The Hindu : Regrouping boosts AGP ahead of polls

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Mar 23, 2004

National

National - Elections 2004

Regrouping boosts AGP ahead of polls

Sushanta Talukdar

The Lok Sabha elections have focused the attention of voters in Assam on regionalism once again with the run-up to the polls seeing a regrouping of regional forces in the State.

In a major political development, the decks have been cleared for the return of former Assam Home Minister Bhrigu Kumar Phukan to the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP). Phukan parted ways with the AGP, along with his followers following sharp differences with the party's founder president and former Chief Minister, Prafulla Kumar Mahanta.

Phukan, who resigned on Saturday as the president of the state unit of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) — now the Nationalist Trinamool Congress after its merger with Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress — has begun discussing the modalities of his return with senior AGP leaders. It was against this backdrop that Apurba Kumar Bhattacharjee, the president of the Asom Jatiyatabadi Yuba Chatra Parishad (AJYCP), a non-political body that jointly spearheaded the six-year long anti-foreigners movement with the All Assam Students' Union (AASU), joined the AGP on Sunday in the presence of senior leaders and workers of the youth body.

Bhattacharjee's joining the AGP was preceded by the initiation of talks on the merger of the Asom Gana Sangram Parishad, a new regional party floated by the AJYCP, with the AGP. Bimal Patgiri, the chief adviser to the AJYCP, revealed that the discussions on the merger of the two regional parties was in an advanced stage and would be completed shortly.

Another breakaway AGP faction, the Trinamool Gana Parishad (TGP), led by two former senior AGP leaders, Atul Bora and Pulakesh Baruah, has also decided that its lone MLA, Premodhar Bora, will vote for the AGP candidate in the March 24 Rajya Sabha polls, Birendra Prasad Baishya. Sources in the AGP said that efforts were being made to bring back Bora and Baruah into the party's fold.

After formally handing over a party membership card to Bhattacharjee, AGP president Brindaban Goswami expressed the hope that all the regional forces in Assam would unite to strengthen regionalism and win back the people's trust, which had eroded because of the past mistakes of the party.

The disintegration of the regional forces in the state began in 1991 when Phukan and Goswami parted ways with Mahanta and floated the Natun Asom Gana Parishad (NAGP) by splitting the AGP. The immediate fallout of this was that the AGP lost the 1991 Assembly elections to the Congress. The duo returned to the AGP in 1994 and the NAGP was merged with the mother party. However, they were sidelined again by Mahanta; both Phukan and Goswami were denied ministerial berths as well as party top posts when the AGP came back to power for the second time in 1996. This prompted them to part ways with Mahanta once again and float a political outfit under the name Asom Jatiya Sanmilan (AJS) with their followers.

Although Goswami decided to fight on from within the party fold, Phukan openly revolted against Mahanta, which led to his expulsion from the party. Phukan merged his party, the AJS with the NCP and became president of the State unit subsequently.

Phukan said that he felt betrayed by former Lok Sabha Speaker P.A. Sangma as the latter had announced the merger of the NCP-faction led by him (Sangma) with the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress and the formation of a new party, the Nationalist Trinamool Congress without taking the Assam State unit into confidence.

Goswami was elected AGP president on September 6, 2001 in the aftermath of the party's debacle in the Assembly elections held the same year — an election marked by bigamy charges against Mahanta who had resigned from the top party post and gone into political hibernation. Though Mahanta tried his best efforts to make a comeback, Goswami defeated him in a straight contest for the post of AGP president at the party's conference held at Tezpur in January this year.

Goswami's re-election to the top party post also helped in easing the tensions between the AGP and the All Assam Students Union (AASU), the student body that gave birth to the regional party at a special convention held at Golaghat in 1985 to capture power at Dispur and capitalise on the signing of the historic Assam Accord the same year.

The rift between the two major regional forces started during the Mahanta's second tenure as Chief Minister from 1996 to 2001 with the AASU accusing the AGP-led government of going back on its promises to identify and deport illegal Bangladeshi migrants from the State and the scrapping of the controversial Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act, 1983. The differences were such that the AASU decided to back Goswami to foil Mahanta's comeback.