New Delhi: By adopting a last-minute, multi-pronged strategy in the eight northeastern states, the Bharatiya Janata Party managed to neutralise the massive public opposition to its push for the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill and emerge with more seats in 2019 than it had five years ago.
In Assam, the party faced the most vociferous opposition to the Bill in the Assamese heartland, the Brahmaputra Valley, where the BJP – for the first time – won seven seats in the 2014 general elections. In the 2016 assembly polls too, it could seize the reins of the state from a well-entrenched Congress primarily because of its success in that valley.
However, a win in the panchayat polls in end-December 2018 added to the BJP’s confidence and it began to brace itself up to break its ties with the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP). As it is, it only needed the other ally, the Bodo People’s Front (BPF)’s 12 MLAs to keep the government from falling.
When the three AGP ministers of the Sarbananda Sonowal government walked out in January over the Bill, a couple of state BJP leaders didn’t lose time to tell local news media that the party could well do without them.
But with the volume and tone of the protest unremitting, which also gave the AGP the required platform to help regain the ground it had lost among Assamese voters in 2001, BJP leaders had to craft a clever strategy and quickly so. They went back to the 2016 drawing board and convinced the AGP to once again enter into a pre-poll alliance with it along with BPF.
According to sources in the AGP, the BJP not only promised to help the party contest the Lok Sabha elections with funds but also support it to get a Rajya Sabha seat from the state. In the 16th Lok Sabha, the AGP had no MP in any of the houses. The AGP bit the bait.
Also read: BJP is Replicating the Shiv Sena-Model in Assam. This Should Worry the AGP
To set the pitch for the required results, the BJP national president in-charge of the region, Ram Madhav, told reporters on the evening of March 13, just after it sealed its seat-sharing arrangement with the AGP and the BPF in a Guwahati hotel: “We will together defeat the Congress in all 14 seats.”
Ram Madhav, BJP national security in charge of Northeast speaking to reporters in Guwahati after the AGP-BJP alliance on March 12. Credit: Twitter
With that political message targeting Congress as the joint enemy, Madhav and his party hoped to reap the same benefits it did in the 2016 polls. Though the announcement of the alliance did factionalise the AGP, it certainly helped the BJP to go to the Assamese voters of the Brahmaputra Valley as a player of regional not religious politics.
The alliance helped the BJP remind voters that it hadn’t quite forgotten its 2016 promise made to the indigenous people of protecting jati mati bheti (home, land and hearth) from the ‘illegal Bangladeshis’. Additionally, its Central government also made the right noises about providing Scheduled Tribe status to six communities which comprise a large chunk of voters in the valley.
Interestingly, when it came to dividing the constituencies among the partners, the BJP was conscious about fielding its candidates from the seats it won in 2014 in the Brahmaputra Valley in order to keep its voter base intact while leaving only three seats with substantial Muslim voters to the AGP – Kaliabor, Dhubri and Barpeta.
While Kaliabor has been a Congress bastion, the sitting MPs of Dhubri and Barpeta belonged to the All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF). All these seats were an uphill task for the AGP. As the counting picked up the pace on May 23, it was clear that AIUDF chief Badruddin Ajmal would be able to retain the Dhubri seat.
So would Congress national spokesperson Gaurav Gogoi in Kaliabor. In Barpeta too, Congress went ahead of the AGP, thus holding up the fact that AGP was taken for a royal ride by the BJP to meet its own ends. The BJP ended up retaining all its seats in the valley due to the alliance, except for Nowgong. That loss was because of a factional fight within the BJP.
Additionally, like in the 2016 assembly polls, the BJP also worked out a strategy for the Bengali-dominated Barak Valley, where there is believed to be overwhelming support for the Bill. Congress sitting MP from Silchar and the national president of Mahila Congress, Sushmita Deb, had to accept defeat at the hands of Rajdeep Roy of the BJP, mainly on the ground that her party openly opposed the Bill.
Also watch: BJP’s Rising Graph in the Northeast
In Manipur, while it tried to ride on the divide between the Nagas and the Kuki groups to corner the Outer seat – it failed to do so as it underestimated the anger of its oldest ally Naga People’s Front (NPF) for ditching it for the National Democratic People’s Front (NDPP). In the Meitei-dominated Inner constituency, it employed the same policy of regional politics over religious politics as in Assam’s Brahmaputra Valley.
In mid-2018, the N. Biren Singh-led BJP government took preemptive action keeping in mind the possible losses to the party due to the Citizenship Bill by passing in the assembly the Manipur People’s Protection Bill. The Bill grants the majority community enough safeguards from ‘outsiders’. The Bill is awaiting presidential accent.
A protest rally against the Citizenship Amendment Bill 2016, in Guwahati. File photo. Credit: PTI
Like the BJP has tried to bargain with the ‘Assamese people’ the ‘constitutional safeguards’ – as promised in the Assam Accord – in lieu of the Citizenship Bill which would treat, among others, the Hindu Bangladeshis as refugees and grant them Indian citizenship. With the Meiteis too, it has used a similar strategy through the Protection Bill. Both these measures have yielded results. On May 23, it helped the BJP wrest the Inner Manipur seat from Congress after 15 years.
The BJP also tailored another strategy to mop up numbers from the rest of the Northeast. It was also done keeping in mind the anger against the party due to the Citizenship Bill. Its regional allies could sense that aligning with the BJP before the polls at that point would give the Congress a ready advantage. The BJP, therefore, chose to go it alone in Meghalaya and Mizoram, knowing well that it would not eat into its allies’ vote share as it didn’t do well in the recent assembly polls.
While in Nagaland it propped up the regional party, the NDPP – a covert way of ensuring a seat under NDA – in Meghalaya too, it succeeded to ensure that the NPP retains the Tura seat, thus adding one more to the NDA tally.
Like in Meghalaya, in Mizoram too, the Mizo National Front could take away the Mizoram seat from the Congress. The MNF is also an NDA ally.
In Tripura, where the BJP won handsomely the 2018 assembly elections, it ensured its victory in both the seats by huge margins. With the majority of the state’s population being Bengali Hindus of East Bengal origin who were supportive of the Bill, the BJP didn’t need to piggyback on its tribal partner, the Indigenous People’s Front of Tripura (IPFT) in these elections. It didn’t enter into a pre-poll alliance with IPFT even though the latter sought it. All it needed to do was field a tribal candidate. On May 23, Rebati Tripura of the BJP won the Tripura East constituency by cornering more than 50% votes.
What has also come through today’s results from Assam is that, contrary to popular impression, Muslim votes (of East Bengal origin) got divided between the AIUDF and the Congress, the reason why the former could retain the Dhubri seat and lose the Barpeta seat to Congress.
BJP strategist for the region, Himanta Biswa Sarma, harping on the notion during the campaign that Congress and the AIUDF have a tacit understanding to share the Muslim votes to each other’s advantage, further helped the non-Muslim votes to go away from the Congress. It helped to project the Congress as a party of only Muslim (read possible ‘illegal Bangladeshi’) vote bank.
This would restrict the Congress tally to not more than three in Assam. In total, against BJP’s 16 leads along with its NDA allies, the Congress and its UPA and other allies could fare well only in six seats.
