Hindutva in the hills: interrogating BJP's dominance in autonomous hill districts of Assam

The Hills of Assam have long been theatres of identity politics, insurgency, and negotiated autonomy. Over the last decade, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has gone from being a peripheral player in these hill areas to a major political force. Existing literature on Hindutva ideology and electoral studies has highlighted that the BJP's electoral rise among the tribes of North East India is backed by the ‘political resource' that has been created by the Sangh Parivar with its long-term investment in the appropriation of indigenous religion and culture. In this context, the paper argues that the saffron surge in the hills of Assam came as a spill-over effect of government changes in the centre and state, but the nature of dominance of the party over the last decade is supplemented by the appropriation and institutionalisation of indigenous religion and culture along with development and peace narrative. Against this backdrop, the article examines the BJP's electoral consolidation in this ethnic homeland, where earlier political mobilisations centred on autonomy demands and ethnic nationalism have increasingly been reconfigured and negotiated by the ruling party’s developmental agenda and its rearticulation of indigenous identity.