Mahanta breathes easy but headache has just begun

But the party has other reasons to be worried. To begin with, the effectiveness of the LoC scam as an election issue was always in doubt. If the long-drawn trial — the monitoring by the court, the CBI petitions — diluted its impact, the electorate also knows that the AGP isn’t the only one whose hands are dirty. Congress politicians have also been named in the scandal.

But it’sreasons, other than the scam, which are worrying the AGP: the election ban imposed by the outlawed ULFA, a split in the party precipitated by former Mahanta colleague Bhrigu Kumar Phukan, and the decision of the All Assam Students’ Union (AASU) to boycott the polls.

For Mahanta, the headache has just begun. As head of the state government, he is required to ensure that polls are free, fair and, what’s most important, peaceful. As head of the AGP, he needs to lead his party and its allies to a victory if only to keep them together.

Police and intelligence agencies fear widespread violence on polling dayand maybe even earlieras the ULFA goes about enforcing its ban. Several members of the AGP have been threatened, some even shot at. A party rally held at Hajo, near the capital, attended by National Conference leader Farooq Abdullah and CPI(M) general secretary H S Surjeet, turned out to be a poor show. Main reason: ULFA cadres ensured that people stayed away.

Similar is the case in Nagaon where the AGPhas fielded Mahanta’s wife Jayashree Goswami Mahanta and in Mangaldoi where the candidate is Union Steel Minister Birendra Prasad Baishya. Several local AGP workers, in both places, have been threatened.

One AGP worker was killed in Nagaon a few weeks ago, another was injured on Thursday night. On February 2, six party workers were abducted and released after they were assaulted, the same day Abdullah and Surjeet had come visiting.

The ULFA ban will hit AGP the hardest. For the grooup doesn’t have much of a hold in areas inhabited by minorities and tea labourers, both traditionally voting Congress. They dominate in as many as eight seats: Barpeta, Dhubri, Tezpur, Dibrugarh, Kaliabor, Jorhat, Silchar and Karimganj.

If the ULFA is a problem for the AGP, so is former Home Minister and AGP executive president Bhrigu Kumar Phukan. He has already formed a new party, the Asom Jatiya Sanmilani and fielded four candidates apart from supporting five others in the state’s 14 constituencies.

Phukan’s new partycould very well wean away a section of the traditional AGP vote. And although this is not expected to jeopardize the AGP’s overall position in the state, in some seats, for example Guwahati, it could mean major loss of face.

Phukan has fielded Gautam Uzir, the lawyer who had filed the PIL complaining of the delay in the LoC probe. Of the 10 Assembly segments that fall in the Guwahati Parliamentary seat, Uzir is expected to attract almost all the AGP votes in the Jalukbari segment, of which Phukan has been the MLA for three consecutive terms. The BJP, too, is casting its shadow here. The party’s candidate is Colonel Manoranjan Goswami, the younger brother of late Dinesh Goswami, one of the founders of the AGP.

As for the AASU’s directive to its members not to vote, it’s once again the AGP that will be affected the most. For, AASU cadres have traditionally voted for the AGP, the latter being its own child born of the six-year long agitation.