, quite impressive. But winning less than 50 per cent of the seats and just about half of the ULBs can hardly be described as a sweep, and certainly not as a surge, if you keep in mind the party's gradually-increasing voteshare since the late 1990s.
The party has definitely grown, but hardly because of its own popular appeal or capabilities. Depending on the area of the state, it has either filled in an aspirational gap left by the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP)'s redundancy, or weaned away disgruntled voters from the Congress. Finding which segment of voters swung which way in any particular election is not easy.
Communal and caste equations don't apply to Assam in the same way it does in many other parts of India; language and ethnicity matter more. And yes, land too. That's what has been central to most conflicts that, have in the past and even now, hold sway in the state.
Assam is a demographer's dream and a psephologist's worst nightmare. According to the Anthropological Survey of India's (ASI) People of India project, there are 115 ethnic groups in the state. How the inter-group ethnicities have a bearing on an election can indeed be deliberated and explained, but would be beyond the scope of this write-up.
One can look at the numbers, nevertheless. But what one needs to bear in mind is that factors that decide the fate of contestants at the Lok Sabha hustings are not always the same that prevail during the Assembly elections. And elections to ULBs are an entirely different ballgame.
In the elections that were held on February 9, the BJP won 38 of the 74 municipal boards and town committees. The ruling Congress, which had won 71 boards and committees five years ago, could muster only 17 bodies. Out of the 746 municipal wards to which elections were held, the BJP won 340 and the Congress, which had won 517 the last time in 2009, could manage only 232. The AGP won two towns, and the Left has been decimated altogether.
The BJP, riding the Modi Wave in the 2014 general elections, had won seven of the 14 seats in the state with about 36.86 per cent of the votes. It had won five of the 120 seats (out of 126) that it had fought in the last Assembly elections of 2011. It’s voteshare overall had been 11.47 per cent that year, but 12.09 per cent votes in the seats that it had contested on its own.
Roughly 50 per cent of ULBs and wards, therefore, hardly call for the narrative of a sweep or a surge. But the results do indicate a few things: the electoral growth of the BJP, the eroding credibility of the Congress, and the AGP being rendered politically redundant. It’s worth taking a look, cursory though it might be, at the latter two factors.
The Congress, which vanquished the second AGP-led government in 2001, has seen Tarun Gogoi rule uninterruptedly. It ran into problems in this last tenure – with infighting plaguing the party constantly. The ageing Gogoi has been grooming his own son Gaurav, the state PCC chief Anjan Dutta has been harbouring a more ambitious role for himself, and young turk Himanta Biswa Sarma has been a nagging thorn in Gogoi’s flesh these last few years.
Sarma, who had quit the ministry after the 2014 elections and has since been caught in the Saradha quagmire, has not been able to curry much favour with the high command. When Gogoi offered to quit after last year’s poll debacle, he was asked to continue. A chance to revamp the party was lost. The Congress could not see the Delhi washout staring it in the face even though all its central leaders were stationed right in that city, and Assam is a far-away land. The party’s political future is there for all to see, except maybe the high command.
The AGP, once a party constituted by the bright and idealistic young lads who had steered the popular Assam Movement of the 1970s and 1980s, is a pale shadow of itself. The hot blood has long dried up, and all its leaders are spent forces. The dynamic young men who were in their Thirties when the AGP stormed to power the first time in 1985, are now in their fading Sixties. The party had been given a (second) chance by the people of the state to redeem themselves in 1996, but the leaders squandered away that opportunity by remaining shamelessly inefficient and flagrantly corrupt. The AGP can’t blame the stars for the hapless situation it is in.
But make no mistake – the AGP has not lost ground because the demographic realities that shaped the Assam Movement have disappeared. The party has rendered itself politically inconsequential, and the gap left by it in the political space has been filled in by an obliging BJP. The latter has also roped in many from the AGP and the All-Assam Students Union (AASU) bloc. Among them is Sarbananda Sonowal, AASU president from 1992 to 1999 and AGP legislator from 2001 to 2004. Sonowal is now a Union minister, and remains popular in his home state. The Sonowal example is just a political weathercock – it tells you which way the wind is blowing.
The ULB elections are being seen as a litmus test in the run-up to the Assembly elections in Assam next year. Not because this indicates which way the people are likely to vote next year (since the Delhi elections have shown that political loyalties change in a matter of months), but because it clearly shows how organised the political parties themselves are.
The AGP is in tatters, the Congress is in disarray, and the BJP is happily fishing in troubled waters.
