NEW DELHI: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling party won power in remote northeast Assam and made gains in other states on Thursday, expanding its political influence beyond its traditional heartland two years after a landslide national election victory.
The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party seized control of restive Assam from the center-left Congress Party, which promised to “work harder” to win people’s confidence after losing ground in several states.
“This win is historic by all standards. Phenomenal!,” Modi tweeted about the win, a boost for his right-wing government after poll losses last year.
Assam is the first northeastern state to be controlled by the BJP, whose traditional power base is in Hindi-speaking north, central and west India.
Political analyst Ashok Malik told AFP that Thursday’s results showed the BJP was now India’s only truly national party.
“This expansion for the BJP comes at a time when the Congress is shrinking, even though they have different social constituencies,” said Malik, a fellow with New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation think-tank.
“And now, the BJP is the only pan-India national party, which the Congress once used to be.”
The BJP needs to win state elections to gain more seats in the nation’s upper house of Parliament, which has been blocking reforms seen as crucial to fueling the economic growth it has promised voters.
Most members of the upper house, which has obstructed measures such as a planned standardised goods and services tax, are indirectly elected by state legislatures.
The BJP mounted a fierce campaign in tea-growing Assam, promising to support indigenous rights and crack down on illegal immigration from neighboring Bangladesh.
Migrants have long been accused of illegally entering the state from Bangladesh and grabbing land, causing tensions with local people and sporadic outbreaks of communal violence.
India’s seven northeastern states, joined to the rest of the country by a narrow sliver of land, are culturally distinct from the rest of the country and have a long history of separatist insurgencies.
“People were fed up and they wanted a change... that’s why this time they’ve voted for BJP and its alliance partners,” said Sarbananda Sonowal, BJP’s Assam chief ministerial candidate.
Partial results showed the Congress had just 25 of the total 126 seats in Assam and the BJP-led alliance had 87.
The party also made gains in Kerala in the south and in eastern West Bengal state, whose feisty Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool party had won a clear majority even before all the votes were counted, despite corruption allegations.
Modi’s party swept to power in a general election two years ago promising business-friendly reforms to overhaul the economy, but lost out in two critical state polls in 2015.
Early results from five states, whose results will be announced later Thursday, indicated regional parties would win in Kerala and Tamil Nadu in the south.
Jubilant supporters of Tamil Nadu’s popular Chief Minister Jayalalithaa Jayaram gathered outside her house to celebrate, many of them painted in the colors of the state flag.
In Kerala the Communist Party of India (Marxist) was seen leading in early counting, ousting a Congress alliance.
Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi, who fronted the campaigning in several states, tweeted that his party would “work harder till we win the confidence & trust of people.”
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Indian ruling party makes gains in Assam state polls
Indian ruling party makes gains in Assam state polls
Afghan returnees in Bamiyan struggle despite new homes
- More than five million Afghans have returned home since September 2023, according to the International Organization for Migration
BAMIYAN, Afghanistan: Sitting in his modest home beneath snow-dusted hills in Afghanistan’s Bamiyan province, Nimatullah Rahesh expressed relief to have found somewhere to “live peacefully” after months of uncertainty.
Rahesh is one of millions of Afghans pushed out of Iran and Pakistan, but despite being given a brand new home in his native country, he and many of his recently returned compatriots are lacking even basic services.
“We no longer have the end-of-month stress about the rent,” he said after getting his house, which was financed by the UN refugee agency on land provided by the Taliban authorities.
Originally from a poor and mountainous district of Bamiyan, Rahesh worked for five years in construction in Iran, where his wife Marzia was a seamstress.
“The Iranians forced us to leave” in 2024 by “refusing to admit our son to school and asking us to pay an impossible sum to extend our documents,” he said.
More than five million Afghans have returned home since September 2023, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), as neighboring Iran and Pakistan stepped up deportations.
The Rahesh family is among 30 to be given a 50-square-meter (540-square-foot) home in Bamiyan, with each household in the nascent community participating in the construction and being paid by UNHCR for their work.
The families, most of whom had lived in Iran, own the building and the land.
“That was crucial for us, because property rights give these people security,” said the UNHCR’s Amaia Lezertua.
Waiting for water
Despite the homes lacking running water and being far from shops, schools or hospitals, new resident Arefa Ibrahimi said she was happy “because this house is mine, even if all the basic facilities aren’t there.”
Ibrahimi, whose four children huddled around the stove in her spartan living room, is one of 10 single mothers living in the new community.
The 45-year-old said she feared ending up on the street after her husband left her.
She showed AFP journalists her two just-finished rooms and an empty hallway with a counter intended to serve as a kitchen.
“But there’s no bathroom,” she said. These new houses have only basic outdoor toilets, too small to add even a simple shower.
Ajay Singh, the UNHCR project manager, said the home design came from the local authorities, and families could build a bathroom themselves.
There is currently no piped water nor wells in the area, which is dubbed “the dry slope” (Jar-e-Khushk).
Ten liters of drinking water bought when a tanker truck passes every three days costs more than in the capital Kabul, residents said.
Fazil Omar Rahmani, the provincial head of the Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation Affairs, said there were plans to expand the water supply network.
“But for now these families must secure their own supply,” he said.
Two hours on foot
The plots allocated by the government for the new neighborhood lie far from Bamiyan city, which is home to more than 70,000 people.
The city grabbed international attention in 2001, when the Sunni Pashtun Taliban authorities destroyed two large Buddha statues cherished by the predominantly Shia Hazara community in the region.
Since the Taliban government came back to power in 2021, around 7,000 Afghans have returned to Bamiyan according to Rahmani.
The new project provides housing for 174 of them. At its inauguration, resident Rahesh stood before his new neighbors and addressed their supporters.
“Thank you for the homes, we are grateful, but please don’t forget us for water, a school, clinics, the mobile network,” which is currently nonexistent, he said.
Rahmani, the ministry official, insisted there were plans to build schools and clinics.
“There is a direct order from our supreme leader,” Hibatullah Akhundzada, he said, without specifying when these projects will start.
In the meantime, to get to work at the market, Rahesh must walk for two hours along a rutted dirt road between barren mountains before he can catch a ride.
Only 11 percent of adults found full-time work after returning to Afghanistan, according to an IOM survey.
Ibrahimi, meanwhile, is contending with a four-kilometer (2.5-mile) walk to the nearest school when the winter break ends.
“I will have to wake my children very early, in the cold. I am worried,” she said.
