Litmus test awaits Gaurav Gogoi

The Jorhat MP will face his first challenge as Assam Congress president when the Bodoland Territorial Council goes to the polls in September, writes Aditi Phadnis

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"It's a tough election. But it is winnable," Gaurav Gogoi, new president of the Assam unit of the Congress, told Business Standard on the phone from Guwahati.

Gogoi is also a member of Parliament from the Jorhat Lok Sabha seat and is deputy leader of the Congress in the Lok Sabha.

The seat was previously held by the Bharatiya Janata Party. Retaining Jorhat was a prestige issue for Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, who deployed considerable resources to defeat Gogoi.

However, Gogoi, considered by younger voters as a promising politician from the Northeast, won the constituency by a comfortable margin of more than 140,000 votes.

On the strength of this victory and the fact that the faction-ridden state unit needed a new leader, he was appointed to lead the state party in May. Assembly elections in Assam are due by May next year. "Time is short. But we're already at work," he said. He has just completed a marathon meeting of the Political Affairs Committee (PAC) of the state organisation, he says. He concedes that challenges are many, but points out that those who wrote off the Congress may have to eat their words.

Gogoi's central contention is that incumbency is catching up with the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government, in place since 2016. This, he says, is evident by the results of the recent panchayat elections in the state (May 2 and 7). Although the NDA posted a good performance, winning 274 of 397 Zilla Parishad member (ZPM) seats and 1,261 of 2,192 anchalik panchayat member (APM) seats, the Congress proved that it still had a following, especially in rural Assam, securing 72 ZPM seats and 481 APM seats.