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Congress
pins hope on BJP rebel in Nalbari
Express News
Service
Nalbari,
May 2: The Congress has nothing to lose at Nalbari where the
AGP candidates have won comfortably since the party came into existence
in 1985. Little wonder that the word inhibition doesn’t figure
in the stylesheet of the Congress campaign managers here. So the
party posters scream: Madan aamaar nijor bhai, Congress biney gati
nai (Madan is our ‘‘own’’ brother, the Congress
is the only choice).
Madan Kalita, a PWD contractor by profession, has been trying to
play up the ‘‘local’’ sentiment by not-so-indirectly
telling the voters that while he was their ‘‘own’’
brother, AGP candidate Alaka Desai Sharma was an ‘‘outsider’’.
Alaka, a Gujarati by birth, married AGP’s general secretary
Nagen Sharma when she fell in love with him while covering the AASU
movement during 1979-85. She had to step in as the Nalbari MLA after
her husband was killed by ULFA ambush here on February 27 last year.
But, Madan Kalita and the Congress is banking more on the division
of the AGP-BJP votes by Hiranya Kumar Bhattacharyya, a retired IPS
officer and former Assam Police DIG, who has quit the BJP to contest
as an Independent. Bhattacharyya has named his small faction as
Asom BJP and, like all other candidates, is hoping to win.
‘‘Bhattacharyya is likely to slice off two to three per
cent of the AGP-BJP votes. And Alaka being a newcomer to politics,
was initially opposed even by the district AGP president Akan Malla
Barua,’’ said Biren Deka, a shopkeeper in the heart of
Nalbari town.
Barua had opposed Alaka’s candidature during the 2000 by-election
too. But she had won against all odds against Congress candidate
former chief minister Bhumidhar Barman. That time, the BJP too had
contested, while the CPI(M) was an ally of the AGP.
In villages like Balikuri, north of National Highway 31, housewife
Kalpana Haloi said: ‘‘We do not know Alaka. But she is
Nagen Sharma’s widow and definitely will have the womenfolk’s
sympathy. Look how a Gujarati girl has been widowed by the ULFA
in the most brutal way.’’
The former DIG, who was arrested and imprisoned by a Congress government
headed by Syeda Anowara Taimur in 1981, has put a picture on his
posters which show him behind the bars.
‘‘There is a pro-Congress wave in the district, especially
because the AGP did not do anything significant for the people of
Nalbari,’’ writes Aamaar Nalbari, the only weekly newspaper
published from Nalbari.
On the other hand, most of the posters of Alaka Desai Sharma do
not have her photograph. They, instead, have photographs of her
slain husband, and those of Mahanta and Vajpayee on others.
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