Trinamool Congress looks to shed Barak Valley tag as it builds on recent gains in Assam

Trinamool Congress MP, national spokesperson and its most prominent Assam face, Sushmita Dev, is bidding to rewrite the script for her party in the north-eastern State this Assembly election. Under her leadership, the party has put up candidates in 22 constituencies across the State.

Despite its meteoric rise under Mamata Banerjee in next-door West Bengal, the Trinamool has had several false starts in Assam. There’s fertile ground for the taking though: Barak Valley, predominantly populated by Bengali-speaking people, is host to as many as 13 Assembly constituencies after delimitation. Ms. Dev, daughter of the late Congress heavyweight from the region, Santosh Mohan Dev, said that it’s unfair to expect people “who have been voting for BJP for 30 years and Congress for 50 years” to shift all of a sudden.

“We are up against parties which have been there for a long time. You have to build faith between the voter and the new party. After I joined the party [in 2021], and Abhishek Banerjee took over as the national general secretary in charge of organisation, we have been working on the Trinamool Congress National Plan 2.0. It’s a new beginning,” she told The Hindu.

The party opened its account in Assam as early as 2001 with Jamal Uddin Ahmed winning from the now-abolished Badarpur constituency. But it drew a blank in 2006, won a solitary seat again in 2011 and failed to get on the scorecard in 2016 and 2021. While keeping her ambitions modest, Ms. Dev is hoping to build on recent gains.

“In Lok Sabha, our result in Assam was not good although we contested seats. But in the panchayat election [in May 2025], we won four anchalik panchayats across the State. [Assam Jatiya Parishad president] Lurinjyoti Gogoi, with whom the Congress has tied up in this Assembly election, won only three,” she said, also pointing out that the Trinamool was barely 8,000 votes behind the Congress in the 19 seats it contested in the Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC) election in September last year.

The Trinamool leader is also encouraged by the grassroots demand for party tickets for the Assembly election. The party received around 80 applications for 51 seats, she said. “But Mamata Banerjee was clear that the Trinamool should only contest those seats where it has fared well in the last panchayat and Lok Sabha elections and in seats where the [Congress-led] Opposition alliance messed up during ticket distribution and were basically giving a walkover to the ruling BJP.”

Third alternative

Refusing to predict the results, Ms. Dev said there are a handful of seats in Barak Valley, Lower Assam and Upper Assam where the party expects to do well. Among its candidates is former Congress leader Sherman Ali from Mandia, drafted in at the last moment after the principal Opposition party nixed ally Raijor Dal’s plan to field him, and Assam unit senior vice-president Dulu Ahmed’s wife Rojy Ahmed from the constituency that he had earlier represented, Hajo-Sualkuchi. “We are a small player in Assam compared to the Congress and the BJP, but I can tell you that there’s a huge space there for an alternative to both – especially the Congress, because once they lose a State for the third time, it has been very difficult for the party to bounce back,” she said.

The Trinamool Congress has unveiled 10 pledges for Assam, including a complete and error-free National Register of Citizens, Scheduled Tribe status for the ‘tea tribes’, universal income support of ₹2,000 per month on the lines of Lakshmir Bhandar scheme in West Bengal, and a flood control master plan. In its outreach to Barak Valley voters, the party is pledging a High Court Bench, super-speciality hospitals in every district and an increase in legislative representation, among other things.

Ms. Dev, however, pointed out that Trinamool’s 22 candidates span a wide arc from Digboi and Makum in Upper Assam to Baokhungri in BTC, Guwahati Central, and Bajali in Lower Assam. “Make no mistake, we are not only a party of the Barak Valley.”