The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has had to tailor its strategy to make inroads into the Northeast. Its usual political agendas—cow protection, construction of Ram Mandir, providing citizenship to Hindu refugees from neighbouring countries—that have earned it rich electoral dividends in other parts of India are unlikely to gain wide currency in the region.
Political observers claim that the BJP has customised plans that take into account local culture, ethnicity, religions and languages of the eight states—Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tripura and Sikkim—as well as the complex political landscape. This bouquet of strategies has involved invoking local heroes and history as well as promoting a softer version of Hindutva that would not necessarily alienate the locals, many of whom follow other religions. It has also played up local anxieties.
Local history, local heroes
For instance, in Assam, the BJP traditionally aligned with the Asom Gana Parishad, a state party that was formed in 1985 after the six-year-long Assam agitation against the alleged illegal infiltration from Bangladesh. Led by the All Assam Students’ Union, the Assam movement against infiltrators was violent, leading to the Nellie massacre in which 2,191 people were killed on February 18, 1983. Most of those killed were Bengali Muslims who were not recent immigrants but had settled in Assam in the 19th century.
The BJP’s election agenda in Assam has been ‘kilonjiar sarkar’ (government by locals). After it won the elections to the state Assembly for the first time in 2016, the party appointed Sarbananda Sonowal as chief minister. Sonowal has been a strong voice against illegal immigrants in the state. In 2005, he filed a case in the Supreme Court against the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunal) Act, which places the onus of proving the identity of an alien on the complainant.
Local outreach, however, is not a new strategy for the BJP or the Sangh Parivar. In the 1940s, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) had already begun developing a ground network in Assam. Its student wing, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, also supported the Assam agitation in the 1980s.
However, forming local alliances is only one part of the strategy. The BJP has also been leveraging local history and historical heroes. In Assam, it has tried to reclaim 15th–6th-century religious reformer Sankardev. A scholar and poet, Sankardev was a campaigner against caste. In the run-up to the 2021 assembly elections in the state, the BJP’s star campaigner and Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Adityanath claimed, “Srimanta Sankardev had warned us against the problem of infiltration. That is why the Congress could not tolerate him ever because the Congress’s policy was never development or peace.”
This story was originally published in outlookindia.com . Read the full story here
