Himanta Biswa Sarma: How a Congress "import" became the BJP’s Northeast powerhouse

One month before Himanta Biswa Sarma walked into Amit Shah’s residence to join the BJP in 2015, the party had published a booklet titled Saga of Scams in Congress-ruled States. It named Himanta a “prime suspect” in a Guwahati water supply bribery scandal. The CBI and Enforcement Directorate had been issuing summons. 

Then he crossed the floor. The summons stopped. In at least two cases, the files eventually went missing. Rumour has it that when Himanta went to Shah, he had asked him to get the agencies off his back. 

Indian politics has always run on defections – floor-crossings are the oldest currency in the game. But this one was barely examined. A man named in a corruption booklet by a party joined that party a month later, and the investigations evaporated. 

What made it sharper still was the ideological distance Himanta had to travel. In 2014, still a Congress man, he had campaigned against Narendra Modi with a ferocity that would embarrass him today. At a rally, invoking the 2002 Gujarat riots, he told the crowd: “In Gujarat, the blood of Muslims flows through the pipes… pray to Allah… so this type of killer could never be the PM of India.” The man he called a killer is now his boss. The party whose rise he tried to stop is now his vehicle. And Himanta has made himself its most zealous face in the Northeast – outdoing, by many accounts, leaders who spent their entire careers inside the RSS fold.

This is where his story becomes genuinely interesting, and troubling. He had never been an RSS man. He had no ideological pedigree in the Hindutva world, no shakha years, no slow climb through the Sangh’s ranks. Which is precisely, say those who know him, why he had to perform harder than anyone else. “Sarma is aware of his limitations,” a senior Congress leader said. “He remembers that he is a Congress import and not an RSS guy – which is why he has to perform even more.”

As Congress MP Gaurav Gogoi, who has become Himanta’s most persistent political antagonist, put it: “Those genuinely committed to an ideology don't make a song and dance about it. At his core, I doubt he is a BJP person.”

So what is he? The question is not merely rhetorical. Are these the contradictions of a man who changed his mind – who found, late in his career, an ideological home? Or the manoeuvres of someone who has only ever had a fixed destination? 

Four decades point in one direction. 

For this story, Newslaundry spoke to senior BJP, Congress, and other political leaders, Himanta’s former college and schoolmates, journalists, political analysts, and RTI activists.

The son who outgrew the father

Born in 1969 into a Brahmin family in Jorhat, Himanta was a social climber from the start. He was barely 10 when he delivered his first public speech. As a boy, he ran errands for the top brass of the All Assam Students Union, the organisation leading the movement against the influx of Bangladeshis. Streets were heavy with military and police; activists struggled to pass messages through the dragnet. But Himanta was a child. He slipped through.

It was during this time that he caught the eye of two faces of the Assam Movement – Prafulla Kumar Mahanta and Bhrigu Kumar Phukan, who would soon be running the state. A childhood photograph shows him standing immediately behind them, the smallest figure in the frame, already in proximity to the most powerful men in the room. Mahanta and Phukan turned out to be the captains of the first vessel he would board – and, eventually, abandon.

With the Assam Accord signed in 1985, the movement folded into institutional politics. The first Asom Gana Parishad government was formed with Mahanta as CM. Himanta enrolled at Cotton College in Guwahati – the St Stephen’s of Assam – and quickly made himself indispensable, serving three times as general secretary of the student union between 1988 and 1992.

Senior journalist Sushanta Talukdar, who was vice president of the Cotton College Student Union in 1990-91, recalls: “Even in college elections, he would make lofty promises to students like colour televisions and water coolers – which were impossible to provide from college funds. But he did deliver them successfully. It was only possible because he was backed by a couple of high-profile ministers of the state.”