Who has the greater authority to interpret an electoral mandate? Is it the commentariat with their post-haste explanations? Or is it the politician at the centre of it all who criss-crossed constituencies and waded into the crowds on the poll stump? Senior Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, the putative number two in the Assam Cabinet and widely credited as one of the architects of Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) first ever win in the State in the Assembly elections last year, thinks it’s decidedly the latter.
Mr. Sarma, especially, and Sarbananda Sonowal, now Chief Minister, mounted the BJP’s campaign on the rallying cry of ‘jati, mati, bheti’ (community, land and home), which resonated with the Assamese population and resulted in a landslide for the National Democratic Alliance, ending 15 years of Congress rule. But attempts to inject a Delhi-Nagpur agenda in the State, from the now-on-hold plan to introduce Sanskrit in schools to the Ganga-like deification of its arterial river during the government-organised Namami Brahmaputra festival, have sparked some unease.
The latest government salvo is the setting up of 22 Deen Dayal Upadhyaya colleges in the State, which led to an outcry of excess, and the counter-question of whether Assam didn’t have enough home-grown luminaries to be acknowledged and memorialised.
A new interpretation
As the State government brazens it out, it is Mr. Sarma as Education Minister who is leading from the front. He has clarified just what ‘jati, mati, bheti’ he was talking about during the electoral campaign — of an inclusive, pan-Indian identity where Assam, as part of the national mainstream, becomes an exemplar among Indian States; and definitely not a parochial son-of-the-soil pitch for the Assamese populace. Moreover, he reasoned, the BJP’s rich haul of 61 seats — and 88 for the NDA — wasn’t courtesy the (Assamese-dominated) Brahmaputra Valley alone; the party won handsomely in the Bengali-dominated Barak Valley and other parts of the State as well.
If Mr. Sarma’s recourse to redefining — or restating, as he sees it — the mandate appears to betray the government’s discomfiture, at the heart of it is the disparate nature of electoral vote banks the party tapped into during its successful campaign.
Assamese dominance
Barring the Janata wave of 1978-79, the State had been a Congress preserve until the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) swept to power in 1985 on the back of the six-year-long Assam agitation. The BJP, prior to its spectacular performance in the 2014 general election in which it won seven of the State’s 14 Lok Sabha seats, had made inroads in the Barak Valley as early as the 1990s apart from urban concentrations such as Guwahati. While the Hindu Bengali voter has had a longer history of going with the party, her Assamese counterpart’s overwhelming support is of recent vintage, 2014 constituting the point of departure. Part of the reason why the BJP was compelled to tie up with a weakened AGP in the last Assembly elections was the urgency of not splitting this ethnic Assamese vote base, some of which still retained its loyalties to the regionalist agenda. Thus the BJP was able to mount a successful campaign that melded its Hindutva agenda with Assamese subnational aspirations. The dissonance inherent in this force-fitting is however something an electoral campaign can paper over but which everyday governance must negotiate.
Governments in Dispur have historically tended to pander to the Assamese caste Hindus, to the marginalisation of significant sections of the population, to the extent that even prominent leaders from other communities such as the late Santosh Mohan Dev from Silchar, and Paban Singh Ghatowar from Dibrugarh — both Congressmen and from the Bengali and tea tribe communities, respectively — have often had to chart out a ministerial career at the Centre instead of Guwahati. It is this hubris of jatiyotabad (regionalism) and ‘Assam for Assamese’ that the BJP is running into as it seeks to sublimate that sentiment into the broader rubric of a Hindutva identity.
Balancing act
The project has already weathered choppy waters in the Centre’s attempt to extend citizenship to minorities persecuted in India’s neighbouring countries, a Bill currently being examined by a joint parliamentary committee. Aimed in part at rehabilitating Hindu migrants from Bangladesh, the proposal is being vociferously opposed by regional (read Assamese caste Hindu-dominated) outfits including the AGP, the All Assam Students’ Union and Asom Jatiyatabadi Yuva Chhatra Parishad. It is telling that on this issue, the ethnic Assamese fronts are united in opposition with Badruddin Ajmal’s All India United Democratic Front — a party largely seen as espousing the cause of the State’s Bengali-origin Muslims — although from very different standpoints.
The State government has demurred, suggesting that this Malthusian burden be shared by other parts of the country too. Meanwhile, an interim report of a committee tasked with protection of land rights of the indigenous people has recommended that the base year for reservation of land for indigenous people and granting of land rights to citizens should be 1951. The underlying principle behind these proposals — of protecting the indigenous population — is at loggerheads with the new expansive spin to jati-mati-bheti. But since when did contradictions come in the way of a juggling act?
abdus.salam@thehindu.co.in