BJP’s Electoral Victory in Assam, 2016: Co-opting the Khilonjiyas

The landslide victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Assam’s assembly election in April 2016 provokes diametrically opposite interpretations. While for the rank and file of the Sangh Parivar, the victory reveals a consolidation of Hindutva forces in the state, at the other end of the spectrum, some portions of the intelligentsia, who want to project the BJP as a changed and secular entity, assert that the electoral results do not reflect the rise of Hindutva in the state but rather the advance of indigenous and identity politics. For the latter, the key to BJP’s electoral triumph was its alliance with regional-ethnic forces against the backdrop of the growing insecurity among Assam’s indigenous people caused by a steady influx from Bangladesh. While Hindu consolidation, through different agencies and institutions, gained momentum in the state, in the present elections, it was the highly emotive campaign for the protection of the rights of the Khilonjiyas (the indigenous) that assured victory for the BJP-led alliance. But it is important to understand the way ‘indigenous’ was constructed as an exclusionary category to bring in communal divisions in the electoral battle. The theory of ‘indigenous’ propagated during the elections had nothing do with substantive rights like the ‘right to self-determination’ or ‘rights over resources’, emphasised by the International Declarations on Rights of the Indigenous People. The international bidding for the auction of 12 oil fields in Assam by the BJP-led union government immediately after the new state government had assumed power and the collective resistance by nationalist and indigenous groups against this decision exposed the hollowness of the ‘indigenous agenda’ of the BJP in Assam.