From Left of the centre to Right, Asom Gana Parishad has seen it all

“To capture a wild elephant you have to first ride an elephant,” Prafulla Kumar Mahanta (pictured) declared from a podium in Jorhat, in 1983. He was then president of the All Assam Students’ Union (AASU), the genesis of which was traced to a Lok Sabha by-election in Mangaldoi in 1978, occasioned by the death of then sitting MP, Hiralal Patowary. The AASU deman­ded that the election should be deferred because it alleged that the electoral rolls, which were being revised, were overrun with the names of “lakhs” of illegal Bangladeshi immigrants. Three Ds — detection, deletion (from the voters’ list) and deportation —formed the basis of the AASU’s long-drawn agitation.

The movement culminated in the signing of the Assam Accord on August 14, 1985, by AASU leaders, the Centre and the state government. Two months later, Mahanta and Brighu Phukan, AASU general secretary, launched the AGP, adopting the elephant as its symbol. It swept the 1985 Assembly polls, but the  tenure was cut short because the United Liberation Front of Asom or ULFA created major law and order problems, after which Assam was brought under President’s rule. The AGP returned to power in 1996 but it never touched the heights it soared to a decade earlier. At times, it aligned with the Left but was subsequently drawn to the BJP which rode on the AGP’s back for a while before getting its own majority in 2016.