Electoral politics in Assam: The man with a magic wand
So far it has become common knowledge that electoral politics in Assam and the Northeast is closely linked to the aspirations and tactics of one man and his ‘brigade’. People generally underestimate the support and hard work of an individual who is a deputy and who can be called the Commander-in-Chief of the ‘Brigade’, another commander in Assam politics: Pijush janti Hazarika.
While this may sound like a compliment, I’m not a historian, and the man I’m writing about hasn’t instructed me to compliment him and, in fact, is completely unaware of it. Is. But as an in-depth observer of electoral politics, he surveyed various constituencies, especially Hazarika’s own (Jagirud) and during the by-elections in the constituencies where he was in charge of elections – Thowra and Mariani.
When we visited almost the whole of Assam before the 2021 Assembly elections, there was something special and strange about jagirod. We have all heard of the idea of ’Party Society’ or some of us may have read some sort of article by Dwaipayan Bhattacharya on Party Society in Bengal. The idea behind the party society is that there was a time in West Bengal when every member of the household was directly or indirectly involved in the work of a particular party (in the case of Bengal it was the Communist Party).
We saw a similar ‘Party Society Syndrome’ in the Jagirod constituency. As in a typical focus group survey, mostly quality, we went to ask people, especially the Bengali Hindu community in which we were particularly interested, as the current MLA (Hazarika) is an Assamese, and the Congress The candidate was a Bengali Hindu named Swapan Mandal. . After nearly two days of extensive surveys, we were surprised to see that almost every family or individual would admit their affiliation with the BJP, and by BJP they meant Pijush Hazarika.
Our concern was to know the Bengali ’emotions’ that could draw the Bengali Hindu community towards Swapan Mandal. But apart from a village panchayat, and a special village, No. 2 Murkata, where Swapan Mandal’s sister lives, there was not a single gaon panchayat on which the Bengali Hindus had expressed their opinion in favor of the Mandal. One woman almost said in the style of a slogan ‘Jar Lin Kheso Tar Gan Ga’ – in Hindi in the style of ‘Namak Halali’ or ‘Salt loyalty’.
We were surprised to learn that people were defending the poor quality of roads in some places – many commented that the MLAs were working hard to build bridges that would later improve roads and water. Facilitate – that they have done a lot of construction. Wells and small bridges had already been built and people were committed to it. While the Hindutva factor and the Himanta-BJP-RSS alliance worked wonders everywhere in Assam, we have to give some credit to the person who is the central manager of the electoral process and allegedly a close associate of the Chief Minister. Is.
When we traveled to Thora and Mariani for the by-elections, there was a lot of controversy about the two current Congress MLAs, Sushanta Borgohain and Rupjyoti Kurmi , joining the BJP immediately after winning seats from the Congress. During our three-time survey, we were surprised to find that Hazarika’s delegation visited remote areas of the constituency whenever before the election. It is interesting to note that the election in-charge remained very close to the constituencies and visited every part of these two constituencies with the same dedication as any newcomer in the field of politics does.
While politics in Assam is now seen as a group of the BJP-RSS-Sarma alliance, Hazarika used his magic wand to overcome all obstacles in the way of winning the elections with his master strategy. And they are medieval knights. Somewhere, he goes back to winning all the elections. With the political climate in Assam now buzzing with local body elections, it will be interesting to see how the Chief Minister and his commander-in-chief adopt their best strategy to fill the BJP’s coffers with votes and a landslide victory. Are