Assam’s giant killer who channelised voter anger
Rakibul Hussain, a five-time legislator, unexpectedly won the Dhubri seat, showcasing a shift in Muslim vote consolidation.
Dhubri was not a seat Rakibul Hussain wanted to contest from. The small town on the banks of the Brahmaputra was a bastion of perfume baron Badruddin Ajmal who appeared to have a stranglehold on the Lower Assam constituency that was rejigged during a controversial delimitation process.
The 59-year-old deputy leader of Opposition in the Assam assembly feared a tough contest. Ajmal, who headed the All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF), had registered three consecutive thumping victories from the Muslim-majority constituency, besting the Congress. Beleaguered after the demise of his mentor Tarun Gogoi, the state Congress, however, didn’t pay heed to his remonstrations. “I didn’t choose Dhubri. The party did its own survey and told me that if I were to contest there, we would win. And that’s what happened,” he said.
On June 4, Hussain’s surprise victory over Ajmal from the Dhubri seat shone as one of the Congress’s most consequential triumphs as the five-time legislator posted the highest electoral victory margin in these Lok Sabha polls –1,012,476 votes. More importantly, the win was representative of two other broader phenomena that buoyed the Opposition to its best showing in a decade. The first was the consolidation of the Muslim vote behind the Congress and the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance bloc, and the Opposition’s better-than-expected performance in the Northeast, a region that has traditionally voted in consonance with the government at the Centre.
2
The son of Congress leader and two-time legislator Alhaz Nurul Hussain, Hussain was born on 7 August 1964. He completed his schooling from Nagaon Government Boys Higher Secondary School in 1979, secured a BA degree from Nagaon College in 1984 and did a masters in political science (through distance learning) from the Aligarh Muslim University.
In 2001, he took the political plunge after getting a Congress ticket to fight from Samaguri, a seat his father also represented. He won and immediately became a minister under chief minister Tarun Gogoi.
He went on to win from the seat five consecutive times, becoming one of the most successful politicians in the state. Despite the Bharatiya Janata Party’s inroads in Assam in the past decade, Hussain was able to retain his seat comfortably, due in part to the sizable Muslim voters in the constituency. In 2021, he defeated the BJP’s Anil Saikia by a margin of 26,000 votes even as the ruling party won 60 seats, compared to the Congress’s 29. “I have been winning from Samaguri since 2001, whether the wave was in favour of Congress, or not. Though I will be more active in New Delhi from now on, I will continue to be associated with Assam and the people of Samaguri,” Hussain said.
From 2002 to 2016, he served under Tarun Gogoi handling various portfolios – home, information technology, border area development, information and public relations, tourism, panchayat and rural development and environment and forests.
His stint as minister for environment and forests from 2011 to 2016 was particularly controversial, given the spike in rhinoceros poaching in the Kaziranga National Park. Poachers killed 103 rhinos in the state in that duration — a significantly high number in comparison to the previous years (38 killed from 2006 to 2010). The killings sparked an uproar and opponents pointed the finger at his complicity but Hussain defended himself, blaming extremists for getting involved in poaching and using assault rifles such as AK-47 and AK-56.
But the allegations have continued. “If he wins (from Dhubri) and stays in Delhi many wild animals in the state will be protected. If we can send Hussain to Delhi for 5 years, I can withdraw a huge amount of police force from Kaziranga,” Assam chief minister, Himanta Biswa Sarma, who was once very close to Hussain, said.
3
Surrounded on three sides by the Brahmaputra and Gangadhar rivers, Dhubri has been an important part of Assam’s history for many centuries. Considered the gateway to Assam, the Muslim-majority district has an eclectic mix of people and is an important business centre.
The region shares a 61-km boundary with Bangladesh, most of which is along the Brahmaputra as it enters the neighbouring country and is filled with numerous chars (sand bars) making it difficult for security forces to patrol and easier for undocumented immigrants to cross over or smuggle goods ranging from cattle to drugs.
The Dhubri Lok Sabha seat is one of the three among 14 in Assam where Muslims are in majority; since Independence, it is one of a handful of constituencies across India where the parliamentarian has always been a Muslim. Before last year’s delimitation exercise, which saw a massive redrawing of boundaries of the state’s 126 assembly and 14 parliamentary seats, there were 10 assembly constituencies across three districts under the Dhubri Lok Sabha seat. But now it has 11 assembly seats – four new ones added and three old ones removed – spread across five districts.
Delimitation has also increased the number of voters in Dhubri. In 2019, the constituency had 1,858,566 voters. But now it has jumped to 2,643,403 — a 42% increase in five years. This has caused fevered speculation around the possibility of gerrymandering and its potential impact on voting patterns this time around.
For over three decades between 1971 and 2004, Dhubri was a Congress stronghold. But since 2009, Ajmal, the perfume baron who founded the AIUDF in 2005 with a mass base among Bengali-speaking Muslims, many of whom migrated to the region from erstwhile East Pakistan, established a vice-like grip on the seat.
Defeating Ajmal in his home turf was not easy. But Hussain kept the focus on the Congress’s national agenda and the BJP government’s policies that he argued were against Muslims. He attributed his win to anger and disenchantment against campaigns by the state government against child marriages and deaths in police encounters, in which Muslims were affected. “The open deal between the BJP and AIUDF to support each other was another reason that turned voters towards the Congress,” he said.
In the end, the results showed the Muslims had largely consolidated behind Hussain, a fact acknowledged by Sarma as well. “Earlier AIUDF and Congress both used to get a share of the Muslim votes, but this time almost the entire Muslim vote shifted to Congress,” Sarma said. Hussain’s victory signals a churn in Assam’s politics, and he believes the signs will only get clearer in 2026, when the state goes to the polls. “The Congress will win.”