A dream run since 2011

Bijay Sankar Bora

Tribune News Service

Guwahati, May 24

It has been a dream run for Sarbananda Sonowal in the BJP since he joined the party on February 8, 2011, at a public rally in Dibrugarh in the presence of then BJP president Nitin Gadkari. He was made member of the national executive committee of the party on the same day.

In an extraordinary gesture, the Central leadership made Sonowal the state president of the BJP in Assam in 2014 only three years after he became a member. It usually takes at least 10 years of experience of serving the party for anyone to become eligible to contest for the state party president’s post in the BJP.

Sonowal reciprocated outstandingly by ensuring a starling performance of the BJP in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections in the Assam. He was rewarded with a ministerial berth in the Modi government. But the call for taking over the reins of Assam BJP came soon from the party’s leadership in November 2015, a few months before the 2016 Assembly elections. He obeyed and discharged his responsibility with clinical precision and demolished the Congress in the state.

Sonowal first shot into national limelight when the Supreme Court (in July 2005) scrapped the controversial Illegal Migrants’ Determination by Tribunal (IMDT) Act, 1983, in response to a petition filed by Sonowal, then a leader of the regional Asom Gana Parishad (AGP). Sonowal was branded the ‘national hero’ (jatiya nayak) of Assam in the aftermath of the court verdict. He led the All Assam Students Union as its president from 1992 to 1999. A law graduate, Sonowal also led the North East Students’ Organisation (NESO), a banner organisation of all leading students’ body in the region, as its chairman from 1996 to 2000 before he took the final plunge into active politics.