BJP warriors to take on Congress in Assam

The smooth sailing of the congress in Assam, where the party is comfortably poised to get at-least 10 out of the total 14 seats, is all set to be challenged by several senior BJP leaders who are planning to take on the congress head on.

Political analysts in the state claim that Congress will get atleast 10 of the 14 seats and will do better than the last time.

A host of senior BJP national leaders-- Rajnath Singh, Sushma Swaraj, Arun Jaitley, Murali Manohar Joshi, Venkaiah Naidu, Nitin Gadkari, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Vasundhera Raje, Raman Singh, Manohar Parikar, Mukhter Abbas Naqvi, Gopinath Munde, Ravi Shankar Prasad, Ananta Kumar, Smriti Irani, Shahnawaz Hussain and few others for campaigning in Assam, led by the party’s prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi, and senior leader L K Advani, will be addressing rallies and preparing strategies to uproot the congress from all the 14 seats in the state.

“These leaders will be campaigning in all the constituencies in the state on several dates, and those dates will be finalized soon. We are confident that the campaigning by these leaders, will boost up our chances,” said state BJP spokesperson Shantanu Bharali.

Speaking to The Hans India, Assam BJP president Sarbananda Sonowal said that the party has been working at the grassroot level for a long time, and is confident of a very good performance this time.

The BJP also rubbished the assessments of political analysts that in Assam out of the 14 seats congress is comfortably poised to get atleast 10, while the BJP’s tally will be reduced to 2 from its existing 4.

The Congress had bagged 7 seats in 2009.

“We will get atleast 7-8 seats,” said Prasanta Phukan, senior BJP leader in Assam.

According to BJP sources, the party national leadership is confident about a good show in the upcoming election in all the states, but is aware about its lack of presence in Assam, and is also aware that it might perform very poorly.

The Congress when approached said that neither Modi nor any senior BJP leader is a factor in the state, and said that it will comfortably bag 10 or more seats.

Trying to blunt the edge of Modi, Gogoi produced papers before the media highlighting the contrast between growth rates in Assam and Gujarat.

The papers showed that 124 persons committed suicide in Gujarat due to bankruptcy in 2010 as against only 15 in Assam, while there were over 1.30 lakh cognizable crimes in Gujarat in 2012 compared to over 77,000 here.

Gogoi said the Plan allocation fell by over 13 per cent year-on-year in 2000-01 to Rs 1,521.28 crore. It was only after the Congress came to power in Assam in 2001 that allocations increased and have now reached Rs 12,500 crore.