Assam elections result: Masterful mama delivers magic majority | India News
Restricted seats give the saffron party a multiplier effectThe delimitation proved a wild card in Assam’s first assembly election since the redrawing of constituency boundaries in 2023, with the BJP’s two main rivals – the Congress and the AIUDF – cutting the number of Muslim-majority seats from 35 to 22 to fight an existential battle against each other. While the number of assembly seats remained unchanged at 126, demarcation changed the representation matrix, keeping the number of Muslim MLAs below 25 and making tribal communities the determining factor from 90 to 103 seats. CM Himanta Biswa Sharma had always said that demarcation would ensure more than 100 out of 126 seats for tribal communities. The poll results gave a bonus for the BJP. The Congress improved its position in the shrinking Muslim-majority belt at the expense of perfumer Badruddin Ajmal’s AIUDF.
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The state’s new electoral geography shook the balance of the opposition even before the polls. Several sitting AIUDF MLAs have jumped ship, joining the NDA constitutional AGP so that they don’t miss the bus in the scramble for tickets that are less than ever. For the BJP, this was a strategic fit, increasing the NDA’s chances in seats where the Muslim vote would be decisive. Although the script did not go as planned, the AIUDF ended up with just two seats, which was what the BJP wanted. The 2023 delimitation exercise not only reduced the weightage of constituencies long dominated by Bengali-leaning Muslim voters but also expanded the number of seats reserved for STs from 16 to 19. SC seats increased from one to nine. The redrawn constituencies included Congress strongholds across lower, central and southern Assam with a high concentration of Muslim voters. Assam politics has long been shaped by illegal immigration from Bangladesh.
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The Assam Accord of 1985, born out of a mass movement, set March 25, 1971, as the cutoff for citizenship. But even after that, allegations of illegal intrusion continued. The BJP has consistently argued that the political trajectory of the state should be determined by the indigenous community rather than the immigrant Muslim population. Until the BJP formed its first cabinet in 2016, voting patterns among the state’s minorities were historically linked to the party in government. That dynamic changed further after the delimitation, with voters in the remaining Muslim-majority seats supporting the Congress amid concerns about whether their interests were protected under the BJP.
