It is 11.30 pm in Guwahati but we manage to find a lone figure in the darkened street to guide us. Himanta Biswa Sarma’s ornate mansion is conspicuous in an otherwise unexceptional neighbourhood. We are ushered into a den with chandeliers and baroque crystal décor for another hour-long wait. But when the wait is finally over, his visage, with a droopy-eyed stare, is as theatrical and baleful as the first clap of thunder outside.

Sarma is not just a politician. He is a metaphor in Assam, often employed to denote statecraft and a kind of perfidious efficiency voters typically associate with the Congress. His chequered political history, from a stint in the All Assam Students’ Union (AASU) with Prafulla Kumar Mahanta, to an arrest, with alleged links to the militant United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA), only adds to the Sarma myth and glamour.

The Congress was quick to spot his talent, with first Hiteshwar Saikia and then Tarun Gogoi nurturing him over the years. As part of the Gogoi cabinet, Sarma is known to have been a key figure in crafting the Grand Old Party’s extraordinary victory in Assam in 2011 when the Congress won 79 of the 126 seats in the state assembly.

The trouble between mentor and protégé famously started soon after the assembly elections when Gogoi launched his son Gaurav into politics. Amidst bickering and constant infighting, the CBI summoned him in the multi-crore Saradha scam, although Sarma says it was only as a witness. Losing faith in his mentor, he demanded his pride of place in the party from the ‘high command’. He apparently told Rahul Gandhi that it was he who steered the Congress’s triumph in 2011; an assertion which provoked an indifferent shrug from the Congress Vice President who simply said, “so what”.

An embittered Sarma soon sent feelers to the BJP. The story goes that in a secret meeting with the BJP president Amit Shah during the 2014 election campaign, Sarma predicted the exact number of seats the BJP was going to win in Assam. Shah was impressed, and after protracted negotiations (Sarma was also looking at the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) as a fallback option), Gogoi’s protégé and Congress’s chief strategist joined the BJP in August 2015.

He is now Shah’s right-hand man, stitching up alliances with the AGP and the Bodoland People’s Front (BPF), while also influencing the party’s candidate selection and future policy planning. That the BJP has a chief ministerial candidate in Union Minister Sarbananda Sonowal is immaterial to Sarma’s prestige and clout in his new party. And in Shah, he seems to have found a kindred soul.

“He (Shah) is most professional. I work as hard as I did in the Congress, but here in the BJP, at least there is no reservation at the top for the blue bloods,” he says. “Have you ever seen Rahul Gandhi in the company of anyone who is not from a dynasty? You can give your life to the Congress but in the end, it is Deepender Hooda, Jyotiraditya Scindia or a similar successor to the throne who gets to be at the top.”

One can sense the anger, surfacing in a flash of the hooded eyes and scorn in the smile. There are also some remnants of loyalty to a shared past and memories. “He (Gogoi) has been my Chief Minister, my leader. I will not say anything bad about him,” says Sarma.

But the target of his ire, the forever smiling Tarun Gogoi, has no such inhibitions.

“What did I do? I helped him (Sarma) from the time he was a junior legislator, gave him opportunities… He was my blue-eyed boy. I trusted him completely. I promoted him in a way I’ve never promoted Gaurav (his son and MP Gaurav Gogoi). What more did he expect?” Gogoi asks.

The wily Chief Minister had been expecting a defection and was suitably prepared when Sarma finally made his switch to the BJP. The day he quit the Congress, the state Congress chief Anjan Dutta burst firecrackers in the party office and distributed sweets, claiming Sarma has carried whatever anti-incumbency Gogoi had after a three-term tenure.

“He has found his level, hobnobbing with a person who had murder charges against him (Amit Shah). He once said the blood of Muslims flows in the gutters of Gujarat. I am sure he is happy there,” says Gogoi.

In the BJP, Sarma is feted as a star by the top leadership. A senior BJP leader in Assam says, “You can weigh our entire state leadership on one side of a scale and Sarma alone on the other. He would be heavier. He has changed the BJP’s fortunes.”

There are, of course, murmurs of discontent from the cadre on the field. A young BJP office-bearer in Mangaldoi says, “We fought against this man throughout our political life. We fought court cases against him and had arguments in the assembly. He symbolises the Congress’s corrupt culture and now we have adopted him.”

This local leader, requesting anonymity, sees two negative fallouts of Sarma’s entry in the BJP. The first is that his presence is a constant threat to the BJP’s chief ministerial candidate Sarbananda Sonowal. “He has not shifted from Congress to BJP to play second fiddle to another leader. He is definitely planning something,” says the BJP worker.

Sarma, of course, rubbishes these suspicions. “I have just joined the BJP. How can I expect to be promoted to the top? I am not stupid,” he says.

Speculations about Sarma plotting to topple Sonowal are still hypothetical. But what is also visible on the ground, and this is the second important fallout of Sarma’s entry, is that workers’ disenchantment with the move is reflecting in the party’s campaign.

For instance, in the reserved constituency of Jagiroad near Nelli, the BJP has fielded Sarma’s loyalist Piyush Hazarika, whom the local party workers refer to as “Dada Brigand” or part of “Sarma Syndicate”. “No one has the courage to tell Amit Shah what this means to us. Our MPs are not protesting because they believe that if Sarbananda Sonowal becomes Chief Minister, they have a chance to become Cabinet ministers. But what about us, the common workers? How can we campaign for these people who represent everything we fought against for most of our political life,” says a BJP worker in Jagiroad.

Whether this widespread discontent will result in a situation similar to Delhi where the BJP imposed Kiran Bedi as the party’s chief ministerial candidate and lost, is one of the variables that rarely get reflected in the opinion polls which are predicting a sweep for the BJP in Assam. About Jagiroad, the BJP is fairly confident they will win. “Don’t tell us about the cadre’s disenchantment. They have been working for two decades without the BJP winning any election in Assam,” says a BJP leader.

The fact, however, is that the BJP did extraordinarily well in the Lok Sabha elections without Sarma. The party won seven of the 14 seats in the state and cornered 36.86 per cent of the vote share. This was a quantum jump from the assembly elections in 2011 when the BJP was able to win barely five seats with about 11.47 per cent of the vote.

The Congress lost ground with just three seats and a vote share that shrank from 39.39 per cent in 2011 assembly polls to 29.90 per cent in 2014. Along with the BJP, Badruddin Ajmal’s All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF) also improved on its vote share from 12.57 per cent in the 2011 assembly polls to 14.98 per cent in 2014 while it also won three Lok Sabha seats.

Since then, Tarun Gogoi has picked himself up and closed ranks to win back what is called the traditional Ali-Coolie-Bangali (a pejorative reference to the Muslims, tea garden labourers and Bengali migrants) vote for the Congress.

For the purpose, hard-nosed veterans such as Paban Singh Ghatobar and Bhakt Charan Das have been pressed into service to recover ground among the tea garden workers who have shifted en masse to the BJP. Ghatobar, a tea tribe leader and former Union Minister, is contesting the assembly seat of Moran for the first time in his long career. He has always contested the parliamentary polls so far. The fact that he has joined the local leaders in winning assembly elections reflects Gogoi’s resolve in not letting his former aide help the BJP trip him up.

He has also launched an insidious campaign against Ajmal, the man who can topple the Congress’s applecart by splitting the 34 per cent Muslim vote. “Ajmal is working for the BJP,” Gogoi says, a message that the Congress cadre has carried to target voters.

Whatever happens in Assam, this round of polls will be memorable for the exciting sideshow starring the mentor and his protégé. Electoral battles are seldom reminiscent of the duels of yore.

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