A useful man to know

Rarely does the writ of a chief minister run outside the state he leads. Leaders like Yogi Adityanath have been used by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for election campaigns, but there’s no evidence Mr Adityanath has been involved in negotiations to stitch up coalitions for the BJP outside Uttar Pradesh. That honour belongs to Himanta Biswa Sarma alone.

The Chief Minister of Assam might be in the BJP today. But he has skills he learnt at the feet of top Congress leaders like Tarun Gogoi, with whom he worked for many years. This is not to decry Sarma’s own talents of political persuasion. Home Minister Amit Shah forges alliances for the BJP with brisk efficiency, but he knows when to stop throwing good money after bad, like in the case of the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD), which the BJP simply let go when the going got tough. Sarma’s business style is much more genial and accommodative.

Little wonder then that he is, for all practical purposes, the BJP’s ‘Nawab of the Northeast’. Days after the BJP formed a government in Assam for the first time in 2016 and Sarbananda Sonowal was made chief minister, Amit Shah announced the formation of the North Eastern Development Council (Neda), a political grouping of parties in the Northeast that —broadly speaking — were on the same ideological platform as the BJP. Sarma was appointed convenor, and this was his ticket to grow the BJP’s presence — and his own — outside Assam to other states in the Northeast.    

Neda has become a powerful alliance. In Meghalaya, the ruling National People’s Party (NPP), led by Conrad Sangma, may have its differences with the BJP today. It announced it would contest the Assembly elections on its own. But the NPP continues to be a part of Neda: Who knows when you might need to be on the right side of the BJP? There are many examples of Sarma’s overt and covert interventions in the politics of northeastern states that have made him virtually indispensable for his party.

He began his political career in the All Assam Students’ Union (AASU) but left the organisation in a move that made history when he defeated Bhrigu Kumar Phukan of the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) in the 2001 Assembly elections. He later joined the Congress and gradually became a pan-Assam face of the party.

He thrived in the organisation and gradually became the right hand man of Gogoi. The relationship between the two leaders was like one between a father and a son. Except that Gogoi had a son who is now a member of Parliament from Assam.

Still, Sarma hoped his party would recognise his undeniable talent and promote him ahead of family claims. Gogoi was not a leader to be trifled with: He took the Congress to victory for a third consecutive time in 2011 and became Assam’s chief minister, winning 78 of the 126 seats in the Vidhan Sabha. But Sarma felt part of the credit was due to him. In July 2014, Gogoi attacked him by name. “I used to trust him a lot. Now he wants to become the chief minister, no less. I am no longer on good terms with him,” Gogoi said at a public meeting. Stung into retaliation, Sarma got together enough dissidents to get a meeting of the Congress Legislature Party (CLP) convened and proved pretty much conclusively that he had more followers in the CLP than the chief minister: He claimed support of 52 of the 78 legislators and staked claim to become the CLP leader. This was turned down by Rahul Gandhi, then vice-president of the All India Congress Committee.

Sarma realised he’d hit a brick wall and sent a message to the BJP, and joined the party in August 2015. It would have happened sooner. But the BJP had only two leaders in Assam who were well known – Kamakhya Tasha and Sarbananda Sonowal. Days before he was to join the party, minister Kiren Rijiju and Sonowal held a press conference and highlighted Sarma’s role in the Louis Berger bribery scandal. Sonowal made it clear that he considered Sarma a corrupt politician. The allegations related to Sarma’s tenure as Guwahati Development Department Minister between 2006 and 2011, when US firm Louis Berger, indicted by US courts for bribing Indian lawmakers to get the contract to provide water to the city, was at work. But the files in Guwahati relating to that contract are “lost”.  The Enforcement Directorate's Eastern Region office has registered a complaint under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) against “unknown individuals”. In Goa, PWD minister Churchill Alemao, who was facing the same charges, was arrested. But no one has ever been arrested in Guwahati. And now, no one ever will.

With Meghalaya, Tripura and Nagaland due for elections in the next few months, Sarma is active: He understands — better than anyone else — the complexities of tribal politics, and how much traction the issue of citizenship will have if it is not to become counterproductive. He’s a useful man to know.