Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday claimed that Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma will be “put in jail” if his party comes to power in the Assembly elections in the state next year

The Assembly elections in Assam are likely to take place by March 2026.

“Your chief minister does not consider himself a chief minister, he thinks he is the king of Assam,” Gandhi told party workers at an event in Chhaygaon in Assam’s Kamrup district. “And Assam’s king is busy 24 hours giving away your wealth, your land, sometimes to [industrialists] Adani, sometimes to Ambani.”

Gandhi’s remarks come amid at least five eviction drives that have been carried out in four districts of the state over the past month, which displaced nearly 3,500 families.

At the event in Chhaygaon, the leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha claimed that there is fear in the Bharatiya Janata Party leader’s voice.

“Because he knows that one day or the other, the brave lion of the Congress party will catch him and put him in jail,” he said. “He knows that, someday or the other, he will have to account for the corruption he and his family have done to the people of Assam.”

Gandhi added that neither Prime Minister Narendra Modi nor Union Home Minister Amit Shah would be able to “save” Sarma from this.

“You watch, you will see him inside jail,” Gandhi said. “This work will not be done inside the Congress party, this work will be done by the youth, farmers, workers, people from every community of Assam.”

Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge, who was with Gandhi, added that the Congress would build the homes of those who have been evicted by the ruling BJP government in the state.

“The people whose houses they have broken, we will build them and we will help them,” Kharge told the party workers. “And the ones who do wrong things? We will send them to jail. He [Sarma] should improve the jails, because he has to go stay in them.”

In response, the chief minister on Wednesday said that Gandhi appeared to have forgotten that he himself was out on bail, referring to the allegations of corruption against the Congress leader in the National Herald case.

“‘Take it in writing, Himanta Biswa Sarma will definitely be sent to jail’ – these were the exact words spoken by the Leader of the Opposition, Shri Rahul Gandhi, during his closed-door meeting with the Congress Political Affairs Committee in Assam,” Sarma said on X. “He came all the way to Assam just to say this, conveniently forgetting that he himself is out on bail in multiple criminal cases registered across the country.”

Demolition drives

On Saturday, authorities in Assam’s Goalpara district cleared 140 hectares of land in the Paikan Reserve Forest, displacing 1,080 families, most of whom are Muslims of Bengali origin, officials told Scroll.

Goalpara Divisional Forest Officer Tejas Mariswamy told Scroll that 2,700 structures were demolished. “The land is part of the Paikan Reserve Forest of the Krishnai Range,” he said.

This was the second major eviction drive in the district. On June 16, the authorities demolished homes of 690 families in Hasilabeel, a wetland, near Goalpara town.

Last week in Dhubri district, where an eviction drive led to the demolition of the homes of 1,400 Bengali-origin Muslim families, the authorities had allocated land for the rehabilitation of the affected persons. The administration had also earmarked Rs 50,000 for one-time relief for residents to transport their belongings.

Between 2016 and August 2024, more than 10,620 families – the majority of them Muslim – have been evicted from government land, according to data provided by the state revenue and disaster management department.