Can Modi's diamond dazzle Assam?

Sarbananda Sonowal, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s chief ministerial candidate in Assam, is aware that apart from stitching together alliances and keeping his party’s cadres united and motivated, he is pitted against a seasoned politician, the three-time chief minister Tarun Gogoi. He is hoping that Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be able to counter Mr Gogoi’s politics of freebies. The Congress has been targeting Mr Modi, Mr Sonowal’s most important campaigner, as a “vendor of sour mangoes”. An Assamese proverb, it implies that sour mangoes can be sold only once.

Mr Sonowal knows that the most challenging promise that the BJP will have to deliver on if elected to power is the detection and deportation of Bangladeshi immigrants. He admits that the party will have to do a lot of manoeuvring to win the confidence of voters. He admits that his task is Herculean: to capture power in a state where his party has the strength of merely five legislators in a House of 126. That’s why Mr Sonowal has modified his stand on many issues that he had harped on as a student leader, but whether it brings votes will be tested on April 4 and 11, when the state goes to polls.

Whatever the outcome, Mr Sonowal has come a long way from the sleepy, riverine town of Molokgaon in eastern Assam’s Dibrugarh district where, as a child, he used to get very upset with a tax collector whom he encountered frequently in his village collecting tax from villagers. He asked his father on whose behalf the tax was being collected, and his father said that tax-collectors work under a magistrate. Mr Sonowal says that he started dreaming of becoming a magistrate to end the plight of the villagers.

He did his bachelors in criminal justice from Dibrugarh University before moving to Guwahati to do his LLB from Gauhati University. It is here that his political career took off. Mr Sonowal began his journey in politics as a student leader and was appointed president of the All-Assam Students’ Union in 1992 and continued till 1999. He fought for the rights of the indigenous people in Assam and was known for his firebrand image. He was given the title of Jatiya Nayak by AASU.
In 2001, he joined the Asom Gana Parishad and was elected MLA from Assam’s Moran constituency. In 2004, he was elected MP from Dibrugarh.

Disillusioned with the AGP, Mr Sonowal joined the BJP in 2011. He quit the AGP because many senior party leaders were opposed to doing away with the contentious Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunal) Act of 1983, one of the biggest barriers to deportation of Bangladeshi immigrants. In 2014, he was elected to the Lok Sabha by defeating Union minister Ranee Narah in Lakhimpur on a BJP ticket and was appointed Union minister of state with independent charge.

Mr Sonowal is credited for uniting the party before the 2014 Lok Sabha elections and bagging seven out of the state’s 14 seats. Soft-spoken and gentle, yet staunch in his views, Mr Sonowal is an ardent follower of Krishnaguru Eknam Dharma, a religion in Assam, and doesn’t hide how he was influenced and brought closer to the BJP by former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s style of politics.

Though he has always been at the forefront of anti-foreigner movements in post-Assam agitation days, his popularity rose after he succeeded in challenging the controversial IMDT Act, which was scrapped by the Supreme Court in 2005, terming the legislation as the biggest hurdle and impediment in the identification and deportation of illegal migrants.

Mr Sonowal, who has a distinct advantage in his clean image and the credibility of being a performing politician, has already shown his political acumen by roping in the Bodoland People’s Front and the AGP as the BJP’s alliance partners. He has also reached out to leaders of the Rabha, Mising, Karbi, Dimasa, Deori, Koch-Rajbongshi, Tea tribes and others.

A bachelor at 51, Mr Sonowal loves spending time with his friends and takes a keen interest in sports, cricket, football and badminton being his favourite. But these days he is campaigning for party candidates and addressing at least five to six public meetings every day. Amidst his whirlwind tour of the state Mr Sonowal does not forget to update himself on the ICC World Twenty20.

His critics say that Mr Sonowal should be more realistic in his assessment of public mood and gleefully recall how he was busy “forming” a Cabinet of AGP leaders just a day before the counting of votes of the 2006 Assembly polls in which the AGP, led by Brindaban Goswami, was reduced to 10 seats. This time Mr Sonowal looks prepared with stock replies on all those vexing issues where the BJP has been accused of taking a U-turn from its stand in the last Lok Sabha elections. One such issue was the Lower Subansiri Hydel Power Project, which threatens a large swathe of land downstream with fatal floods, and the BJP had opposed the completion of the dam tooth and nail, exactly two years ago.

Mr Sonowal’s community, Sonowal Kachari, is a Scheduled Tribe, and if the BJP wins, he will be the second tribal chief minister of Assam after Jogen Hazarika, who held office for only 94 days in 1979. Mr Sonowal is contesting from Majuli, one of the constituencies of North Lakhimpur Lok Sabha seat, which elected him in 2011. On his choice of contesting from Majuli, Mr Sonowal says the process of making the island shine began when the BJP assumed power at the Centre in 2014.

After the debacle of Bihar, the BJP in Assam has decided to contest this election by putting forth Mr Sonowal. Mr Modi, who addressed only seven public meetings in Assam, has said that Mr Sonowal was “a diamond” that he would lose from his government after the elections, but that “the people of Assam would benefit”.