With hours left before Assam's polls closed, Aadab News Network host Bushra Khan Fahad put a blunt question to her guest: is Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma about to lose power, or is he about to be re-elected despite an election campaign built, by his own admission, on targeting one community? The guest was Aman Wadud, a human rights lawyer practising at the Guwahati High Court, a former Supreme Court advocate and Fulbright scholar with a law degree from the University of Texas, who is also a Congress spokesperson in Assam. Over roughly forty minutes, Wadud laid out the case his party is making against Sarma's government — a case built less on the chief minister's rhetoric about Muslims, he insisted, than on corruption, unmet promises and an election machinery he believes is stacked against a fair contest.
"This is not a polarised election"
Fahad opened by pressing Wadud on communal politics: Assam is roughly 62 percent Hindu and 34 percent Muslim, with Muslim voters concentrated in Lower Assam and the Barak Valley. Given Sarma's open hostility toward Muslims through the campaign, was this a straightforward polarised contest? Wadud disagreed. Congress rallies, he said, were drawing large crowds across Upper, Middle and Lower Assam, including in Hindu-majority constituencies such as Bihpuria, Lakhimpur and Roha — evidence, in his telling, that Sarma's language was not resonating even with voters the BJP hoped to consolidate. His sharper argument was that the hate speech had produced no violence: despite what he called the most communal rhetoric the state had seen, no Muslim had been killed by a fellow citizen in Upper Assam during the campaign, which he read as proof that ordinary Assamese were rejecting the politics of division rather than absorbing it. "Himanta Biswa Sarma is going to lose this election," he said flatly, attaching a condition he repeated throughout the conversation — provided the vote was free and fair.
Corruption, unmet promises and a broken pledge
Pressed on what Congress was actually offering beyond opposition to Sarma, Wadud pivoted to what he called the government's record. He alleged that the chief minister, his family and a small circle of ministers had accumulated wealth impossible to explain through clean governance, and pointed to Congress leader Pawan Khera's public allegations — repeated on this programme — that Sarma's family holds undisclosed properties in Dubai and the United States, challenges Wadud said the family has not rebutted. He also cited the government's jobs record: against a pledge of one lakh government jobs a year for five years, he said only about 1.43 lakh were delivered over the full term, and mostly through filling existing vacancies rather than new hiring, while a promised 8 lakh private-sector jobs went undelivered. A long-standing demand for Scheduled Tribe status for six communities in Assam — promised, he said, in 2014, 2016 and 2021 by Narendra Modi, Kiren Rijiju and Sarma himself — remains unmet and unmentioned in the BJP's current manifesto. Wadud also alleged an economy of "syndicates" controlling everything from betel nut and sand to coal mining, which he said function as an illegal tax driving up prices for ordinary Assamese.
Deleted voters, redrawn seats
The conversation turned to two processes that reshaped the electoral map ahead of this vote: a Special Revision of electoral rolls — distinct, Wadud noted, from the Special Intensive Revision conducted elsewhere in India, and justified by the Election Commission with reference to citizenship law and the National Register of Citizens — and a delimitation exercise that redrew constituency boundaries without changing the total number of seats. Roughly 10 lakh voters were removed in the draft revision, a number that fell to about 2.43 lakh in the final list; Wadud said the deletions disproportionately affected Muslim voters. On delimitation, he alleged the exercise was effectively led by Sarma and a close aide, minister Ashok Singhal, rather than being independently conducted by the Election Commission, and that it had reduced the number of seats where Muslim candidates had a realistic chance of winning from roughly 31–34 to about 21–22 — a process he compared to gerrymandering in the United States. He called the redrawing a violation of proportionate representation as a constitutional right, while maintaining his view that it would not be decisive: "I still believe this government will lose the free and fair election," he said, arguing that anger over governance outweighed the effect of the boundary changes.
"Miya Muslims" and the eviction question
Much of the interview turned on Sarma's practice of distinguishing between Assamese-origin Muslims and Bengali-origin Muslims, whom he refers to as "Miya" Muslims and has repeatedly linked to alleged illegal migration from Bangladesh. Wadud argued the distinction is deliberate: the chief minister, he said, targets Indian citizens of Bengali Muslim origin as "infiltrators" while never applying the label to non-Muslims. He pointed to the 2019 National Register of Citizens process — court-monitored and executed under the previous Sarbananda Sonowal government — which excluded about 19 lakh people, a smaller share of them Muslim than the BJP had expected or wanted, he said, prompting the party to demand a re-verification it had once said it did not need. He also raised the case of evictions from forest and riverine land, including a 2021 eviction in Darrang district after which, he said, the opposition leader in the assembly took the matter to the Guwahati High Court and secured rehabilitation for 700–800 people; a similar eviction in Bhuragaon, he said, saw affected families paid roughly ₹50,000 to relocate rather than being expelled from the country. He connected the scale of eviction to a separate driver of landlessness: river erosion, which he said claims roughly 8,000 hectares of Assam's land a year and has consumed close to 7 percent of the state's land mass since 1950, displacing people onto government land regardless of religion even as, in his account, enforcement action falls overwhelmingly on Muslim settlers. He also referenced the case of a pregnant woman who was deported before a court battle secured her return, as an example, he said, of a climate of fear built more through messaging than through mass action.
A fractured opposition
Fahad also asked why Congress had not renewed its 2021 alliance with the All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF), whose leader Badruddin Ajmal's brother, Sirajuddin Ajmal, has publicly called Sarma India's best chief minister — a remark Wadud cited as evidence the AIUDF was too closely aligned with the BJP to be a credible ally. He noted that AIUDF legislators had voted with the BJP in Rajya Sabha and presidential elections after 2021, and argued that Asaduddin Owaisi's campaign appearances for AIUDF candidates, while drawing crowds, had in practice benefited Congress candidates such as Abdur Rahim Ahmed, a former AASU leader involved in NRC litigation who ran on the Congress ticket in the Sengra constituency. Congress is contesting instead alongside the Jatiya Parishad, Raijor Dal and CPI(M), and Wadud rejected the idea that a split opposition would fracture the Muslim vote in the BJP's favour, arguing Muslim voters in Assam, like anywhere else, do not vote as a bloc.
Zubeen Garg and the limits of institutions
Two other threads ran through the interview. One was the death of singer Zubeen Garg, whose case Congress has made a manifesto commitment, pledging justice within 100 days of taking office; Wadud called the government's chargesheet weak and noted that an accused's frozen bank accounts and a water-bottling plant linked to the case had since been unfrozen and reopened, which he read as evidence the government would not deliver accountability. The other was Wadud's repeated argument that even a strong anti-incumbency mood might not translate into a Congress government, because he believes the Election Commission, police, and central agencies such as the ED and CBI function, in practice, as extensions of the BJP. Fahad pushed back directly, noting that ground reporting ahead of the Haryana and Maharashtra elections had also pointed to Congress victories that did not materialise. Wadud did not dispute the comparison, arguing instead that it strengthened his underlying point: that Assam's contest, as he put it, is less "Congress versus BJP" than "the Election Commission and the BJP versus the people of India" — and that whatever the institutional odds, his party was contesting, in his words, with limited resources but full commitment.
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