In the most high-profile exit from the Assam BJP since it came to power in the state, veteran leader and former Union Minister of State for Railways Rajen Gohain resigned from the party on Thursday.
Gohain, 74, a former Assam BJP president and four-time Nagaon MP, submitted his resignation at the party state headquarters in Guwahati Thursday afternoon, along with 17 of his supporters.
A part of the BJP for over three decades, Gohain had in recent years emerged as the most prominent face of the internal rift within the Assam unit between the old guard and the new crop that rose under Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, after Sarma joined the BJP from the Congress in 2015.
The Sarma camp includes many leaders such as Jayanta Malla Baruah, Pijush Hazarika and Ajanta Neog, who are also part of his Cabinet.
Gohain, who represented Nagaon from 1999 to 2019, and was inducted as Union Minister of State in the Modi Cabinet in 2016 in his last term as MP, signalled that this rift was the biggest reason behind his resignation. He was denied a ticket in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections from Nagaon, and did not contest in 2024 either. In both elections, the seat was won by the Congress.
“We didn’t join this party for the people who are currently in power. We joined it inspired by Atal Behari Vajpayee, L K Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, and other senior leaders. But the situation (now) is that after bringing people from other parties, the older people who have given the prime of their lives to the BJP have been sidelined,” Gohain said.
The BJP is now “the biggest enemy of the Assamese people”, he alleged. Gohain belongs to the Ahom community, and claimed that after the delimitation exercise carried out in 2023, the sway of “indigenous” communities like the Ahoms has reduced.
“Around 30-40 seats in the Assam Assembly were once decided by the Ahom community. But today, there is no constituency over which it can claim rights to a ticket. The whole community has been broken and scattered. The political sway they should have had has been made non-existent… Today Ashok Singhal (a minister in the Sarma Cabinet) can contest from any seat in Assam because no Assamese community has deciding power anywhere,” Gohain said.
In fact, in the middle of the delimitation exercise in 2023, Gohain had resigned as chairman of Assam Food and Civil Supplies Corporation – a Cabinet-rank position – in protest against changes to his former Lok Sabha constituency of Nagaon. He alleged that its demography had been changed with the inclusion of a larger number of minority voters, making the seat “unwinnable for BJP candidates in the future”.
Gohain’s resignation comes two months after another veteran BJP leader, Ashok Sharma, left the BJP to join the Congress, citing differences with the Sarma-dominated state unit.
BJP spokesperson Ranjib Kumar Sarmah played down the impact of Gohain’s exit on Assam elections due in about six months.
“Even when he was the BJP MP from Nagaon all those years, there were no BJP MLAs from the constituency (it has eight Assembly seats). Now, however, there are so many BJP MLAs (eight) from Nagaon. It shows this (Gohain’s resignation) will not be of much consequence,” Sarmah said, adding that the BJP had given Gosain his due.
“Yes, he was with the party for a long time, but he was also rewarded by the party. He has been a Union Minister of State, he had a Cabinet-rank position in the state government. What more can he want? The party is not just for one person,” he said.