Electoral politics in Assam: The man with a magic wand

By now, it has become common knowledge that electoral politics in Assam, and by extension, the Northeast, is greatly associated with the whims and tactics of one man and his ‘Brigade’. People generally understate the contributions and hard work put forth by one individual who is the Deputy and can be called the Commander-in-Chief of the ‘Brigade’, the second in command of Assam’s politics: Pijush Janti Hazarika.

While this may sound like a eulogy, I am not a chronicler, and the man I am writing about has not directed me to eulogise about him and is, in fact, completely unaware of it. But as a keen observer of electoral politics, especially having done surveys in different constituencies, including Hazarika’s own (Jagirod) and during the by-polls in constituencies where he was the election in-charge – Thowra and Mariani.

While we toured almost the whole of Assam before the 2021 Assembly polls, there was one thing particular and peculiar about Jagirod. We all have heard about the idea of a ‘party society’ or some of us have even perhaps read Dwaipayan Bhattacharya’s one of a kind piece on the party society in Bengal. The idea behind the party society is that there was a point in time in West Bengal when every member of a household would be directly or indirectly connected with the workings of a particular party (in Bengal’s case it was the Communist Party).