Questions raised over Asom Gana Parishad's choice of candidates

New Delhi: In 1979, Assam was grappling with the churns of a mass agitation demanding that the Central government detect, disenfranchise, and deport documented individuals. It was on a cold December morning that year when the agitation took a dark turn.

Protests against non-Assamese people filing nominations for the 1980 Lok Sabha elections had broken out. In Barpeta in Lower Assam, a young man — Khargeswar Talukdar — faced the wrath of the police. He was beaten up and left by the roadside; he succumbed to his injuries soon after.

His death turned the tide for the agitation, which eventually led to the signing of the Assam Accord, and the formation of Assam's youngest government. 

When the Assam Accord was signed in August 1985, the same leaders walked off the streets and into the political arena.

In a move quite similar to Nepal's recent Gen-Z movement, the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) was formally established in the Golaghat National Convention, with young firebrand All Assam Students' Union (AASU) president Prafulla Kumar Mahanta at its helm.

The party won 92 of 126 seats in the Assembly elections that followed. Visuals of 30-year-olds being sworn in became global news: A student movement had turned into a ruling party almost overnight. 

Forty years later, however, when the AGP announced its list of 26 candidates for the 2026 Assam Assembly elections, 13 were ironically from the minority Bengali-Muslim community. Exactly half of its total ticket allocation had gone to the very demographic that the 1979 agitation was mostly directed against.

Meanwhile, the BJP, the AGP’s senior coalition partner, has not fielded a single Muslim candidate.

Questions are being raised about whether the AGP, or what’s left of it, will be subsumed by the BJP, and its prospects in Upper Assam, once its stronghold. 

After coming to office, the party faced internal churns and the brunt of the rise of the state’s biggest insurgent group — ULFA. It was bifurcated in 1991, reunited before 1996, and then split again in 2005

One of the BJP’s tallest leaders, Sarbananda Sonowal, who rose with his crusade against the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act 1983, started his political career with the AGP.

In 2011, he resigned from AGP to join the BJP, stating, “The AGP was born out of the illegal foreigners’ issue after the six-year-long Assam agitation; 855 people laid down their lives in it. However, the party has failed to honour their sacrifice by deviating from its principles.”

Questions on intent

Behind the AGP's ideological gymnastics is plain poll arithmetic. Muslims comprise 34% of Assam’s 3.14 crore population. The AGP has been allocated seats in largely minority-dominated areas of Lower Assam in the NDA partnership.

This is not the first time that questions have been raised about AGP’s role in the NDA. In 2021, party founder and former chief minister Mahanta was denied a ticket, and while there was speculation that he would be given a Rajya Sabha berth, he remains sidelined.

Abhijit Sarma of the Assam Public Works, an organisation functioning on nativist sentiments that petitioned for the NRC and against the CAA, said the AGP had betrayed the people of Assam, as well as the 860 who laid down their lives during the Assam Agitation.

“The 860 lives were an investment for the lives they are leading now. I wonder what the compulsion is of the other members of the AGP to listen to everything that their leaders Atul Bora and Keshav Mahanta are saying. We were surprised that they quickly joined the NDA after leaving the alliance following the Citizenship Amendment Act's passing,” said Sarma.

He added that despite the BJP and NDA’s claim to fight “Bangladeshis”, only 26 had been legally deported since 2017.

“No deportations took place the year the BJP came to power. In 2018, it was 13, and just six in 2019. It fell to one in 2020, was three in 2021, two in 2022, and one again in 2023,” he said, citing state government data. 

The question hanging over the AGP this time is not over its prospects, but whether the party still stands for anything beyond its own political survival.