Column: The Importance of Being Regional in Assam

Following Assam election success, an upbeat BJP is suddenly on expansionist mode; even on streets of Shillong (where Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited on May 27th for a plenary of the North Eastern Council) volunteers were distributing party flags to vehicles passing by. They have sensed that regional parties would be agreeable to an arrangement for sharing power in these states. Manipur is next on their radar where a violent agitation is going on for the imposition of the colonial Inner Line Permit.

 

The swearing-in ceremony in Guwahati was a BJP show of strength completing the second year at the centre with a much-needed win. The event, however, had a whiff of fresh air with the new chief minister Sarbananda Sonowal reaching out to his senior predecessor Tarun Gogoi who reciprocated the gesture by sharing the stage along with NDA chief ministers from across the country. The party used the platform to announce a regional alliance announcing as it were the arrival of the saviour to a region battered for decades. They avoided being patronising, though.

 

It may be a convenient alliance of parties but doesn’t look like a space that the personalities would be able to share with ease; Sarbananda Sonowal, Himanta Biswa Sarma, Prafulla Kumar Mahanta and Hagrama Mohilary. Each comes with a baggage that is not too pleasant. Sharing of power comes with sharing responsibilities too and this combination doesn’t promise a joyride.

Guwahati is all set to receive the monsoon. The Brahmaputra is in full spate. The valley is green and the weather seems as favourable as the results of an election that had an emphatic people’s choice for ‘poribortan’. But is change possible?

 

Chief Minister Sonowal has set out his journey by declaring that the Indo-Bangladesh border will be completely sealed in two years. That seems a difficult proposition given that part of the international border is riverine. But he is acutely aware of the issue that propelled him and his party to power and he cannot disappoint the voters who reposed faith on him, someone who’s challenge of the faulty IMDT Act helped repeal a law considered to be abetting infiltration instead of stemming it.

 

However, his past as a student AASU leader and later AGP MLA are not credentials of addressing the issue of illegal infiltration. The AGP that came to power on this issue failed entirely to even make a token move to stop infiltration. But now he is in BJP! The reality on the ground, however, doesn’t change. Deportation is not possible. The border is far too lucrative with 68 smuggling points that allows trafficking of millions of Indian cattle, fake currency and human beings. Indian and Bangladeshi security agencies are allegedly involved in this trade.

The BJP may have been lucky with insurgency no longer an issue in the state. But there are still half a dozen militias that continue to be in a talk-mode without any substantial progress in negotiations. He wouldn’t want them to go back to the jungles.

The immediate challenge that Sonowal may face is flood that has become an annual feature in the state largely due to abysmal flood mitigation management. Fifteen years of Tarun Gogoi’s reign had ensured an entrenched politician-contractor mafia that ensures embankments is not in place. Flood don’t just cause loss to life and property, it creates an unending cycle of debt. The state has no disaster planning and invariably a few million people will be affected with the rising water of the Brahmaputra.

 

Former Gogoi deputy, Himanta Biswa Sarma vindicated after switching to the BJP daring his party supremo and Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi will manage the key portfolios of health, education, finance and planning. Sarma was the health and education minister in the previous government too but the state’s health record is amongst the worst in the country. Quality of education is poor. The student-teacher ratio is disgraceful and drop out of students particularly the girl child is high. Therefore, Sarma’s much discussed ‘efficiency’ quotient is not good enough to take the state out of this morass.  

 

 

Tea gardens have clearly voted for the BJP but they need urgent attention. 60 lakh people of the tea-garden community known in Assam as ‘coolies’ brought by the British as indentured labourers from the Chota Nagpur plateau have the worst human development indices. Sonowal growing up in the tea country of Upper Assam is not unfamiliar to the situation in the plantations. Does he have the will to change things there?

 

The BJP may have been lucky with insurgency no longer an issue in the state. But there are still half a dozen militias that continue to be in a talk-mode without any substantial progress in negotiations. He wouldn’t want them to go back to the jungles. From his previous experience in the AGP, he knows very well that as a new government assumes power, the likes of Paresh Baruah and his gang will make attempts at getting a foothold in the Brahmaputra valley.

 

He has inherited a state with aspiration and expectation to break free from the stereotype of a conflict-ridden and underdeveloped place. Keeping things simple and sincere may be the best way forward but does that make good politics for a party set out on a conquest?

 

Kishalay Bhattacharjee is a senior journalist and author. His most recent book is Blood on my Hands: Confessions of Staged Encounters (Harper Collins 2015). The views expressed here are his own.