Kharge’s ‘venomous snake’ remark about BJP-RSS, Sarma’s jibe cap off final day of Assam campaign

Referring to the comments, Union Home Minister Amit Shah said at a rally in Hailakandi, “Ever since Rahul Gandhi became the leader of the Congress, the public stature of all Congress leaders has gone down.”

Assam BJP spokesperson Pranjal Kalita, in a statement, said a complaint had been filed at the Basistha police station in Guwahati and another was lodged with the poll panel. The comments “amounted to an outright insult to Hindu beliefs and traditions”, he said.

The Congress, meanwhile, targeted Sarma after the Assam CM said Kharge was “speaking like a madman” due to old age after the latter put the onus on central agencies to probe the charges against him. In response, Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi said “whenever a Dalit leader speaks the truth, they (BJP) stoop to humiliating him” and said it was an insult to “crores of people from the SC-ST community”.

Congress communications chief Jairam Ramesh targeted Sarma, saying he “knows no dignity or restraint in language, leave alone action”.

Earlier in the day, the key faces from both sides made the last-minute push before the silence period before polling kicked in.

After travelling across the state, Assam Congress president Gaurav Gogoi, making his debut in state elections, spent Tuesday in his constituency Jorhat and the neighbouring seat of Mariani. Sarma’s wife Riniki Bhuyan Sharma, meanwhile, campaigned for him in his home constituency Jalukbari, while the CM spent the day campaigning in Teok, Mariani, Dergaon, and Demow in Upper Assam.

As the Assam police landed up at Congress media and publicity chairman Pawan Khera’s residence in Delhi in connection with a case of forgery and related charges that the state Crime Branch registered on the complaint of Riniki Bhuyan Sharma, the echoes of the row continued to reverberate in Assam too.

Before getting on with his schedule for the day, Sarma addressed a Facebook Live in which he accused the Congress of “crossing some limits”. He issued a “challenge” to Gogoi, returning to his allegations of Gogoi and his wife’s “Pakistan links”. Gogoi has, in the last couple of days, “challenged” Sarma to deny the Congress’s claims under oath on the Bhagavad Gita.

The national leaders of both parties also made last-minute appeals. Kharge addressed a press conference in Guwahati, where he claimed the Congress would win “72-73 seats”, out of a total of 126, and alleged that the BJP government in the state was “the most corrupt government in India”.

At multiple rallies in the Barak Valley, Shah emphasised his “anti-infiltration” pitch. “For 10 years you have elected a BJP government …. First five years, we spent stopping infiltrators. We stopped them from here but they kept entering from Tripura and Bengal. In Tripura, too, a BJP government was elected. We stopped them there too. Now, in Bengal, too, a lotus government will be formed. In this whole corridor, we will stop infiltrators. In the first five years, we stopped infiltrators in Assam. In the next five years, we identified them. Give us another five years, we will work to remove them from the country,” he said