It’s his big re-election campaign, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s star campaigner, has been criss-crossing the country holding a series of Vijay Sankalp—or “determination for victory”—rallies in the run-up to what promises to be hard-fought Lok Sabha elections in April and May.

The first of these rallies was held on January 4 at a place that doesn’t often make headlines in the national news, or the national imagination: Kalinagar, a village about 25 km from the untidy, bustling town of Silchar in Assam’s Bengali-speaking Barak Valley.

Few people know or remember that Silchar is the place where the Bharatiya Janata Party’s first unit in Northeast India was set up in 1980, the year the party itself came into existence. It was from Silchar that the BJP’s expansion into the Northeast began.

That day in Kalinagar, Modi’s rousing speech to a crowd of about 2 lakh addressed two issues that have bedevilled the area and the broader region as a whole for most of 2018: the question of the National Register of Citizens (NRC), and its flip side, the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill. Modi said, “I am aware of the difficulties faced by many during the NRC process but I assure you that no injustice will be done to any genuine Indian citizens”. He also spoke in favour of the controversial Citizenship Bill, saying it was linked with emotions and with people’s lives. It was, he said, a “penance against the injustices and many wrongs done in the past”.

Modi expressed the hope that the Bill would soon be passed by Parliament. This has not happened, but the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill and the NRC, and the politics of migration, are still very important in the politics of both the BJP and its principal opponent, the Congress, in Assam.

“They made many tall promises. None of those promises was kept”, says local district Congress general secretary Partha Chakraborty. “In 2014, Modiji had come here and promised that if he was voted to power, detention camps would be shut down. Instead more detention camps have been opened and new ones are being built.”

Chakraborty says people are still getting notices related to NRC and several of those with their names in the NRC are getting D-Voter (D for doubtful, implying doubt about the person’s citizenship) notices. “My own wife has got an NRC notice to appear for verification of legacy data. You can go from house to house. In every house, people are facing harassment due to NRC”, he says.

Outsiders versus Insiders

Perhaps this accounts for some of the support here for the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill that, if passed, would grant relatively easy citizenship to Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi and Christian refugees from neighbouring Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh. The place has a predominantly Sylheti Bengali population, and many are descendants of Hindu families that migrated from Sylhet in what is now Bangladesh after a Partition-time referendum in 1947 that took the erstwhile Assam district into East Pakistan. The Congress in Silchar has found itself in a bind over this Bill, with sitting MP Sushmita Dev going against the Assam Congress line to express a kind of support for the Bill.

Chakraborty, in line with the party’s state unit, sees in the Bill an attempt at polarising votes on religious lines. “The communalisation of the Citizenship Bill will not succeed,” he says. “People here are aware of how polarisation is done”.

The Congress’s political fate in Silchar depends heavily on winning the bulk of the sizable Muslim votes in the constituency, but a similar polarisation of the majority Hindu vote would see the BJP winning comfortably. The constituency has around 11.89 lakh voters of which approximately 4 lakh are Muslims. The remainder is mainly from the Hindu Bengali community, with significant minority populations of Adivasis from the tea tribes, and Manipuris. In the past, the All India United Democratic Front, a party led by millionaire maulana Badruddin Ajmal, has been a strong presence in the area. In 2009, Ajmal himself contested for the seat against BJP veteran Kabindra Purkayastha and Dev’s father, former Union minister and local heavyweight Santosh Mohan Dev. Purkayastha won that big fight, with Ajmal a close second and Dev finishing a poor third.

The AIUDF has not put up a candidate from the seat this time. However, the National People’s Party led by Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad Sangma—which is a part of the BJP-led North East Democratic Alliance—has declared the candidature of Nazia Yasmin Mazumdar, a Muslim woman engineer who worked with Tata Consultancy Services before joining politics. The NPP has been expanding throughout Northeast India, especially after Sangma went out on a limb to lead opposition to the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, and is trying to make inroads in Assam, which is politically the most important state in the region.

Mazumdar, in her statement to the local media immediately after filing her nomination, attacked both BJP and Congress. “Where are the acche din Modi promised?” she asked. Her other question was for the Congress’ Sushmita Dev. “Why is she only bothered about minority votes? She is MP, and her father was a minister … if she has worked for the people who voted for her, she should not be worried at all.”

BJP candidate Dr Rajdeep Roy, an orthopaedic surgeon and son of former MLA Bimolangshu Roy, won the nomination after a bruising internal struggle for the party ticket. He’s been busy trying to convince Silchar voters that acche din have actually dawned and it’ll only take another term for the high noon of acche din to arrive. Upon filing his nomination, Roy immediately came out and made a press statement saying, “The way Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been working tirelessly, 18 or 19 hours a day, and the way Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal and our leader Himanta Biswa Sarma have been working, we expect unimaginable results … we will win all 10 seats we are contesting in Assam”.

The key issue for the Silchar seat, Roy said, was development. “The way Prime Minister Modi has been taking Northeast India on the path to development … the Congress treated Northeast like a colony, Modi has given it a place of importance and is treating it as a new engine of development. Similarly, under Tarun Gogoi, the Congress treated Barak Valley as a colony. In 15 years, he came here three or four times and never spent a night here. In the last two-and-a-half years, we have seen our CM Sonowal here 17 times, we have seen lots of work and lots of development.”

The focus of the “Chowkidar Dr Rajdeep Roy” campaign is development, with Citizenship and NRC bringing up the rear. He has released a series of campaign posters on social media that promise he will organise a summit in Silchar to promote it as a business hub, open a training centre for youth to prepare them for competitive exams, work on completion of rail corridors, and push for transit to mainland India via Bangladesh, among other things. He has also done a little “Swacch Bharat Abhiyan” in Silchar and is campaigning with a slogan in Bengali that goes, “Jitben abar Modi, Rajdeep ke vote dei jodi” which means “Modi will win again, if we vote for Rajdeep”.

The rhetoric of development and support for Modi via Rajdeep plays well with voters, including youth, though the communal divide is visible.

The Modi factor

Pranita is a student of Silchar’s prestigious Gurucharan College who will be voting for the first time this year. She’s not very clued in about politics, but knows who she’s going to vote for. “I love Modi,” she says. Her friend and classmate Afroza standing next to her is silent. Pranita says the country was not developing so rapidly when the Congress was in power. She feels whatever Modi is doing is for the rapid development of the country.

Her classmate Arko agrees that the pace of development has picked up. However, he arrives at a different conclusion. “During the Modi reign there has been development. Although I support the development, I want peace too, so I don’t think I will vote for the BJP but I will not vote for the Congress either.” It emerges that there have been fights in the college between Hindu and Muslim students, which Arko is concerned about.  

The communal divide, ever present, is back in Silchar, simmering below the surface. People skirt around it in formal interviews but the uncomfortable reality emerges in dinner conversations where no one wants to be quoted. It is a remnant of old and bitter memories for many among the older generation of Sylhetis who experienced Partition or its aftermath when Sylhet, which was a district of Assam, went to what became East Pakistan after a close vote in a contentious referendum. Many of the future animosities between Hindus and Muslims, and Assamese and Bengalis, in Assam, came out of that Partition in which the Sylheti Hindus became refugees.

Sangh’s starting point

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh has long been active in the area, and the BJP has old roots in Silchar. “The Cachar district committee was the first district committee of BJP in Northeast India,” says party veteran and former Silchar MP Kabindra Purkayastha.

Now a strong, upright 88, he has quit electoral politics, but not public life. Purkayastha knows all about that first district committee formed in 1980; he set it up. “I joined BJP the day it was formed on April 6, 1980,” he says. “That day, Atal Bihari Vajpayee sent me to Assam with responsibility for Assam … the entire expansion of BJP in Northeast India started from here.”

He was a Sangh pracharak much before the BJP was born. “I joined the Sangh in 1950. I was put in charge of the Sangh for Cachar district in 1953, then of Cachar, Tripura and Manipur subsequently,” he says.

The Citizenship Amendment Bill will be passed by the next BJP government even if it costs political capital, according to the Sangh veteran. “There was opposition in the Brahmaputra Valley, but our party leaders, CM and Himanta, strong Assamese leaders, did not budge a hair’s breadth from the party stance,” he points out. As for NRC, he says the BJP should not be blamed for the inconvenience caused. “We support the NRC. No non-Indian should stay and no Indian should be forced to leave.”

He traces the BJP support for the Citizenship Bill to Partition. “Partition happened. At that time, Nehru, Patel, all said, a lot of people who ended up in Pakistan, if they face difficulties there, we will give them shelter. We are saying the same thing”. Purkayastha believes the BJP has the upper hand in Silchar constituency this election, though there is likely to be a stiff fight.

Among the reasons the fight may be stiff is the consolidation of Muslim votes behind the Congress.

A ghar-wapsi

A short 12 km drive out of Silchar in the direction of Manipur, off the highway on a village road that runs through bamboo groves and rice fields, is an area called Badripar. Kutub Ahmed Mazumder, 78, is a veteran local politician from this area, a former Congress MLA who contested the 2014 polls for MP on the AIUDF ticket. “I quit UDF,” he says. He has joined the Congress again. “Ajmal (Badruddin Ajmal, AIUDF chief) was supporting Congress in the Centre and opposing it here. If the UDF supremo had no problem joining hands with Sonia Gandhi, as an old Congressman I had no trouble going back to the party,” he says.

He calls it his “ghar wapsi”. UDF, he says, has a certain voter base, but the Congress has support across all sections and communities. Sushmita Dev, the Congress candidate, is a very active parliamentarian, he points out, and adds that she is “her father’s daughter … and that is important  too. Her father’s influence is still there in all parts of this constituency.” Mazumder reckons that the minority vote in Silchar constituency is leaning towards the Congress.

There’s another thing going for the Congress. Rumours of infighting within the BJP are also doing the rounds. It is no secret that BJP’s Assam and Northeast strongman Himanta Biswa Sarma himself couldn’t get a ticket to contest the Lok Sabha polls despite throwing his hat in the ring. Candidates he supported for various seats also failed to find places in the Assam BJP list. For the Silchar seat, aspirants included state minister Parimal Suklabaidya and Silchar MLA Dilip Paul, among a host of others. The BJP’s evident strength may hide internal weaknesses.

However, the broader Congress parivar is not free from internal dissent either.

Paper dreams

Among the issues in Silchar this election is the fate of the government-owned Hindustan Paper Corporation’s Cachar Paper Mill at Panchgram. The paper mill, which started in 1984, was a profitable industry, says the Indian National Trade Union Congress General Secretary for Assam, Kishore Bhattacharya. During Santosh Mohan Dev’s tenure as Union Industries minister, a modernisation project for the mill was announced, says Bhattacharya. ₹750 crore was sanctioned and used for modernisation of the Cachar mill and another unit at Jagiroad, also in Assam.

“No one could see any real modernisation. I filed RTIs to know what modernisation happened,” he says.

He did not receive any satisfactory answers. Bhattacharya alleges that at that time new syndicates also came up for supply of raw materials as a result of which input costs rose sharply. Scams emerged in supplies of bamboo and coal. Costs kept rising until eventually the industry shut down. “The mill has been closed since September 2015. Employees have not been paid for two years,” says Bhattacharya, who is one of the founders of the workers’ union leading an agitation for its revival. He is bitter about the history of the mill, and those whom he holds responsible for its plight, among whom Santosh Mohan Dev is prominent.

Congress President Rahul Gandhi, who held a rally in Panchgram on Tuesday, has promised that the mill will be revived within six months if his party is voted back into power.

Different organisations have joined issue over the mill in different directions. The All Cachar Karimganj Hailakandi Students’ Association has blamed the present BJP government for failing to revive the unit. The organisation’s advisor Rupam Nandi Purkayastha also attacked PM Modi for failing to honour his 2014 poll promise that detention camps for those declared “D Voters” by tribunals would be shut down.

Issues are only one aspect of the electoral strategy of contending parties. Apart from the wooing of voters and airing of issues, another electoral staple—deal-making of various kinds—appears to be on in the constituency. Dilip Kumar, leader of an organisation of tea garden workers called the Rashtriya Chai Janajati Unnayan Mancha, had announced his candidature as an independent, and has since withdrawn to support the BJP. Kumar told the Northeast Now website that his decision followed a meeting with Himanta Biswa Sarma.

Pulwama effect

It came up again and again in conversations: the sense that the Modi government has worked on development, and has done the right thing by striking a terrorist camp in Pakistan. Tapan the rickshaw-puller had heard of the bombs being dropped. S.K. Choudhury, retired from government service, who  spent much of his time before the television, knew all about it from Republic TV. The students in Gurucharan college had obviously heard of it too.

The communal atmosphere and rise in nationalist sentiment drummed up by television channels following Pulwama and Balakot stand to benefit the BJP, overshadowing the earlier disaffection over the NRC and Citizenship Bill issues. Consolidation of the tea garden workers’ votes, and a split, however small, of the Muslim vote, would appear to make it advantage BJP—unless there’s internal dissension within the party of a magnitude sufficient to cause defeat.

The fight in any case is bound to be a closely contested one, and both BJP and Congress are throwing in their heavyweights. Rahul Gandhi just did his tour, and Prime Minister Modi will be back in the Barak Valley on April 11. The battle for Silchar, from where the BJP began its expansion in Northeast India, is likely to be a hotly contested one.