Tarun Gogoi: The quintessential Congressman who brought peace to Assam

Tarun Gogoi, quintessential Congressman and proven administrator, died on Monday after battling post-Covid complications. He was 84. Former Assam chief minister, six-time parliamentarian, Union minister twice and MLA from the Titabor Assembly constituency since 2001, he was one of the founders of modern Assam.

Few in the Congress managed to beat incumbency like Gogoi. He took the Congress to victory for the third consecutive time in 2011 and became chief minister; the party won 78 of the 126 seats in the Vidhan Sabha, surprising everyone. He tried to keep everyone happy, sometimes against his better judgement. But ultimately, it was one of his lieutenants, a man he trusted almost like his son, Himanta Biswa Sarma, who proved to be his undoing. Ironically, Sarma — now part of the BJP government in the state  — officially broke the news of Gogoi’s death.

In 2001, when Gogoi took charge as chief minister of Assam, the outgoing Asom Gana Parishad government had left the state’s finances in a mess. The United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) was striking and killing at will. Neighbouring militant groups were claiming that Assam was actually part of Greater Nagaland. And incessant migration from Bangladesh had prompted then governor, Lt General S K Sinha, to warn President K R Narayanan in a report that 57 of Assam’s 126 Assembly constituencies had shown more than a 20 per cent increase in the number of voters between 1994 and 1997, whereas the all-India average was just 7.4 per cent, and that the Muslim population in Assam had shown a rise of 77.42 per cent over what it had been in 1971 (there was no census in Assam in 1981). In this, lay the tried and tested formula for the Congress’s base in Assam, as spelt out by Devakanta Barooah, veteran Congressman, who declared once from the podium: “As long as I have Ali (Assamese Muslims), the Kuli (tea garden labour), and Bangali (migrants from West Bengal and Bangladesh), no one can drive me out.”

In 2006, Gogoi became chief minister again largely by dint of putting the finances of the state in order and taking control of law and order. But the Congress got 55 seats. This time he made a pact with the Bodoland People’s Front (BPF) which wields power in the Bodoland Territorial Autonomous District Council (BTADC). By now, Muslims in Assam (about whom Gen Sinha had warned the government) were beginning to look for their own leadership. This had emerged in the form of perfume king and MP Badruddin Ajmal, who had launched the Assam United Democratic Front (AUDF). As Muslims had always been the backbone of the Congress, the party realised that it needed to balance the loss of the Muslims by another ethnic group. Gogoi identified this as the Bodos.

In 2011, although the Congress did not need the support of anyone else to form the government, it announced it would still keep the Bodos with it, describing the BPF as a “valuable ally”. He managed to Badruddin Ajmal at bay as long as he could. This was the Congress training kicking in — that if the Congress were to yield minority space, radicals would move in. He began by rejecting the claims of the Assam unit of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind, which had backed the Congress in the earlier Assembly elections and now wanted its pound of flesh. When Ajmal sought a relationship of equals, he rejected that as well — though towards the end of his chief ministership, he had begun to reluctantly put out a hand to Ajmal.

In Gogoi, always affable and never one who held anything against anyone, the Congress has lost a true secularist. Until 2019, he believed that the CAA and the National Register of Citizenship were ‘bad things’ for India. His death is the end of an era for Assam.