Dispur: BJP leader and former Union Minister of State for Railways Rajen Gohain resigned from the party on Thursday, giving a shock to the state’s BJP administration, The Indian Express reported.
The 74-year-old accompanied by 17 of his supporters submitted his resignation at the party’s state headquarters in Guwahati.
Gohain’s exit marks the internal rift within the BJP’s Assam unit after Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma emerged as the most prominent face since he joined the BJP from Congress in 2015.
Representing Nagaon from 1999 to 2019, Gohain was Union Minister of State in the Modi Cabinet in 2016 in his last term as MP.
He was denied seat in the 2019 and 2024 Lok Sabha elections to represent Nagaon, and the Congress won the seat in both elections.
Gohain reportedly said that ‘We didn’t join this party for the people who are currently in power. We joined it inspired by Atal Behari Vajpayee, L K Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, and other senior leaders. But the situation (now) is that after bringing people from other parties, the older people who have given the prime of their lives to the BJP have been sidelined’.
Calling the BJP ‘the biggest enemy of the Assamese people,’ Gohain said that the clout of Ahom community to which he belongs has reduced after the delimitation exercise carried out in 2023.
‘Around 30-40 seats in the Assam Assembly were once decided by the Ahom community. But today, there is no constituency over which it can claim rights to a ticket. The whole community has been broken and scattered. The political sway they should have had has been made non-existent… Today Ashok Singhal (a minister in the Sarma Cabinet) can contest from any seat in Assam because no Assamese community has deciding power anywhere,’ Gohain reportedly said.
In August, another BJP leader in the state, Ashok Sarma crossed over to the Congress following difference with the BJP state unit dominated by the Himanta Biswa Sarma, according to the report.