Discourses From the East
The election schedule has been announced. Dates have been fixed. Papers have been notified. Assam will vote on 9 April 2026. Counting will take place on 4 May. Nominations close on 23 March, scrutiny on 24 March, withdrawals on 26 March. The procedures are in place. The paperwork is in motion. On paper, this is an election.
On the ground, Assam is having a neighbourhood tennis-ball cricket tournament.
Every team needs players. Every team claims higher purpose. Every team says this is a historic contest for the future of the state. But the locality has only one exhausted pool of available people, and many of them have already played for three different clubs. One person turns out for Milan Sangha in the morning, Friends Club in the afternoon, and Rising Star Sporting at night, depending on who gives the better jersey or the more convincing promise of biryani after the match. Another storms off after being denied captaincy, denounces corruption, and reappears two hours later batting at number three for the rival side. Everybody still speaks of loyalty. Nobody expects it.
That is the present condition of electoral politics in Assam.
This is no longer just about leaders defecting. It is about the full circulation of candidates, grievances, wounded egos, and moral vocabularies across the field. Congress loses leaders to BJP. AGP loses and gains people according to BJP’s seat logic. Raijor Dal absorbs not only its own ambitions but also the overflow of disappointed Congress leaders and hopefuls. AIUDF figures, after years of being denounced as political danger, become usable through AGP or elsewhere when the arithmetic demands it. BJP itself drops sitting MLAs and invites rebellion from within. Every party still speaks in the old language of principle. In practice, everyone is running a transfer market. So fluid has the field become that it is often difficult to identify the line separating the fascist from the anti-fascist, or to tell who is playing for which side.
No party in Assam can now publish a candidate list without also publishing, indirectly, the first draft of its own rebellion. No alliance can now announce a breakdown without leaving the door open for one more midnight meeting. Tickets are announced, and within hours counter-camps emerge, resentments harden, press conferences are called, whispers of sabotage begin circulating, and the disappointed start scanning the horizon for alternative homes. In Assam now, a candidate list does not settle politics. It merely starts a second round of it.
The Congress-Raijor Dal story alone could sustain a small comic opera. Publicly, there was breakdown, injury, and the usual speech about respect. Dhing became a symbol of wounded pride. Gaurav Gogoi said talks were only paused. Akhil Gogoi spoke like a man determined to convert insult into leverage. From the outside, it looked like an alliance that had failed. From inside Assam, it looked more like an alliance that had merely changed venue. The expected destination was one city, then suddenly another became the real site of politics. People were redirected at the last moment. Meetings ran past midnight. Talks remained inconclusive for hours. And then, after all that, Akhil Gogoi and Gaurav Gogoi appeared together in Jorhat after midnight and declared the alliance final. This is no longer alliance politics in the old sense. It is a politics of continuous renegotiation, where breakdown itself becomes one more instrument of bargaining. In Assam, an alliance is not final when it is announced broken, and not broken when it is announced final.
This uncertainty produced its own secondary market. Those denied tickets, or fearing denial, began looking elsewhere. Akhil Gogoi opened the gate and invited aspirants. District-level Congress leaders and hopefuls started drifting toward Raijor Dal. The party briefly began to resemble not only a regional formation, but an overflow counter for displaced ambition. Opposition unity, in such conditions, behaved less like a principled front and more like a moving help desk.
The ruling side offered its own version of the same farce, only with more command and less embarrassment. Himanta Biswa Sarma no longer appeared merely as BJP’s principal campaigner. He appeared as the allocator of breathing space across the wider camp, deciding where AGP would contest, where BJP would hold ground, and where workers would swallow humiliation and smile for the cameras. Hajo-Sualkuchi went to AGP. So did Sibsagar. That did not end the story. It only changed its tone. In Hajo, BJP cadres and supporters resented the seat being handed to AGP. In Sibsagar, BJP workers and supporters had already said openly that if the seat went to AGP, they might have no option but to vote for Akhil Gogoi. The Congress-Raijor Dal alliance was declared after midnight in Jorhat, but Sibsagar still remained charged because it had already become one of the key constituencies through which alliance arithmetic, cadre resentment, and the Akhil factor were being read. Party workers were asked to wave one flag, campaign for another symbol, and maintain ideological discipline throughout. They were no longer simply political workers. They had become transferable emotional resources.
Even BJP’s own list read like a political acquisition ledger. Of the 88 seats it announced, a striking share of candidates came from Congress, AGP, and smaller regional or tribal formations. This is one of the central facts of the season. BJP is not merely contesting an election. It is operating as an absorption machine. The result is that the line between party-building and political acquisition has become increasingly hard to draw.
Then there are the candidates themselves, who now move with a flexibility that would once have embarrassed even seasoned opportunists. An AASU figure can go to BJP in one season and then shift to AGP in time for candidature. An AGP hopeful can prepare for one seat and wake up politically displaced because BJP has changed its mind. A veteran AGP leader can find the old arrangement suddenly too small and the new alignment unexpectedly welcoming. In Ranganadi, one seat-sharing move triggered a chain reaction and sent an AGP hopeful into Congress. Candidates in Assam no longer appear as representatives of settled conviction. They wait for placement. They are not bearers of ideology. They are assets in search of symbols.
And then comes the AIUDF comedy, one of the season’s finest moral performances. For years, BJP and AGP treated AIUDF as the political other, useful for warning, fear, outrage, and communal choreography. It was the party that had to be named in dark tones, invoked as proof of demographic danger, and held up as the unacceptable thing from which righteous politics had to maintain distance. Yet once the seat matrix shifted, AIUDF figures became absorbable wherever required. Some moved through AGP. In Mankachar, AIUDF MLA Aminul Islam reappeared through Conrad Sangma’s NPP. Suddenly the same political universe that spent years speaking of contamination discovered a talent for selective purification and flexible redistribution. In Assam, moral distance lasts only until candidature requires a vehicle.
AGP itself also became a theatre of absurdity. Its headquarters turned heated. Ticket aspirants levelled serious allegations. In Chenga, there were accusations that Saddam Hussain received the ticket in exchange for money. Another aspirant, Abdul Rahman, complained that he was denied a ticket despite carrying the Chief Minister’s tattoo on his hand. Even Facebook profile presentation reportedly entered the world of party discipline. In a healthier democracy, parties might ask what a candidate stands for. In Assam, an aspirant may now have to ask whether even visible devotion, digital grooming, and a tattoo on the hand are enough.
Now even the BJP’s own list has opened another front. Sitting MLAs have been removed in significant numbers. The bugle of rebellion has already been sounded in several constituencies. A wave of resignations has begun after the list came out, which tells you that the injury is no longer private irritation but open organisational fallout. And Dispur has become an especially revealing scene. Nagaon MP Pradyut Bordoloi crosses over from Congress and is promptly rewarded with the BJP ticket from Dispur. What follows is not one rebellion but two. Jayanta Das, BJP vice-president and one of the party’s senior organisational figures, erupts in the open, threatens to float a new party, and accuses Himanta Biswa Sarma and his ex-Congress cohort of turning the old syndicate culture into a political ticket syndicate, beef, coal, supari, sand, and now election tickets too. Sitting BJP MLA Atul Bora Sr. also rebels and announces support for Congress candidate Mira Borthakur. So even the party that appears to manage everyone else’s instability is busy producing fresh instability of its own. The machine remains powerful, but the machine too leaks resentment.
Only after seeing this wider circus does one fully appreciate Congress as one especially rich theatre within it. Congress did not merely lose leaders. It began hollowing out its own election machinery. The chair of the campaign committee crossed over. The chair of the manifesto committee followed. Before polling day itself, the person tasked with leading the campaign and the person tasked with shaping the manifesto had both changed sides. In most elections, parties worry about whether people will accept the manifesto. In Assam, one must first check whether the people who wrote it are still in the party.
This is not a small symbolic embarrassment. It tells us something deeper about the present field. The problem is no longer simply that parties cannot keep dissent under control. The problem is that election preparation itself has become unstable. The campaign chair migrates. The manifesto chair migrates. Local aspirants drift. District-level leaders wait to see who is denied. Rejected ambitions look for alternative homes. A party begins to resemble not an organisation moving toward an election, but a bus stand at dusk, full of restless passengers trying to guess which vehicle will actually leave.
In Margherita, the larger disorder contracts into a family scene. The son gets the Congress ticket. The father joins BJP. Then, within hours of that realignment, the son withdraws. Prateek Bordoloi was declared the Congress candidate, Pradyut Bordoloi crossed over, and Prateek withdrew his candidature. That single father-son tableau contains the whole season in miniature. A ticket is given, the political home behind it shifts, and then even the candidature itself collapses. In a healthier democracy, parties worry about rebel candidates. In Assam, one must first ask whether the household itself has completed seat adjustment.
Even the formal ticket process adapted to the times. The application form asked for WhatsApp number and follower counts on social media. It also carried an acknowledgement for a bank draft of Rs 50,000. The modern legislator must now be measurable not only through public standing, but through digital reach. Representation begins with a form, a fee, a social media footprint, and an estimate of how many colony WhatsApp groups can be activated before lunch. The old party worker still exists, but now has to compete with the cousin who “handles media.” The line between MLA and group admin has blurred. The candidate list is a group chat.
Then comes the one-crore atmosphere. Not one-crore fact, always one-crore atmosphere. Somebody knows the rate. Somebody knows the advance. Somebody knows who paid, who was cheated, who was dropped anyway. Workers allege crores were sought in the ticket process. Political gossip settles around figures that now circulate with astonishing ease. These may remain allegations, but that is almost beside the point. Nobody may have a ledger, but everyone seems to have a number. In Assam’s election season, even rumour arrives with financial precision. Gossip has acquired accounting standards.
And yet the most revealing images do not come from press conferences or party offices. They come from the villages, from households, from courtyards, from the practical political intelligence of women and families who are expected to receive, calculate, remember, and then vote. For days, BJP flags fluttered in front of homesteads as though loyalty had been permanently planted. Then the Orunodoi money came, Rs 9,000 each, and many of those flags quietly disappeared. It was a small, devastating image. In Assam’s election season, even the flag is not always a declaration of faith. Sometimes it is a short-term instalment of political weather.
That image is worth pausing over because it says more than many speeches. Urban intellectuals and activists still like to describe elections in elevated language, ideological battles, democratic mandates, secular fronts, authoritarian threats. Some of that language still matters. But the people living through this election read it with more practical intelligence than those who theorise it from Guwahati drawing rooms. They know that a flag can be temporary, a slogan reusable, a candidate movable, a party negotiable, an alliance unfinished. They know that distribution, adjustment, resentment, and opportunity often explain more than ideology alone.
By the time nominations close, every party will have announced principles, every faction will have circulated its injuries, and every disappointed aspirant will have discovered betrayal. Every WhatsApp group will have carried at least one claim to the real inside story. Cadres in one constituency will have been told to work for an ally they did not want. In another, they will have threatened to vote for a rival.
Dropped incumbents will have nursed insult. Fresh rebels will have appeared before microphones. Leaders will have changed camps, candidates will have changed vehicles, and parties will still be speaking in the old language of conviction.
But people will remember more than slogans. They will remember who changed sides, who was denied a ticket, which alliance broke in public and returned after midnight, which worker was asked to campaign for an ally they did not want, which flag stayed up, and which flag quietly disappeared after the money came. They will remember schemes, yes, but also insults, adjustments, humiliations, and opportunism. And when they vote, they will vote with that whole memory.
Because in Assam, the election is not a break from politics. It is politics condensed into its purest form, circulation without end, absorption without limit, adjustment without rest. The candidate list is a group chat.
And the flags will return. They always do. The question is whose they will be, and for how long.
