An economically battered Assam pins its hopes on Gogoi

Santanu Saikia

Assam’s chief minister designate, Tarun Gogoi, has a daunting task carved out for him over the next five years. The mettle of the seasoned politician will be severely tested as he tries to coax a stagnant economy out of its morass, grapple with rising militancy and keep a lid on the explosive social cauldron that Assam is today. To come to power on a strong anti-incumbency wave in the wake of Asom Gana Parishad’s Prafulla Kumar Mahanta’s mis-governance will seem easy in relation to holding on to the same public support as Mr Gogoi steps into the chief ministerial shoes.

What the new chief minister is expected to bring to the table is his transparent operating style. He is one of the few politicians of Assam who has not been scarred by corruption and has stayed clear of taking up shallow causes that sought to meet narrow ends. He kept his focus on the larger picture and has successfully persuaded the alienated Assamese mainstream to lend support to his party. And unlike former Congress chief minister, Hiteshwar Saikia, Mr Gogoi refused to play the politics of power or of gamesmanship in a state where divisions run deep along communal, ethnic and linguistic lines.

In the last five years that he has been the head of the Congress party, he has never fell for the temptation of going for the jugular despite being severely goaded by the Mahanta regime. He weathered serious charges of being in nexus with the outlawed United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) and, at the end, was successful in putting together a united face of his faction-ridden party before the people.

Mr Gogoi’s call for a unilateral ceasefire with ULFA is seen by many as an ambitious gambit. He is seeking to introduce a new idiom into the relationship between the state and the ULFA which was not possible in the earlier Mahanta regime, bent as it was on wiping out the militants through unified operations of the army and the police.

There is no doubt that Mr Mahanta succeeded in breaking the command-control structure of the ULFA and the extremists were forced to retreat into camps in Bhutan and Bangladesh. But Mr Gogoi’s ceasefire call is based on the tenet that militancy is Hydra-headed and a singularly military approach will, in the final analysis, not bear fruit. Communication lines between the ULFA and the state broke down completely in the last five years as the relationship between the two was marked with bloodshed and bitterness. What Mr Gogoi is seeking to do is to begin the process of dialogue with a unilateral offer. It is the first step in the right direction.
The big issue in this elections was the anti-incumbency factor. But the Congress party’s unequivocal stand on the Illegal Migrants Determination Act (IMDT)—which applies only to Assam and makes detection and deportation of Bangladeshi nationals difficult, if not impossible, by putting the onus of identification on an individual reporting a case of illegal migration and not the state—is what swung the sizeable Muslim vote in its favour.

The Congress had fought against the scrapping of the Act, a stand different from the AGP-BJP alliance. This is where Mr Gogoi would walk on the razor’s edge as he would have to delicately balance the interests of his vote bank against the sentiments of the mainstream Assamese population. If he wavers, not only will he fall but in the process unleash unprecedented violence in the already fragile social mosaic.

The other grave challenge that the new chief minister will face is in reviving the moribund economy. Industry has been on the decline ever since militancy reared its head in the early 80s. It has been so severely hit that even a one-of-its kind tax sop announced by North Block one-and-half years ago—of making Assam a completely tax-free zone—failed to have an impact. Indian companies have shied away from the sops as they fear that the costs of operating in a violent environment would far outstrip the benefits.

In this context, Mr Gogoi is perhaps right in trying to solve the ULFA issue first. For, investments are unlikely to flow in until the state rids itself of the cult of violence. The government is in no position to pump in money on the Plan account as over 90 per cent of its resources are earmarked for non-Plan expenditure, mostly in paying salaries and interest on loans. Mr Gogoi will, therefore, have his hands full in trying to pull the government out from near-bankruptcy, nudging industry back to shape and creating the correct climate for private investments to come in.