Three suspended Congress MLAs formally joined the BJP Thursday, in the churn in ahead of the upcoming assembly election.
The three MLAs, Kamalakhya Dey Purkayastha, Basanta Das, Sashi Kanta Das, have all been suspended from the Congress party – Sashi Kanta Das since 2021 and the other two since 2024 – for declaring ‘support’ to the BJP government in the state.
On Thursday, just ahead of the upcoming elections, all three were formally inducted into the BJP by the party’s state president Dilip Saikia.
Kamalakhya Dey Purkayastha is a three-time MLA from Karimganj North constituency, and was an Assam Congress working president when he announced his decision to “support” the -led BJP government’s “developmental work” while claiming to remain in the Congress in 2024. He had made this announcement together with Basanta Das, who is also a three-time MLA from the Mangaldoi constituency and a former minister. Subsequently, the Congress had filed petitions seeking the disqualification of two Congress MLAs.
This comes weeks after two other Congress MLAs – Abdur Rashid Mandal from the Goalpara West constituency and Sherman Ali Ahmed from the Baghbor constituency – formally joined another opposition party, regional party Raijor Dal.
With these movements, the – which had won 29 seats in the 2021 legislative assembly elections – is effectively left with only 20 MLAs in the assembly. Two prominent MLAs from Upper Assam – Sushanta Borgohain and Rupjyoti Kurmi – had jumped ship to the BJP in 2021 itself. Another Congress MLA, Siddeque Ahmed from the South Karimganj constituency, was suspended from the party in 2022 for cross-voting in the polls but is yet to formally join another party.
In the meantime, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said that there is no guarantee on ticket allocation for new additions to the party.
“For the last couple of years, they have been supporting our government in the legislative assembly. Today they have formally joined and I welcome the three MLAs to the party… Now all three MLAs’ names will be added in the panels of the state election committee. But the decisions of ticket allocation will be done by our central parliamentary board, not by us. We have spoken to them (the MLAs) earlier that no one joins the BJP for tickets but there is no barrier to anyone getting a ticket on the grounds of them being new or old to the party. The decision is made based on capability,” he said.
