The 2026 Assam assembly election explained

Assam voted for its sixteenth legislative assembly on 9 April, with Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma seeking a second consecutive full term in office. Sarma, who defected from the Congress to the Bharatiya Janata Party in 2015, has taken to his new party’s penchant for spreading Islamophobia with a convert’s zeal. During the election campaign, the BJP shared, and later deleted, an AI-generated video of the chief minister shooting at a picture of two Muslim men, with the caption “No Mercy.” This came weeks after he had asked the people of Assam to “trouble the Miya Muslims”—a derogatory term for Bangla-speaking Muslims—“by any means” in order to create a hostile climate that would force them to leave the state.

Sarma has certainly done his bit to create that hostile climate. Over the past five years, his government has deported over fourteen hundred of the more than thirty thousand people identified as foreigners illegally residing in Assam. It has also evicted more than fifty thousand people in what Sarma has called its attempt to combat a “demographic invasion” and “land jihad.” None of this has been a surprise. Before the 2021 assembly election, Sarma said that the BJP did not need a single Bangla-speaking Muslim to vote for it.

In June 2021, soon after the BJP won the assembly election and installed Sarma as chief minister, Praveen Donthi wrotein The Caravan that the party had quite easily managed to transform the prevalent ethnonationalist strain in Assam’s politics along the lines of conventional Hindutva. For nearly half a century, the state has undergone a moral panic over immigration from Bangladesh, with the Axomia-speaking majority defining itself in opposition to a Bangla-speaking minority constituted by successive waves of migration, some of them dating back to precolonial times. The BJP has skilfully navigated these tumults, eliding the contradictions in its own position and making crucial alliances, before taking the lead in framing the debate at an opportune moment.

“Historically, Assam’s politics has been associated with a complicated set of social divisions—between the Assamese and Bengali languages, tribal and non-tribal groups and tea plantation and reserve forest areas, among other things,” the political scientist Neelanjan Sircar wrote in 2023. During the past decade of BJP rule, he added, Assam “has seen an extraordinary flattening of these social divisions, at least electorally, to a single Hindu–Muslim cleavage.” Sircar explained that “one part of the state has a high spatial concentration of Muslims and the other parts of Assam have very few Muslims; in elections, this maps to areas where the BJP does poorly and very well, respectively.” Of the 126 assembly constituencies in the state, there were 64 in which the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance was ahead in each of the 2016, 2019 and 2021 elections, with an average margin of around thirty thousand votes each time. There were 27 that the opposition, in its varying combinations, won in each of the three elections, but the average margin in those seats rose from 14,228 in 2016 to 43,468 in 2019 and 49,569 in 2021. Muslims were dominant in 22 of the 27 constituencies.