Saffronizing the periphery: Explaining the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party in contemporary Assam

Introduction

In the early months of 1980, Guwahati was under siege. An indefinite curfew had been declared and the Indian Army had staged a flag march. Assamese journalist Sabita Goswami (2013, p. 2) recalls in her memoir that defying these orders were ‘a vast sea of people there, all screaming…Aaah oi Aah, Ulai Aah [Come one and all, Come out of your homes], Asom morile, aamiu morim [If Assam dies, so will we!], Ei jui jolise, jolise joliboi [This fire has flared, and flare it will]’. The Assam agitation was a mass movement triggered by the alleged addition of thousands of ‘illegal’ immigrants in electoral rolls of a Lok Sabha constituency in the state. The movement, led by the influential student group All Assam Students’ Union (AASU) supported by other civil society organizations, left an indelible mark in the postindependence political history of Assam. More importantly, it brought to the forefront a form of nativist politics founded on the fear of the bahiragata [Outsider]. Like the battle of Saraighat in the late seventeenth century where the Ahoms successfully resisted the entry of Mughals into Assam, the agitation leaders sounded the war bugle against a discredited Congress state government and an extractive, high-handed Indian state.

Interestingly, about four decades later, Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) portrayed the 2016 assembly elections using the same metaphor—the last battle of Saraighat—to evoke a sense of urgency against what it claimed as ‘the demographic, cultural and political aggression of the illegal Bangladeshis’ (Sethi & Shubhrastha, 2017, xxiii) in Assam. That election saw the unprecedented victory of the BJP in what was touted as another tectonic shift for Assam politics, particularly after its stellar performance in the state in 2014 Lok Sabha elections (Table 1). The party won 60 out of 126 assembly seats, with an addition of 16 more seats as a result of a pre-poll coalition with regional parties Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) and Bodo Peoples’ Front (BPF) (Table 2). Both Tables 1 and 2 show the unprecedented rise in vote share of the BJP with a change of 20+ percentage points from 2009 to 2014 Lok Sabha elections and a whopping 30+ percentage points from 2009 to 2011 state elections. Congress, which had dominated the state since independence except for brief interludes when AGP came to power, was reduced to only 26 seats. 2019 Lok Sabha poll further cemented BJP’s position in the state with 9 out of 14 seats.

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Table 1.

Assam Lok Sabha Results 2014 and Change from 2009 (Total seats: 14)

Parties	Seats Contested 2014	Seats Won 2014	Seat Change from 2009	Vote (%) 2014	Vote (%) Change from 2009
Congress	13	3	–4	29.61	–5.27
BJP	13	7	3	36.51	+20.30
AIUDF	10	3	2	14.83	–1.27
AGP	12	0	–1	3.83	–10.77
Others	126	1	1	12.63	–0.16

Source: eci.nic.in

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Table 2.

Assam Assembly Election Results 2016 and 2011 (Total seats: 126)

Parties	Seats Contested 2016	Seats Won 2016	Vote (%) in seats contested 2016	Vote (%) Change in seats contested from 2011
Congress	122	26	32.06	–7.36
BJP	89	60	42.12	+30.03
AGP	12	0	3.83	–15.89
AIUDF	74	13	21.34	+1.47

Source: eci.nic.in

It has been observed that states in northeast India, owing to their small size with low economic and political capital, have high propensity of going with the party in power at the Centre (Bath cited in Awungashi, 2019). This paper argues that the BJP’s rise in Assam, besides other reasons, is premised on an unprecedented crystallization of the Hindu vote owing to the party’s ability to capitalize on and appropriate the state’s existing nativist politics and its attendant cultural symbols. However, this religious consolidation over other political cleavages was not achieved through the BJP’s hardline Hindutva politics seen in ‘mainland’ India. In this borderland state with high linguistic, religious and cultural diversity, the BJP actively shed its image as a Hindi cow-belt party and deftly adapted itself to the regional sentiment of jati, mati, bheti [community, land and home] and a khilonjia sarkar [indigenous government]. The paper situates the BJP’s electoral popularity in Assam in the long-term processes of state formation and the resultant shifts in political opportunity structures in the state. These are as follows: first, a declining influence of upper-caste elite within the Congress party since the 1960s and the former’s re-orientation towards nativist politics in the form of the Assamese language movement; second, the continuing erosion of Congress party’s hitherto catch-all nature of politics when ethnic parties began carving out their own constituencies as a response to growing Assamese chauvinism. Nativist/ethnic politics received further impetus due to the anti-foreigner’s movement in the late 1970s to 1980s. Third, and more significant, was the changing nature of this mass movement when an existing linguistic fault line (anti-Bengali) also acquired a religious (anti-Bengali Muslims) dimension. The paper is thus also preliminary examination of how the RSS played a crucial role in this transformation which eventually enabled the BJP to instrumentalize the Hindu–Muslim cleavage otherwise latent in the state.

Electoral Politics in Assam: Historical Trends

Contemporary Assam is linguistically and ethnically a very diverse state: 61.47 per cent of the total population in Assam is Hindu and 34.2 per cent Muslims while Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs) represent 7.15 per cent and 12.4 per cent, respectively (Census of India, 2011). Major linguistic groups are Assamese (48.38 per cent) and Bengalis (28.91 per cent) (Census of India [Language], 2011). Historically, the multi-ethnic population of Assam has cultural and linguistic overlaps, but in recent decades, mobilization has brought these identities into sharper divisions, making these ‘ethnic constituencies’ electorally salient. ¹

The Congress party represented primarily by upper-caste Assamese gentry dominated the post-independence political landscape of Assam. Transfer of Bengali-dominated areas (such as Sylhet) from India to then East Pakistan transformed the Assamese speaking population into a majority (from 31 per cent in 1931 to 56.7 per cent in 1951) and allowed the Assamese caste Hindu elite to consolidate power in the state. Cultural chauvinism emerged in the form of the Official Language Act of 1960, when the predominantly Assamese elite decided to make Assamese as the official state language. Language riots broke out in the 1960s, thereby marginalizing not only Bengali Hindus but many other ‘indigenous’ tribal groups in the state as well.

However, linguistic and caste hegemony in this period did not go unchallenged within the Congress. The emergence of Sarat Chandra Singha, the first non-upper caste chief minister in Assam government in 1972, was a turning point. Singha, a Koch Ranjbongshi, belonged to the dissident faction of the Assam Congress and was able to cement his position with support from the government at the Centre (Hussain, 1988). ² This was a masterstroke because Singha’s elevation weakened the upper-caste hegemony and also attracted a much diverse electorate to its fold. As Hussain (1988, p. 412) observes, ‘S.C. Sinha succeeded in mobilizing the support of the Muslims, scheduled castes and Hinduised plains and hill tribes, Bengalis, tea-garden labour community, Ahoms, Rajbangshis and other backward communities in his favour’. As a result of this rainbow coalition, the party continued to dominate electoral politics in the first three decades thereby confirming Kothari’s (1964) one party dominance thesis observed in other Indian states.

At the same time, in a state where politics increasingly came to be organized around ethnicity and language, the dominance that Congress patchwork was a fragile one. The upper caste Assamese faction, finding a contender in Singha, began patronizing the Assamese language movement in the 1970s. ³ In 1972, the academic council at Gauhati University mandated Assamese as a medium of instructions in all institutions under it, including those in the Bengali dominated regions of the state like Cachar. Though English was to continue as an alternative medium for another 10 years, this decision further alienated not only the ‘migrant’ communities but also indigenous tribal groups from Assamese speakers. Tea tribes and Bengali speakers (Hindus and Muslims) continued to vote for Congress, while many tribes, led by Bodos, rallied around political parties like Plains’ Tribal Council of Assam (PTCA). Since 1960s, Bodos were already clamouring for recognition of their language and these developments would give their movement a radical/separatist turn in late 1980s.

In effect, the Assamese language movement in the 1960s and 1970s is responsible for two major developments: first, it fragmented the existing constituencies of Congress’ catch-all formula resulting in the rise of ethnic parties and second, it created a conducive environment for mass-based anti-foreigners’ movement to take shape in the early 1980s.

Rise of Ethnic Parties and Nativist Politics

Assam’s nativist movement was a result of a complex set of issues, including long-term movement and settlement of communities across fluid borders, ⁴ competition based on resources (primarily land and jobs) as well as linguistic and cultural mobilization and resultant hardened identities. Discussing each of these is beyond the scope of the paper, but suffice it to say that the political discourse of contemporary Assam is centred around illegal immigration and Bengali Muslims have come to represent the distinct Other in that discourse. However, this was not the case historically. Far from being against immigration, the upper caste Assamese, as early as 1874, expressed a desire in increasing the population of Assam by ‘importing’ people from outside. Evidently, the Assamese landed gentry stood to gain from immigration as it promised more income and hence it even supported British policies of settling Bengali Muslim peasants in Assam. Assamese sub-nationalism began as a protest against the dominance of Bengali Hindu migrants, who came to occupy offices in government and other middle-class occupations in the province. Bengali was the court language as well as medium of instruction in new government schools of Assam from 1837 to 1873, a move widely resented by the Assamese speaking population (Baruah, 1999). Though partition politics did cause a communal rift in Assam, after Independence, the ‘language movement’ overshadowed the problem of illegal immigration into Assam (Baruah, 2008). In fact, in the first two decades after Independence, Bengali Muslims were politically allied with the Assamese against Bengali Hindus. Bengali Muslims even returned Assamese as their language in the Census (Weiner, 1983).

As seen in Assam’s case, historically constructed social cleavages were re-invigorated by political activists. In the late 1970s, the issue of illegal immigration and inclusion of aliens in electoral rolls began to gain traction. Using this opportunity, the AGP, drawn from the leadership of Assamese AASU members, mounted a successful challenge against the one-party system of the Congress and provided the state with a regional alternative in 1985. However, even when riding on such a massive wave of a popular movement, AGP had polled only 33 per cent of the votes. In a diverse multi-ethnic state like Assam, movements prioritizing a dominant identity seldom found full purchase among many local minorities. Hence, this period saw a massive increase in ethnic polarisation and parties scrambled to accommodate these new demands (Goswami, 2003). Many sub-regional parties and organizations such as Autonomous State Demand Committee (ASDC), United Minority Front (UMF) and All Bodo Students’ Union (ABSU) began to dot the political landscape in the state. Disgruntled with the nature and the outcomes of the Assam agitation, the leadership among local minorities, who had participated in the movement, began reviving earlier demands for autonomy. This is implied by the fact that the last few elections have seen nearly 20 seats in a 126-member assembly going to small ethnic parties and independent candidates.

Eventually, AGP had to soften its anti-immigrants stand due to electoral compulsions. Its aggressive posture often alienated other communities, and support from its core constituency of Assamese Hindus alone was not enough to come to power. At the same time, its popularity was already on the wane during its first term in government due to its lackadaisical attempt in implementing the Assam Accord. The detection, deletion and deportation of ‘illegal’ immigrants from Assam seemed politically less viable for the AGP, the promise with which it had come to power in the first place. Moreover, AGP’s inability to form government at the state level in subsequent elections was also a result of rampant factionalism, lack of leadership and its ambiguity in dealing with the separatist group of ULFA. The rapidly diminished political capital of the AGP, once considered an indomitable regional force, demonstrated the limits of aggressive ethno-nationalist politics in a state with complex ethnic diversity and the presence of cross-cutting cleavages. Interestingly, this brand of nativist politics also ended up creating space for the BJP. The rest of the paper explores the rise of the BJP and saffron politics in the same socio-political context of Assam.

Creating Groundwork for Saffron Politics

Despite AGP’s weakened position, an enduring feature of the Assam agitation was the embedding of the issue of illegal immigration in state politics and collective psyche of Assam. Disagreements over probable solutions to this crisis and splintering of ethnic identities did not preclude the narrative—‘indigenous’ communities of Assam were in grave danger of being swamped in their own land—from continuing to be politically salient. Politics of indigeneity often makes claims about organic links between territory and identity. In Assam’s case too, it was argued that without land, these indigenous communities would lose their cultural identity as well. Planked on ideas of cultural nationalism, the movement began as a critique against an exploitative Indian state and a historically skewed representation of the native communities in government and economy. It acquired an anti-outsider (bahiragata) character and targeted Bengalis (Hindu and Muslims) as well as Marwaris who were entrenched in the state’s economy. Thus at this stage of politics, the ‘Other’ was any migrant from other parts of India.

So far, Assam politics was organized around complex crosscutting cleavages of caste, linguistic and tribal identities that had thwarted the growth of communal politics as a singular fault line. ⁵ Over time, however, the narrative was transformed, as demonstrated by the 2005 Supreme Court judgement declaring the IMDT Act unconstitutional: ‘illegal migrants coming into India after 1971 have been almost exclusively Muslims’ (Sonowal vs. Union of India, 2005, p. 12). This transformation was made possible because the anti-foreigner’s movement created the political opportunity structure for the RSS to activate religious fissures that were overshadowed by language politics in Assam post-independence.

The RSS, unlike the Congress party’s aggregating nature that historically relied on co-opting local elite to consolidate power, believed in creating a dedicated network of activists in the long run in order to create a fertile ground for its ideology of Hindu majoritarianism (Jaffrelot, 2002). A key reason why the RSS developed an interest in the northeast region was because of what it considered to be the proselytization efforts of Christian missionaries particularly in tribal areas. The Sangh established its first shakha in Guwahati as early as 1946. Current BJP political activists in Assam mention the role of Thakur Ram Singh, a pracharak from Punjab in laying foundation of the RSS in the state with its relief work during the devastating Assam earthquake of 1950. ⁶ Singh, who was the prant pracharak [Prant = State, as defined by the RSS; Pracharak = full-time workers of the RSS (Andersen & Damle, 2018)] in Assam, actively sought out ‘local notables’ such as High Court judge Kamakhyaram Barua and Giridhar Sharma, who headed the Arya College in Guwahati (Bhattacharjee, 2016). Pracharaks from Maharashtra such as Sudhakar Deshpande and Madhukar Limaya and Vinayak Limaye were sent across the region to set up shakhas. At the time for RSS, ‘[e]lectoral results were certainly less important than local implantation and propaganda’ (Jaffrelot, 2002, p. 201).

While the movement may also be seen as a larger power struggle among factions of the Assamese elite discussed in previous sections, the RSS played a key role in transforming it ‘from being anti-bahiragat (outsiders) to being an anti-videshi (foreigners) movement’ (Sethi & Shubhrashtha, 2017, p. 71). ⁷ In the context of the agitation, the Sangh’s General Assembly passed a resolution in 1980 (Kaushal, 2007, p. 93):

The Assam problem of today is the result of a deep-laid political conspiracy of planned Muslim infiltration carried out over the last several decades. The problem assumed an additional dimension when a large number of Hindu refugees entered Assam after being perpetually persecuted in E. Pakistan, later Bangladesh, leaving them with no choice than crossing over to Bharat forsaking their all behind them. Bharat, it must be remembered, remains the only country in the world, which the displaced Hindus consider as their home and where they can never be considered as foreigners [emphasis added].

Upon examining some of the Sangh’s literature, it is clear that it has historically differentiated between two kinds of immigrants in post-partition India: Hindus who they claimed were ‘sharanarthis’ (i.e. asylum seekers) and Muslims as ‘anupraveshkaaris’ (i.e. infiltrators) (Archives of RSS, n.d.). This binary, which also informs the current polarizing amendment to the Citizenship Act 1955 (discussed later in the paper), is a recurring theme of the Sangh, evidenced by its many resolutions on Assam since 1961 (Ibid.). In the 1980 resolution on the Assam agitation, the RSS urged the central government to take responsibility of Hindus entering India while at the same time pressed upon it to expel the ‘infiltrators’ (Kaushal, 2007). Furthermore, while appreciating the agitation’s goals, the RSS was troubled by the non-sectarian rhetoric of the Asom Jatiyabadi Dal, a collective of sub-nationalist voices in Assam. ⁸ Targeted violence against both Bengali Muslims and Hindus did not sit well with the RSS’s worldview of protecting Hindus and it continued to seek an inflection of the Hindu-Refugee/Muslim-infiltrator binary into the Assam agitation. ⁹ The circumstances under which the 1983 Nellie violence occurred are a further illustration of this.

In 1983, about 70 kilometres from Assam’s capital Guwahati, 14 villages were simultaneously attacked by Tiwas and Assamese villagers killing over 1,600 people, mostly women and children of predominantly the Bengali Muslim community (Kimura, 2011). Unofficial figures are much higher. Nellie happened right after the state assembly election in 1983, despite AASU’s calls for boycott due to non-revision of electoral rolls. Many Bengal Muslims saw in the election an opportunity to elect a friendly government. Nellie violence was a result of a complex interplay of many factors: tribal land alienation, breakdown of law and order in the state and the anti-foreigners’ narrative of the Agitation leaders (Ibid.). However, Kimura’s (2011) ethnographic study on Nellie demonstrates that at the local level many rioters led by their village elders were responding to acute fears and rumour mongering about some kind of imminent violence by Miyas (often used pejoratively for Muslims of East Bengal origin in Assam). Making a distinction between structural causes such as land alienation and direct causes of the violence, she avers ‘What the attackers, as well as victims, cite as the [direct] cause of the incidents are … revenge for election, the kidnapping of girls by Muslims, or the proposed attack by the Muslims’ (Ibid., p. 199). The many small-scale incidents of violence across Assam preceding Nellie and a shrill anti-Muslim rhetoric by the RSS in this period may be seen as part of what Brass calls the numerous ‘rehearsals’ that political actors conduct before the ‘dramatic production’ of a riot (Brass, 2003, p. 15). ¹⁰ In the immediate aftermath of the violence, the RSS framed it as (Kaushal, 2007, pp. 112–113):

Deployment of tens of thousands of security personnel in the name of protecting those who wanted to participate in the imposed elections, gave an opportunity to the foreign infiltrators and other foreign-inspired forces to carry out their nefarious designs…the main problem in Assam is that the Hindus there are being reduced to a minority by both infiltration and proselytization…it is essential that Assam remains a predominantly Hindu-majority area as that alone will ensure the identity of each group and save those life values, which form the common bond between Assam and the rest of the country.

Claims about the involvement of RSS in the movement became more pronounced as news about dissent in AASU ranks became evident. Nurul Hussain, AASU vice president, who ultimately walked out, submitted a 15-point memorandum demanding severance of the organization’s links with RSS. ¹¹ Hussain was uncomfortable with the top leadership of Prafulla Kumar Mahanta (later CM after Assam Accord) and Bhrighu Phukan’s closeness with prominent RSS members such as Kumud Narayan Sarma who taught law at Gauhati University, from where the students’ leadership predominantly came from (Gupta, 2016). Sarma’s family was the custodian of the Sukhreshwar Temple where the first RSS Shakha in the Northeast was established (Bhattacharjee, 2016). Thus, growth of the RSS in Assam was sluggish until the anti-foreigner’s movement gave it the much needed fillip. By 1980, Sangh shakhas had mushroomed across Assam (Sethi & Shubhrashtha, 2017, p. 66). Its language of religious polarization had begun to creep into the official discourse, as is evident from a 1998 report of the then Assam Governor (cited in Supreme Court judgement Sonowal vs. Union of India 2005, pp. 12–13).

Furthermore, its belief in Hindutva as a project of cultural nationalism required that it negotiate with complexities resulting due to historical and cultural marginalization of the Northeast. As opposed to the separatist claims of the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA), the militant outfit emerging from the Assam agitation, the Sangh’s objective was to project the state and its people as an integral part of Bharat Mata, the Indian body politic. ¹² Its attempt to appropriate and hence reconstruct the ‘glorious’ ancient past of Pragjyotishpur and Kamrupa kingdoms of Assam underlines its ability to marry local symbols with a larger Hindutva ideology (Bhattacharjee, 2016). The Sangh’s interest in Srimanta Sankardeva, the sixteenth-century neo-Vaishnavite reformer of Assam and his monastic traditions, is relevant here (Saikia, 2018). Sankardeva had brought large sections of people otherwise considered outcastes within the Hindu fold. His syncretic movement Ekasarana Dharma denounced elaborate and esoteric rites, idol and image worshipping and was responsible for creating new art and theatre forms of Sattriya dance, devotional songs called borgeets, dramas and other cultural traditions around which the Assamese identity has come to be defined. Saikia’s (2018) ‘emic’ study as an insider to the Majuli’s Sattra (monasteries within the Ekasarana Dharma) culture reveals the fissures that the RSS’ presence has created. Breaking from tradition, some sattradhikars (monastic heads) were seen to be openly supporting the BJP before the 2016 state elections as well as the current legislation on citizenship, a move that has garnered criticism from within the sattra circles as well (Kalita, 2018). As Bhattarcharjee (2016) points out, sattradhikars are often invited to Hindu sammelans organized by the VHP wing in Assam. This affinity towards the RSS, even if somewhat uneasy in nature, is a result of the growing anxiety of illegal immigration, alleged claims about encroachment of Sattra land and proselytization efforts of Christian missionaries among locals that seeks to affect their influence in the community. ¹³ Similarly, organizing events like the Luitporiya Hindu Samavesh and Namami Brahmaputra, unheard of in Assam before 2014, are attempts to fold local cultural symbols into the ideology of RSS of a greater Hindu identity. ¹⁴

RSS has worked patiently and assiduously to make its Hindu-nationalist ideology gain some potency in Assam politics, albeit in a form that was adapted to local nuances. Interestingly, the first ethnic constituency to respond to saffron politics were Bengali Hindus of the Barak Valley. Increased feelings of insecurity during the ‘sons of the soil’ movement began to push Bengali Hindus to find newer political constellation. The BJP found its core constituency in this community since 1991. ¹⁵ As we will see in the following section, extensive ideological ground-work by the RSS has allowed the party to expand its voter base among Assamese Hindus in 2014 and later in 2016.

BJP’s Rise in Electoral Politics of Assam

Lok Sabha Election 2014: The Hindu Consolidation

Narendra Modi and the BJP made all the right noises before the 2014 Lok Sabha election. Capitalizing on a strong anti-incumbency wave against the Congress at the centre, the BJP in Assam decided to highlight the issue of ‘illegal’ immigration and how the party would ‘deport’ them back to Bangladesh if voted into power. BJP’s strategy in the Northeast has been a mix of going alone in a few states and building alliances in others. In Assam it made a conscious decision to go alone since the alliance with AGP in 2009 had only cost it the votes of the Bengali Hindus thereby benefiting the Congress by a gain of 21 per cent among this community (The Hindu, 2009). In 2014, however, there was a clear consolidation of Hindu votes to the advantage of BJP. As argued earlier, a dominant linguistic fault line meant that the Bengali Hindus have on previous occasions voted for the BJP as a counter to the Assamese support for AGP and/or Congress. In this election, however, riding on the Modi wave and its consistent position on the ‘illegal immigrants’ issue, the BJP managed to lure both Assamese and Bengali Hindus into its fold (Table 3). As Table 3 shows, support for the BJP among the Assamese Hindus rose by 53 percentage points between 2011 and 2014.

However, viewing this unprecedented crystallization of the Hindu vote in Assam as an endorsement to BJP’s Hindutva brand of politics would be rather simplistic and erroneous. As Lokniti-CSDS post-poll survey (2016) findings indicate, 75 per cent Assamese Hindus and 68 per cent Bengali Hindus believe that the issue of illegal immigration is the most pressing one, while in comparison only 34 per cent of total Hindu voters of BJP supported beef ban. Thus, RSS and BJP’s strategy of inflecting religious polarization into Assam politics have been mostly effective when adapted to the region’s local concerns with immigration and preservation of ‘indigenous’ lands and identities. The findings, however, are instructive in showing that religion has emerged as a potent identity; it underscores the BJP’s strategy of exacerbating a collective fear psychosis of the ‘Muslim foreigner’ rather than of the ‘Bengali foreigner’ (Hindu or Muslim).

Another factor that made religious polarization in Assam become sharper over the years was internal to the political landscape of the state: the growing political clout of the All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF) led by perfume baron Badruddin Ajmal. AIUDF’s plunge into electoral fray had considerably dented one of Congress’ core constituencies of Muslim (Assamese and Bengali speaking) votes. In over nine parliamentary seats constituting of as many as 40 assembly segments mainly concentrated in the lower Brahmaputra valley as well as the Barak valley of Assam, Muslim votes are significant (Mahanta, 2014, p. 21), thereby making the community an important factor in elections. AIUDF’s formation was triggered after the Supreme Court’s judgement on the 1983 IMDT in 2005, a move which was perceived by the community as an attempt to making their status in Assam precarious. Passed by the Indira Gandhi government, the Illegal Migrants Determination by Tribunals (IMDT) Act, aimed to provide special protections against undue harassment on the ‘minorities’ affected by the Assam Agitation and hence applicable to Assam only. Under this Act, the burden of proving the citizenship rested on the accuser and the police, not the accused, a major departure from the provisions of the Foreigners Act 1946, which was applicable in other states. The judgement, in a response to a petition filed by then AGP leader and current chief minister of Assam Sarbananda Sonowal, struck it down calling it unconstitutional. Since its creation in 2006, AIUDF has raised the issue of absence of security to the minority community as well as the issue of D-voters list. ¹⁶ AIUDF’s presence has polarized the Muslim vote: Bengali Muslims to a great extent had shifted allegiance to the former while the Assamese Muslims still rally behind the Congress or the AGP (Table 4). AIUDF’s ability to corner votes is seen as alarming by other communities of Assam who continue to feel threatened by what they claim to be unabated influx of illegal immigrants. ¹⁷ It is important to understand that despite the attemps of RSS at communalizing the anti-foreigners’ sentiment, the Assamese and other ‘indigenous’ groups in the state continue to see both Bengali Hindus and Muslims as ‘outsiders’. For the BJP, however, AIUDF’s growth made it conducive to activate a latent religious fault line, and recent electoral outcomes demonstrate that it has succeeded to an extent. Nonetheless, attempt at a neat social engineering in complex ethnic landscapes like Assam is difficult to realize and hence BJP’s growth in the state may not occur in a linear fashion. This is amply evident from the NRC exercise in Assam and mass protests against the recent changes to the Citizenship Act, discussed later in the paper.

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Table 3.

Consolidation of Hindu Vote (%) in General/State Election Results from Assam

Community	2011	2014	2016
Assamese Hindu
Cong	38	19	21
BJP-AGP-BPF	42	73	67
BJP alone	10	63	43
Bengali Hindu
Cong	31	27	28
BJP-AGP-BPF	51	68	65
BJP alone	42	62	54

Source: Lokniti-CSDS 2016 Post Poll Survey in Assam (https://www.lokniti.org; Sardesai & Sharma, 2016).

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Table 4.

Muslim Vote in Assam Continues to be Split between Congress and AIUDF

Community	2011	2014	2016
Assamese Muslim
Cong	59	69	65
AUIDF	15	17	12
BJP-AGP-BPF	14	4	7
Bengali Muslim
Cong	32	36	38
AIUDF	54	45	39
BJP-AGP-BPF	7	4	5

Source: Lokniti-CSDS 2016 Post Poll Survey in Assam (https://www.lokniti.org; Sardesai & Sharma, 2016).

The BJP also made serious inroads into Congress’ another important support base: the tea tribes mostly concentrated in Upper Assam. Congress lost the Dibrugarh seat for the first time in 2014, when Adivasi leader from BJP, Rameshwor Teli, defeated Union DoNER ¹⁸ minister Paban Singh Ghatowar, a four-time MP from the constituency (Saikia, 2015). BJP had successfully co-opted many student leaders from the community who were disillusioned by the Congress’ neglect of the community’s demand for the ST status. The Sangh and its affiliates played a significant role in translating support into votes. The RSS had shed its post-independence reluctant to expand into roles other than that of ‘character-building’, and shifted focus to public policy through its many affiliates. As Andersen and Damle (2018, p. 21) aver about new activities of the Sangh:

This greater diversity has also led to multiple definitions of Hindutva, from a narrowly religious context for those affiliates that focus on cultural issues to a primarily nationalist and even secular orientation for organisations that work with labour, farmers and small-scale entrepreneurs; the sangh’s political affiliate seems to shift directions on various elements of Hindutva ideology depending on its current electoral considerations.

One of its major affiliates Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) runs the pan-India Ekal Vidyalaya Foundation since 1986, concentrating on education and infrastructure in rural and tribal areas (Andersen & Damle, 2018). In Assam, through the Ekal Vidyalayas (single-teacher establishments), the children of the tea and ex-tea industry workers belonging to various tribal communities and hitherto marginalised by the Assamese society, are given free education. The motivation behind ‘tribal out-reach’ is to counter proselytization and welfare efforts of Christian missionaries (Longkumer, 2019, p. 285). The organizational cohesiveness of the Sangh affiliates and their entrenched civil society presence has allowed for a more effective mobilization of support for the BJP.

Conclusion

This paper was a preliminary attempt to situate the surge of BJP in the long-term political processes and opportunity structures of Assam. Congress dominance over the state continued for almost three decades despite changing dynamics of the party leadership. Despite remaining an upper caste Assamese-speaking party, it had managed to create an umbrella coalition in its electoral base till 1970s. However, the one-party dominance system gave way to splits within the Congress as well as in its voter base. Ethnic parties came to occupy the scene as a result of the language movement led by the Assamese speaking elite. In these decades of turmoil and a galvanising students’ agitation against ‘illegal’ immigrants, the RSS first saw a window of opportunity. Building on a thin foundation, the Sangh worked assiduously to give the movement a sectarian turn. It is this fallout that the BJP has been able to capitalize on in its campaigns in 2014 and 2016 and consolidate its power in Assam while on a winning juggernaut. Despite its success in consolidating the Hindu vote in Assam to reap electoral dividends, Assam multi-ethnic fault lines ensured that the RSS and BJP temper their ideological dispositions with local concerns of immigration and identities. Even as the BJP weaponized the NRC issue to sharpen religious polarization, the final list—that leaves out many of its core constituencies—has caused much anxiety in the party ranks. The party’s use of the CAA to allay fears among its traditional and newly acquired voter bases in Assam has patently backfired. This current crisis amply captures the fragility and the contingent nature of a politics that seeks to privilege one political cleavage over another. BJP’s dominance in Assam will be severely tested and may require it to moderate the shrillness of its sectarian politics. Its term so far proves that engineering uni-linear polarization based on religion can perhaps yield immediate electoral dividends, but eventually arrest long-term political growth if it continues to ignore the historical complexities of demography and diverse cultures of Assam.