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Congress gets a majority in Assam

G Vinayak in Guwahati

Continuing a 25-year tradition of not electing the same party twice in succession, the Assamese electorate has brought the Congress back to power ousting the Asom Gana Parishad.

The Congress crossed the magic figure of 64 required for a simple majority in the 126-member assembly quite comfortably, defeating the hastily put together AGP-Bharatiya Janata Party alliance.

Since 1975, no party has been able to retain power in Assam. In fact, since 1985, when the AGP was born out of the six-year-long anti-foreigner movement in Assam, the state has seen power change hands between the Congress and the AGP every five years.

While the AGP ruled from 1985 to 1990, the Congress was in the saddle from 1991 to 1996, when the AGP rode back to power in alliance with the Communist Party of India and the CPI-Marxist.

This time, the AGP's last-minute gamble of hitching its bandwagon to the BJP after abandoning the left failed to help Chief Minister Prafulla Kumar Mahanta buck the trend, with the combine managing just about 40 seats. Two other partners of the alliance, the All-Bodo Students' Union and the Autonomous State Demand Committee, have won another 14 seats to bring the tally to 54.

Many an AGP stalwart, including Mahanta himself, has been roundly defeated at the polls. Mahanta, in fact, came a poor third in the prestigious Dispur seat, behind friend-turned-foe Atul Bora, who had walked out of the AGP three years ago, and first-time Congress nominee Captain Robin Bordoloi, the winner and son of Assam's first chief minister, Gopinath Bordoloi. Several other AGP ministers and Speaker Ganesh Kutum also lost.

Assam Pradesh Congress Committee president Tarun Gogoi, Member of Parliament, attributed the party's victory to a combination of "clear-cut policies and programmes and the right selection of candidates".

"I have always said that the people were fed up of the corrupt and inefficient AGP and that we were the best alternative to rule this complex state," Gogoi said.

The biggest loser in this has been the BJP. Despite having made spectacular gains in the 1998 and 1999 Lok Sabha elections, polling 27 and 33 per cent of the votes, respectively, and coming first in 33 assembly segments, the party's leadership, specifically Lal Kishenchand Advani and Atal Bihari Vajpayee, ignored the local unit and tied up with the AGP, frittering away whatever strength it had acquired in the last few years.

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