By Ananya Sharma 
Guwahati, April 2: Seven days left. And the BJP already thinks it has won. That was the feeling walking out of the party’s press conference in Guwahati on Thursday. Kishor Kumar Bhattacharya, the BJP’s man at the mic, did not sound like someone bracing for a tough fight. He sounded like someone reading out the final score before the match was even played.
The opposition, he said, is “directionless and aimless.” The voters of Assam have already rejected them. The BJP-led NDA is returning to power. Record mandate. Done.
Take that for what it is. But here is the thing. He is not entirely wrong.
The Congress Alliance Barely Made It to the Starting Line
Ask anyone who has been following Assam politics closely over the last few months, and they will tell you the same thing. The opposition almost did not get here.
The Congress and the RJD only shook hands on a seat-sharing deal on March 19. Think about that for a second. Polling is on April 9. That gives them barely three weeks to build a joint campaign from scratch, train booth workers to push for the same candidates, and convince voters in hundreds of constituencies that yes, these parties actually trust each other now.
Before March 19, they were fighting in public, leaking things to journalists and complaining about which party was asking for too many seats. It was a mess. And voters across Assam saw all of it.
Gaurav Gogoi has been carrying the Congress side of things. The Jorhat MP has been doing the work, genuinely. Rallies, joint meetings, running around the state trying to build momentum. You cannot fault his effort. But effort and organisation are two different things. And when you talk to people in the smaller towns, in the areas outside Guwahati where elections are actually decided, what you hear is this. The opposition feels like people who want to beat the BJP. Not people who are ready to run Assam.
Voters notice that gap. They may not say it in so many words. But they notice.
Ajmal Is the Opposition’s Biggest Headache Right Now
If Congress is being honest with itself, losing Badruddin Ajmal from the alliance may cost them more than they publicly admit.
Ajmal runs the All India United Democratic Front. Back in 2021, his party was inside the Congress-led alliance, the Mahajot, fighting the BJP together. That arrangement collapsed after the election. And by this cycle, the Congress decided it did not want him back. Their reasoning was straightforward: being seen alongside Ajmal alienates Assamese Hindu voters that Congress desperately needs.
Fair enough. Political calculations are never clean.
But here is what that decision produced. Ajmal is now contesting around 27 seats completely on his own. In each of those seats, his candidate will pull votes from the Muslim voter base. The same voter base that the Congress-backed candidates in those seats are counting on. Split that vote, and the BJP candidate walks through the middle.
This is not a theoretical concern. Analysts have been saying it out loud. Akhil Ranjan Dutta, who spent years teaching political science at Gauhati University, has described Ajmal at this point as a vote-splitter who helps the ruling party more than he hurts it.
Ajmal himself lost his Lok Sabha seat in 2024. His party got wiped out in the parliamentary elections, not winning a single seat across the country. He is now banking on Asaduddin Owoisi coming in from Hyderabad to breathe life back into the AIUDF campaign. Owaisi is in Assam right now, doing rallies, drawing crowds. Ajmal is contesting from Binnakandi himself and needs every bit of that energy.
The BJP has been pointing at the Owaisi-Ajmal pairing and saying exactly what you would expect. Appeasement politics. Vote bank games. The usual.
Whether that lands depends on the voter. But the BJP did not build that attack from nothing.
Forget the Press Conferences. What Are People Actually Saying?
This is the part that gets lost when elections get reduced to statements and counter-statements.
In Baksa, in Nagaon, in the quiet districts along the Brahmaputra valley, people are not boiling with anger at the BJP government. Some are frustrated, yes. Prices are high. Jobs are not easy to find. There are genuine grievances. But the kind of deep, widespread anti-incumbency that sweeps governments out of power does not appear to be there. Not obviously, anyway.
What voters keep coming back to are simpler questions. Will my land papers stay valid? Will the welfare scheme my family relies on continue? The BJP, whatever its faults, has kept certain things running. Mission Basundhara gave proper land documents to lakhs of families who had been farming land for generations without any legal proof of ownership. For a small farmer in rural Assam, that piece of paper is not a small thing. It is security. It is something you can show your children.
The Congress has not clearly said what happens to any of this if they win. Assam has a debt burden of around Rs 1.60 lakh crore. When a daily wage worker or a tea garden labourer asks how the Congress plans to keep welfare schemes running with that kind of financial pressure, nobody in the opposition has answered in plain language.
That silence has weight.
What the BJP Is Running On
Bhattacharya went through the party’s Sankalp Patra at Thursday’s briefing. Thirty-one promises. Action on illegal immigration under the Immigrants Expulsion from Assam Act of 1950. More land reclamation. Protection of Satras and Namghars, the Vaishnavite religious institutions that are central to Assamese cultural life. Heritage sites through the Asom Darshan scheme.
The party’s argument is simple. We promised this in 2016. We promised it again in 2021. And we delivered. Around 1.5 lakh bighas of encroached land have been reclaimed since the BJP came to power. The Batadrava Than, the birthplace of saint Srimanta Sankardev, had more than a thousand bighas of its land under encroachment for years. That land has been cleared, and the site has been built up as a cultural heritage destination.
In Assam, land means something different than it does in most other states. It is tied directly to identity. To the question of who belongs here and who does not. The BJP has been the loudest voice on that question for a decade, and it has paid off electorally.
Bhattacharya also went after the Congress on history. He said the Assam Accord of 1985, which ended the long and painful Assam Agitation, was signed by the Congress and then quietly ignored by every Congress government that followed. The concerns of indigenous Assamese communities were pushed aside whenever votes from other communities were within reach.
Congress leaders dispute this. They have been disputing it for years. But the charge keeps sticking, election after election, which tells you something about how a significant section of Assam’s voters remembers that period.
The Maths This Time Around
In 2021, the BJP-led NDA took 75 out of 126 seats. The BJP alone got 60. You need 64 to form a government.
This time, there is a complication that was not there before. The UPPL, which was part of the NDA government, walked out of the alliance in March over seat-sharing. It is now fighting independently in the Bodoland Territorial Region, the compact political zone that sends 15 MLAs to the assembly. The BJP moved quickly and tied up with the BPF instead. Whether that replacement works as well on the ground as the original arrangement is something nobody knows for certain.
The defections have also told a story. Pradyut Bordoloi, a former Congress MP from Nagaon, is now a BJP candidate in Dispur. Bhupen Borah, who was the president of the Assam Pradesh Congress Committee, also crossed over. Senior people leaving Congress for the BJP does not exactly project a party that is surging.
One more thing that barely got discussed when it happened. The 2023 delimitation redrew constituency boundaries across the state. Before those changes, analysts estimated that Muslim voters could influence outcomes in roughly 35 seats. After the redrawing, that number is expected to come down to around 25. Muslims make up about 34 per cent of Assam’s population. That is a big community. But where exactly those votes fall, and whether they fall in the right seats, now looks different from what it did three years ago.
April 9 Is Different This Time
Assam has never done a single-phase election for all 126 seats before. This year it is doing exactly that. Everyone votes on April 9. Counting on May 4.
Close to 2.5 crore voters across the state. Polling stations open at 7 in the morning. The single-day format came as a relief to most people, not just because it reduces certain kinds of mischief, but because it means the whole thing is wrapped up before Bihu. Assam’s biggest festival. The celebration that defines the Assamese calendar. Nobody wanted booth workers and party agents missing the dancing and the feasts because their constituency happened to be in a later phase.
So the stage is set. The BJP is confident, maybe genuinely, maybe performatively, probably both. The opposition has patched together an alliance and is hoping the sum of its parts surprises everyone. Ajmal is doing his own thing in 27 seats, hoping Owaisi’s visits change the mood.
And somewhere across Assam, in tea gardens and paddy fields and small market towns, around two and a half crore people are quietly making up their minds.
Bhattacharya said Thursday they already have.
May 4 is when we find out if he read them right.
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- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
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