Litmus test awaits new Congress Prez Gaurav Gogoi ahead of Assam polls

Elections to the Bodoland Territorial Council will test his leadership in Assam

“It’s a tough election. But it is winnable,” Gaurav Gogoi, new president of the Assam unit of the Congress, told Business Standard on the phone from Guwahati.

 

Gogoi is also member of Parliament from the Jorhat Lok Sabha seat and is deputy leader of the Congress in the Lok Sabha.

 

The seat was previously held by the Bharatiya Janata Party. Retaining Jorhat was a prestige issue for Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, who deployed considerable resources to defeat Gogoi. However, Gogoi, considered by younger voters as a promising politician from the Northeast, won the constituency by a comfortable margin of more than 140,000 votes.

 

On the strength of this victory and the fact that the faction-ridden state unit needed a new leader, he was appointed to lead the state party in May. Assembly elections in Assam are due by May next year. “Time is short. But we’re already at work,” he said. He has just completed a marathon meeting of the Political Affairs Committee (PAC) of the state organisation, he says. He concedes that challenges are many, but points out that those who wrote off the Congress may have to eat their words. 

 

Gogoi’s central contention is that incumbency is catching up with the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government, in place since 2016. This, he says, is evident by the results of the recent panchayat elections in the state (May 2 and 7). Although the NDA posted a good performance, winning 274 of 397 Zilla Parishad member (ZPM) seats and 1,261 of 2,192 anchalik panchayat member (APM) seats, the Congress proved that it still had a following, especially in rural Assam, securing 72 ZPM seats and 481 APM seats.

 

Earlier, in the Lok Sabha polls, while the saffron party’s vote share rose from 36.41 per cent in 2019 to 37.43 per cent in 2024, securing it nine of the 14 Lok Sabha seats in the state, the Congress, winning three constituencies, saw its vote share rise from 35.79 per cent to 37.48 per cent during the same period. More significantly, the party wrested the Dhubri seat from perfume king Badruddin Ajmal of the All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF), who considered Dhubri his pocket borough and did not expect the setback inflicted on him by Rakibul Hussain of the Congress.

 

Hussain won the seat by more than one million votes. It is another matter, that Samaguri, the seat vacated by Hussain in the Assembly after he had won the Lok Sabha, was lost to the BJP. The fact that a Hindu candidate won in a Muslim-majority area led Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma to describe this as a “silent wave” in the BJP’s favour.

 

Local analysts see the Congress recovering but point to inner-party friction, which has tended to turn the party on itself. Gogoi is robust when he says: “There is no factionalism in Congress. If there is any faction, it belongs only to the people of Assam.” He says he has been in charge of elections and party observer in other states where the Congress has returned from the brink. In Assam, he feels the situation for the Congress is a lot better.

 

However, analysts differ.

 

Sandhya Goswami, former professor of political science at Gauhati University and author of several scholarly articles and books on the Congress in Assam, told Business Standard: “The Congress has to revitalise itself. But in doing so, it has to address, honestly and frontally, issues relating to migration and people’s displacement from development. It also needs to forge alliances with other like-minded parties. I am not sure if Gaurav Gogoi can do this. But this much is clear: The BJP should not expect a cakewalk in the Assembly elections.” 

 

There’s no denying that in the past 10 years, Assam has seen extensive infrastructure development. Sarma has also piloted welfare schemes like Orunodoi (2020) and Nijut Moina (2024), which have bolstered the BJP’s rural and urban support base. The Nijut Moina scheme aims at financial grants to seven million girls as admission incentive in higher secondary, graduation and post-graduation courses. There is no income criterion for this. Every girl who enrols in Class XI, for instance, is eligible for ₹10,000 annually. The amount goes up at graduate and post-graduate levels. The Orunodoi scheme gives a cash grant of ₹1,000 every month via direct benefit transfer to around 1.9 million families. These are just two among many schemes.

 

Despite these, the Congress believes Assam faces extensive financial distress.

 

“Despite the politics of polarisation in India, there are many who feel they are unseen, their voices unheard. The case in Assam is the same. Many ethnic and tribal communities in Assam feel the gains of development in Assam are cornered by the chief minister’s personal business interests and the business interests of his three or four colleagues in the cabinet,” Gogoi told Business Standard. “We are going to focus on this.”

 

Gogoi is more nuanced on migration, ethnicity, and religious polarisation. “The BJP has been in power in New Delhi for 11 years and in Assam for nine years. If there is anxiety among the people on polarisation, the party has to answer what it has done on this.”

 

The Congress is facing an immediate challenge. September will see elections to the Bodoland Territorial Council, the first the party will face under Gogoi’s leadership. Bodo regions like Barpeta, Bongaigaon, and Kokrajhar have seen extensive development but there are also tensions between indigenous Bodos and Bengali-speaking Muslims. How the party will fare in the polls will determine Gogoi’s future plans.