After months of speculation, the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Asom Gana Parishad have tied up for the assembly polls in Assam. It is, however, an alliance filled with dissensions, as cadres of both parties break out in protest. While some members have defected to rival parties, others vow to start new political outfits.
The discontent stems partly from disagreements over seat-sharing – out of 126 seats, the AGP will contest 24, and members of both parties feel shortchanged. But at the heart of the alliance lie deeper ideological differences between Hindu nationalist BJP and the regional chauvinism of the AGP.
Of course, this is not the first time that the two parties have forged an alliance. They contested the Lok Sabha polls together in 2009 and 2014. While the BJP scored a hefty seven out of 14 seats in the last general elections, the AGP failed to win even one. In the Assam assembly elections of 2011, the regional party finished fourth with just nine seats. But the BJP, which has made no secret of its strategy of advancing through alliances, clearly hopes to benefit from the pockets of support that the AGP still commands.
Both, however, risk alienating their respective constituencies with an alliance that seems to be built solely on electoral expediency.
AGP for Assamese
The AGP was born out of the Assam movement, which swept across the state from 1979 to 1985, floating the slogan, “Assam for Assamese”. The movement drew its energies from the idea of an Asomiya homeland, containing only the true, the original inhabitants of the region. It was attended by language chauvinism and an anxiety that the political future of Assam would not belong to the Assamese anymore, as outsiders crept into electoral roles and contested elections.
The AGP swept to power in 1985, soon after the Assam Accord, which aimed to solve the “problem of foreigners” in the state. While the appeal of such a politics has shrunk since then, the party has stuck to the old orthodoxies. “We are not power hungry,” an AGP leader told Scroll.in in January, “we’ll keep our own regionalism.” This strident regionalism has ranged the AGP against the party from Delhi on several key issues.
The national and the regional
To begin with, migration. Announcing the alliance this week, BJP leader Ravishankar Prasad said the two parties had one thing in common: they were both against “illegal infiltration from Bangladesh”. But the BJP and the AGP have their own versions of this nameless multitude.
The AGP speaks the language of an ethnic population that sees itself being “swamped” by outsiders. “The indigenous population of Assam will become a minority,” said former chief minister and senior party leader Prafulla Mahanta when he spoke to Scroll.in recently. According to the AGP, all outsiders, whether Hindu or Muslim, should be expelled from Assam – it claims, among other things, to be a secular party.
But the BJP’s campaign on illegal infiltration seems to be a regional inflection of the communal politics played elsewhere. Ever since the run up to 2014, Narendra Modi has distinguished between Muslim Bangladeshis who must “pack their bags” and Hindu Bangladeshis who have a “natural home” in India. Once in power, his government tried to put this into practice, floating legislative changes that would make it easier for Hindu migrants to get citizenship in India.
For now, an uneasy truce prevails; the AGP has said that the BJP may invite Hindu migrants into the country if it so wished, but Assam should not be turned into a “dumping ground”.
A sentiment that is linked to another sensitive issue in Assam: land. This is a region where both identity and livelihoods are tied to land, and outsiders are blamed for displacing indigenous peoples. The BJP, as the party which implemented the Land Boundary Agreement with Bangladesh, involving the exchange of border enclaves, is perceived to have bartered away some of this precious resource. Though the area lost in the land swap was negligible, the AGP came out in vocal opposition to the deal.
Finally, as a party that claims to represent regional interests, the AGP’s politics has often revolved around wresting economic autonomies from the Centre. The BJP has promised munificence from Delhi: roads, bridges, dams, airports and refineries. But the AGP remembers the Finance Minister Arun Jaitley’s earlier promise, that states would be able generate their own resources. A promise that was not kept, according to AGP leaders.
Balancing act
How the AGP balances its regional pride with more pragmatic concerns will shape its fortunes in these elections. As for the BJP, it has a different balancing act to pull off. Allying with the AGP means risking its core constituency of Hindu Bengali voters. It could also stretch the limits of the “rainbow coalition” the BJP has tried to build in the run up to the polls.
It has already tied up with the dominant Bodo party, the Bodoland People’s Front, and made overtures to other tribal groups, such as the Karbis and Mishings. But in Assam, ethnic claims are often competitive, and the BJP’s ambitious coalition may find itself pulled in different directions. The challenge for the BJP now is to strike a balance among these competing claims and create a coalition that is greater than the sum of its parts.
