Himanta Biswa Sarma’s decision to join the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has proven expensive for the Congress in Assam with every subsequent election. After joining the BJP, he led the party to a spectacular victory in the 2016 assembly elections in the state, which was followed by the Congress’s defeat in other northeastern states after Sarma became convenor of the North-East Democratic Alliance.
This time, the party managed to secure an unprecedented number of seats in Assam as it improved its tally from seven to nine. Sarma is widely acknowledged to have been the BJP’s main strategist for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections in Assam. Apart from the party’s politics, his unique campaigning style played a major role in galvanising the people in favour of the BJP.
During the course of campaigning, Sarma went on a dancing spree as he sought votes for the BJP. In many of his rallies, the minister undertook exceptionally long marches, where he would frequently break into a dance sequence as the party’s campaign song blared in the background. Seeing him dance drove his supporters into a frenzy.
Sarma’s dance, however, captured attention not due to its coordinated sequence but for its choppy choreography. Perhaps this was why former chief minister Tarun Gogoi attributed Himanta Biswa Sarma’s dancing spree to a condition of drunkenness or mental disorder.
Sarma’s innovative campaigning
One needs to understand that both of these conditions pointed out by Gogoi are suggestive of a mind that is not fully conscious. Gogoi’s remarks are important for they reiterate the continuing inability of the Congress party to understand Sarma. Far from being an unconscious impulse, Sarma’s dancing outbursts were a conscious expression of a well-crafted strategy.
For many in the opposition as well as journalists and intellectuals, Sarma’s dance-based campaign seemed to provide them with an occasion to ridicule him. Elites in the Congress and in the civil society pointed out the crudeness of his campaign and how it lowered the discourse of politics.
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But between his detractors and supporters, nobody made a proper attempt to decipher the conscious political imperatives that underlay the choice for a dance-based campaign. Political analysis is about rationalisation. Treating the unconventional as an aberration or outlier, therefore, goes against a comprehensive understanding of the myriad ways in which political phenomena gets manifested.
Memories play an important role in politics. The interplay of remembering and forgetting serves to mediate the choices people make in politics. New memories emerge through the gradual erasure of preceding thoughts. Sarma’s dance-based campaign has to be understood in this light. For it allowed producing a flux that could separate the past against the promise of a better future.
In a way, Sarma’s choice for a dance-based campaign could be therefore linked to his position on the Citizenship Amendment Bill, 2016 (CAB). While many even in his party spoke about the Bill with ambivalence, the minister emerged as the most unequivocal supporter of Bengali-Hindus.
This not only alienated a section of the people but the media and the opposition persuasively sought to invoke this memory as elections drew nearer. A dance-based campaign delivered the scope for producing sufficient hysteria for inducing a forgetfulness of older memories and the creation of newer perceptions.
Placing a campaign on entertainment served Sarma in two ways. On one hand, a campaign that was based on entertainment through songs and dance left lesser scope for subjecting it to critical questions pertaining to its past record.
Secondly, with the Muslim vote aggregating towards the Congress, a higher turnout of BJP supporters held the key for its electoral prospects. The mass character of the dance-based campaign contributed to building perceptions of euphoria and enthusiasm which aided the scope for greater mobilisation.
BJP’s Himanta Biswa Sarma campaigning in Bhabanipur. Credit: himantabiswa/Twitter
An out-of-sequence dance performance provokes laughter, and after a point of time, mitigates anger. By taking to the streets, dancing in front of the people and making them laugh, Sarma skilfully repaired his rapport with the electorate.
In this way, the dance-based campaign provided the interface through which Sarma rebuilt his capability to mediate voter choices amongst a cross-section of the Assamese. By explaining the enthusiasm and laughter of the people in terms of goodwill towards his prime ministerial candidate, Sarma managed to build up another Modi wave in Assam.
The choice of a dance-based campaign also indicates Sarma’s capacity to comprehend the political economy of a media industry driven by target rating points (TRP). In many of his rallies, the minister himself emphasised how his campaigning style had an entertainment angle to it. Perhaps, his dance sequence would have received lesser media attention if it conformed to the standard patterns of choreography.
Diffusing tensions in a polarised state
But the eccentricity of his dance moves provided the novelty of content that attracted greater media attention. The increase in media coverage also spurted a rise in social media trolling of his dance moves as more and more people began to follow Sarma’s rallies on TV and this, in turn, compelled media channels to provide him with an even greater media space.
For example, during the rally for the Gauhati constituency, many of the local news channels in Assam covered his procession continuously for almost four hours. Consequently, Sarma was able to command more sustained communication with prospective voters. This allowed far more scope for the dissemination of his political messages and dog-whistles in comparison to the members in the opposition.
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Sarma’s dance-based campaign, therefore, needs due consideration when explaining the BJP’s victory in Assam. His insistence on a positive electoral narrative through entertainment helped to diffuse the fault lines that had emerged among different sections of Hindus around the Citizenship Amendment Bill.
The campaign was therefore instrumental in re-consolidating the Hindu community’s vote in Assam and prepared the groundwork for their political mobilisation. The occasion for this was provided when the Muslim-centric All Indian United Democratic Front decided not to put candidates against the Congress in most constituencies.
Abhinav P. Borbora is a political commentator based in Guwahati.