Kokrajhar: Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma inducted Bodoland People’s Front (BPF) MLA Charan Boro into his cabinet last week, praising the party, led by former extremist Hagrama Mohilary, for “always championing” the cause of the Bodo people.
Boro’s induction, sealing an alliance between the BPF and ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and coming just weeks after the BPF’s sweeping victory in the Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC) elections, marked a sobering moment for Sarma, who had asserted that the Council was poised to elect a national party this time to ensure better coordination among New Delhi, Dispur and Kokrajhar.
The Bodoland Territorial Region (BTR) comprises the five districts of Kokrajhar, Baksa, Chirang, Udalguri and Tamulpur.
Sarma, credited with the BJP’s meteoric rise in Assam over the past decade, had previously spared no effort in portraying Mohilary as a corrupt leader who siphoned off development funds.
In 2020, he engineered a pact between the BJP and the United People’s Party Liberal (UPPL), dislodging the BPF from power in the BTC.
However, following the poll results this time, the haste with which Sarma moved to bring the BPF into the fold of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) revealed a rare hint of anxiety in the usually unflappable leader.
Mohilary, well aware of the importance of maintaining friendly ties with Dispur and New Delhi in order to access funds—having led the BTC uninterrupted from 2003 to 2020—also wasted no time in becoming a BJP ally.
His hand was also forced by the Assam government’s move, soon after the BPF’s return to power, to withdraw a notification dated 19 January, 2021, which had placed the deputy commissioners serving in districts under the BTC under the supervision of the Council.
However, with Assam heading for polls in a few months, it was Sarma, more than Mohilary, who appeared eager to extend the olive branch. After all, the 15 assembly seats under the BTR, now firmly in Mohilary’s grip, could well prove decisive in the elections.
In 2021, the BJP-UPPL coalition had won eight of BTR’s then 11 seats. After delimitation, four new assembly seats were added, taking the total to 15. The BJP had won 60 of Assam’s 126 assembly constituencies in 2021.
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Regional politics
The BTC is an autonomous council formed under the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution in 2003. It was established following the signing of the Bodo Accord by the Mohilary-led insurgent outfit Bodo Liberation Tigers Force, the Centre and the Assam government.
The Bodo community is Assam’s largest tribal group, accounting for around 6 percent of the state’s population.
The BTR falls under the Council’s jurisdiction. As many as 19 non-Bodo communities, including Assamese, Koch-Rajbongshis and Bengali-speaking Muslims, make up nearly 65 percent of the BTR population.
The region witnessed decades-long armed insurgency and riots, driven by demands for a separate state. A series of peace accords, the most recent signed in 2020, ultimately brought an end to the armed movement.
Conversations with a cross-section of influential voices in BTR reveal that, even as Sarma campaigned aggressively to establish the BJP as the central force in the region’s politics, a series of missteps by the party not only cost it votes but also impacted the UPPL, its ally after the BJP had spurned the BPF in 2020.
Ahead of the BTC polls, the BJP snapped its alliance with the UPPL, which was a major political beneficiary of the 2020 accord, choosing instead to contest the election solo in a bid to emerge as the king, if not the kingmaker.
Sarma vs Mohilary in BTR
Political leaders and experts noted that while Sarma’s campaign focused on polarising the electorate along ethnic lines, the strategy backfired due to Mohilary’s astuteness.
“Firstly, he (Sarma) tried to discredit the UPPL as a marginal local player, despite the party having been a BJP ally for five years. He did so by emphasising that all development works in the BTR were the result of the BJP’s efforts. Secondly, in rally after rally, he told people that there would be no second-class citizens in the BTC under the BJP’s watch. It was his attempt to win the support of non-Bodos,” a senior BPF leader told ThePrint.
Mohilary, on the other hand, made the distribution of land deeds to every eligible family in the region a central promise of his campaign and ruled out evictions. This struck a chord with non-Bodos, especially in the context of eviction drives in many parts of Assam to remove alleged encroachments on forest land.
The Bodos, meanwhile, were unsettled by statements made by Assam BJP president and Lok Sabha MP Dilip Saikia in the run-up to the BTC polls. Saikia suggested that land laws should be uniform across tribal and non-tribal areas, a comment interpreted to mean that non-Bodos should also be allowed to purchase land in areas under the BTC.
“The BPF aggressively pushed back against such statements from Sarma and Saikia. But the UPPL suffered due to the perception that it had acted like a B-team of the BJP since 2020. The UPPL could have taken a firmer stand against the attempts to polarise the electorate, but it did not. The BJP, in turn, did not reciprocate the alliance either. It even targeted the UPPL during its campaign,” said a senior UPPL leader.
The UPPL, led by Pramod Boro, former president of the influential All Bodo Students’ Union, appeared to acquiesce. For example, the first day of the budget session of the Assam Assembly was held at the BTC legislative assembly in Kokrajhar this February, with Sarma calling it the “high point” of his tenure as CM.
“This is a significant step towards fulfilling Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision to accelerate the development of our Bodo sisters and brothers while nourishing their culture, which proudly represents our civilisational ethos,” Union Home Minister Amit Shah had said in a statement at the time.
The BTC assembly is located within the sprawling Bodoland Territorial Council Secretariat in Kokrajhar, capital of the region.
However, rather than promoting integration, the session sent out the message that the autonomy the BTC enjoys under the Sixth Schedule was being diluted, said Guwahati-based senior journalist Sushanta Talukdar, editor of online news magazine NEZINE.
“Over the years, as many as 25 bills passed by the BTC legislative assembly, which is empowered to make laws on 40 subjects applicable across the Bodoland Territorial Region, remain pending with the Assam Governor. Bodo groups already viewed that as an affront to the constitutional autonomy of the BTC. The one-day session of the Assam Assembly held at the BTC assembly premises did not help,” Talukdar told ThePrint.
‘Limited appeal of BJP’
A section of BPF and UPPL leaders, who had tried to get the two regional forces to merge, said the election results were a resounding rejection of the BJP’s efforts to expand its presence in the region by using the UPPL as a proxy to gain a foothold and eventually cement its control over the nearly 9,000 sq km territory.
The campaigning during the BTC polls also highlighted the limited resonance of the BJP’s political message among tribal communities in other parts of the Northeast. For instance, Pradyot Debbarman, whose tribal-focused party TIPRA Motha is an ally of the ruling BJP in Tripura, campaigned for Mohilary during the BTC elections.
He called for the BJP’s ouster and, just last week, warned that TIPRA Motha would sever its alliance if the Centre failed to implement the provisions of the 2024 agreement signed with the state and central governments for the development of Tripura’s indigenous communities. On Thursday, a coalition of civil society organisations backed by the TIPRA Motha announced a 24-hour strike in Tripura to press for the same demand.
For now, Sarma’s challenges are far from over. While the BPF’s induction into the state cabinet was swift, it has not been well received by the UPPL, which also holds a ministerial position in the Assam government.
Neither the BPF nor the UPPL is comfortable sharing space in the same cabinet, prompting Sarma to say that the BJP will soon decide which of the two parties it will ally with ahead of the 2026 assembly elections.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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