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BJP wrests Assam’s Nagaon Lok Sabha seat from Congress after 7 years
Devashish Sharma secured 7,14,349 votes, while AIUDF chief Badruddin Ajmal finished second and Congress’s Sibamoni Bora came third.
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The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party in Assam on Friday wrested the Nagaon Lok Sabha seat from the state Congress after a seven-year gap, after BJP’s Devashish Sharma defeated All India United Democratic chief Badruddin Ajmal by a margin of 142,224 votes.
Congress’s Sibamoni Bora was left in third place with 129,492 votes.
Even before the results were officially declared, state chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma took to X to celebrate the victory. “Under the leadership of Hon’ble Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi, BJP has secured a decisive victory in the Nagaon Lok Sabha by-election, a seat previously held by the Congress,” Sarma wrote.
Friday's outcome is more bad news for Congress, which has been suffering a series of reverses since the BJP came to power in the state. The Nagaon seat was considered a safe seat for the party as it was Muslim-dominated.
Congress's Pradyut Bordoloi bagged the seat in 2019 and retained it in 2024.
In 2024, Bordoloi had secured 788,850 votes (50.89%) while his closest BJP rival, Suresh Borah, came second with 576,619 votes (37.20%)--a margin of over 212,000 votes.
But the equation changed with Bordoloi quitting the party earlier this year to join the BJP and the entry of Ajmal, who is at present an MLA from Binnakandi, into the electoral fray.
The perfume baron's decision to contest Nagaon relegated Congress to the third spot in a seat which it had won nine times in the past.
Devashish Sharma and the Nagaon Constituency
The winning candidate, Sharma, who netted 714,349 votes, is a recently retired IAS officer whose final posting was as deputy commissioner of Nagaon.
He was earlier posted as the deputy commissioner of Morigaon, adjacent to Nagaon. Three of the eight assembly seats in the Nagaon Lok Sabha constituency are in Morigaon, and the remaining fall within Nagaon.
Polling at the minority-dominated central Assam seat took place on October 6.
The bypoll was necessitated by sitting Congress MP Pradyut Bordoloi’s decision in March to resign from the party and join the BJP, on whose ticket he later secured an assembly election victory from the Dispur constituency.
Ajmal managed to bag 572,125 votes.
Reactions and Analysis
Though he failed to win the seat, Ajmal coming second in this election is a revival of sorts for the AIUDF. Seventy-year-old Ajmal formed AIUDF in 2005 with an eye on the sizeable vote bank of Bengali-speaking Muslims in the state.
From 2006 to 2021, the party won anywhere between 10 and 18 seats in the assembly polls. It also won 1-3 Lok Sabha seats from 2009 to 2019.
But the party's fortunes are dipping— it failed to win any seats in the 2024 general election, with Ajmal losing the Dhubri seat by over 1 million votes to the Congress, and bagging just two seats in the assembly polls this year.
“It is clear that minority votes which used to get divided between our party and Congress all of those votes have come to our kitty this time. Congress is finished,” said Ajmal.
An analysis of the results in each of the eight assembly seats shows that Congress and its ally (at that time) Raijor Dal secured a total of 838,026 votes, while BJP and its alliance partner Asom Gana Parishad secured 586,151 votes —a difference of 251,875 votes.
But within just six months of the assembly polls, the BJP has overcome that deficit and raced ahead. The party's good showing in Muslim-majority seats like Laharighat, Dhing, Rupahihat and Samaguri shows that its efforts to win minority votes are yielding results.
“It appears the Muslim community has become conformist to the incumbent regime, and they have also been getting benefits of the government’s populist schemes,” said Akhil Ranjan Dutta, political science professor at Gauhati University.
“If the BJP and allies win Nagaon this time, we will win all 126 assembly seats in 2031,” the CM had stated while campaigning last month.
Addressing a press conference in Delhi, Assam Congress president Gaurav Gogoi stated that the outcome of the bye-election is the direct culmination of an orchestrated understanding and jugalbandi (nexus) between CM Himanta Biswa Sarma and AIUDF President Badruddin Ajmal.
"A friendship has existed between these two individuals for many years. The collusion and understanding observed between them ahead of the polls—resembling a movie production or an organised conspiracy—has manifested in today's election result. Most alarmingly, the Election Commission of India (ECI) openly patronised this nexus," he said.
“The Congress failed to fulfil the aspirations of the voters. The party lacked organisational efforts, and their candidate was not seen as a strong and credible one. On the other hand, it was a revival of sorts for AIUDF and Ajmal after the 2024 debacle in the Dhubri seat,” added Dutta.
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