Aditi Phadnis: The hot seat in Assam

Any guesses on who will be the chief minister of Assam after the Assembly elections in 2016?

Ahead of the 2014 Lok Sabha elections Himanta Biswa Sarma, once the right hand man of Congress leader and Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi, sent a message to the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP). He was ready to work against the state government and his party. Could they help?

Sarma was not exactly unknown to the BJP, more importantly, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). His brother has been associated with the RSS for some time. Sarma was at loggerheads with Gogoi at the time, publicly questioning his integrity for promoting his son, Gaurav. He could prove a point if the BJP helped him win two Lok Sabha seats: Dibrugarh and Mangaldoi. In return he would help the BJP by continuing to sabotage Gogoi.
 

It is not entirely clear what the BJP told him. Sarma’s game was to ensure his lieutenant, Paban Singh Ghatowar, won the election from Dibrugarh. This would have helped him oust Gogoi eventually. That was not to be. Both the seats were won by the BJP. But Sarma had established contact.

Now things have come full circle. Sarma has left the Congress, Ghatowar and others are far behind, and he is on the brink of joining the BJP along with his supporters who will, no doubt, demand they be given Assembly seats when the state elections are held. If, as is widely expected, the BJP wins the elections and Sarma’s supporters are in the Assembly, guess who will ask to be made chief minister?

There are a host of reasons for Sarma’s defection. Gogoi, the chief minister of Assam and a traditional Congressman, is getting tired. He will be 80 next year. His has been no mean achievement: he took the Congress to victory for the third consecutive time in 2011 and became the chief minister, winning 78 out of 126 seats in the Vidhan Sabha and surprising everyone. He has said he will retire after the Assembly elections in 2016. If the Congress loses the election, it won’t matter.

Sarma has no plans to be on the losing side. Not that he has anything to fear. He may have been the 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 have been ‘lost’. And while Louis Berger officials may have kept spreadsheets to offer a sense of the size of the contract vis-à-vis the size of the bribes paid, the Enforcement Directorate’s Eastern Region office has registered a complaint under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act against ‘unknown individuals’. In Goa, former public works department minister Churchill Alemao may have been arrested, but no one has been arrested in Guwahati.

Last year, Sarma travelled to Kolkata to be cross examined in another scam — the Saradha ponzi scheme. Former Assam director general of police Shankar Barua killed himself a day after the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) questioned him regarding the Saradha scam. But after that, the police headquarters in Assam has issued a circular saying that no cases should be registered in the Saradha scam without “prior approval from appropriate levels in the PHQ (police headquarters)”. In November, Sarma appeared before the CBI. Although that enquiry is not reaching a conclusion anytime soon, Sarma needs to be in a position where he knows what direction the probe is taking.

Everyone who knows him agrees he is articulate and a doer. Sarma began his political career in the All Assam Students’ Union but left that organisation in a move that made history when in the 2001 Assembly elections, he defeated Bhrigu Kumar Phukan of the Asom Gana Parishad. It was under Phukan’s tutelage that Sarma was initiated into politics. He later joined the Congress and gradually became a pan-Assam face of the party. The BJP, which has only Sarbananda Sonowal and Kamakhya Tasha, has embraced Sarma. Sonowal has criticised his entry into the party.

So what should we expect in the Assembly elections? Sarma’s plans could be derailed by Badruddin Ajmal of the All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF). The BJP’s performance in Assam in the 2014 Lok Sabha election made everyone sit up: the party got seven out of 14 seats in Assam. This was largely possible because voters in the tea gardens of Upper Assam, staunchly pro-Congress till then, shifted en masse to the BJP.

However, the minorities are moving away from the Congress — to the AIUDF. This party has 18 seats in the Assembly currently but could go up to 30, say Assam watchers. If that happens, and if the Congress is not completely decimated, Ajmal could become the chief minister if supported by the Congress from the outside.

In that event, Sarma’s career will suffer a setback. But he’s a shrewd player who knows Assam thoroughly. So expect the unexpected.