Assam, India – As elections approach, Islam Uddin takes it upon himself to raise awareness about the importance of voting. The 55-year-old retired teacher from Katigorah, a constituency in India’s northeastern state of Assam that borders Bangladesh, goes door-to-door urging other Muslims to vote.
“This is about sending our representative to speak for us,” Uddin told Al Jazeera, his smile widening.
But as Assam goes to the polls on April 9 to elect a new government after five years, Uddin’s enthusiasm is tempered by a persistent worry: Will his efforts even count?
Following the Election Commission of India’s 2023 order to redraw the boundaries of parliamentary and state legislature constituencies in Assam, the electoral mathematics of Katigorah – which is bounded by the pristine Boreal hills in the north and the Barak River in the south – has changed dramatically.
The population of the constituency was previously almost equally divided between Hindus and Muslims. Of the state’s main parties, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party – which also rules the state of Assam – will choose a Hindu candidate. The opposition Congress often chooses a Muslim candidate, as does the All India United Democratic Front, the state’s third-largest party, which counts Bengali-speaking Muslims among its core voters.
Now that balance has been disturbed.
Before delimitation – as the process of redrawing constituency boundaries is called – Katigora had around 1,74,000 voters. “But about 40,000 Hindu voters from neighboring legislative constituencies have now been merged into Katigora, making it a predominantly Hindu majority constituency,” former Katigora MLA Khaliluddin Majumdar of the Congress party told Al Jazeera. “The chances of getting elected as a Muslim candidate from here have suffered a lot.”
In fact, major parties have chosen Hindu candidates for Katigorah. But the constituency is not alone. In the state’s 126 legislative constituencies, boundaries have been redrawn in a way that – activists like Uddin fear – could lead to Assam’s 11 million Muslims being politically marginalized at a time when the ruling BJP has already targeted them through eviction drives, eviction policies and sharp rhetoric.
Muslims constitute more than 34 percent of Assam’s population – only Jammu and Kashmir and the island of Lakshadweep have a higher proportion of Muslims, and unlike Assam, neither is a full state.
For many political analysts, Assam is the latest laboratory of the BJP’s Hindu majoritarian policies. The work done in the state can provide a blueprint for the rest of India.
‘Communal hooliganism’
Prominent election analyst Yogendra Yadav, writing in The Indian Express newspaper, referred to the Assam model of delimitation as “communal gerrymandering”, comparing it to the racial gerrymandering of the 18th century United States, where electoral boundaries were manipulated or redrawn to favor a dominant group or reduce the electoral influence of marginalized groups.
In the Assam context, gerrymandering weakens the electoral influence of Muslims by applying techniques borrowed from the US: cracking, packing and stacking, Yadav argued. “Cracking” refers to the fragmentation of Muslim voters in many Hindu majority constituencies, reducing their chances of forming a majority in the constituencies. In the case of “packing”, several Muslim-dominated areas – which could dominate multiple constituencies – were combined into a single seat to reduce the number of constituencies potentially winnable by Muslim candidates.
In parallel, Hindu population centers that were not able to form a majority in a constituency were merged under one constituency to give the community a majority. This is what Yadav describes as “stacking”. Net result: Muslims were in majority in about 35 of the 126 constituencies in the state before delimitation. Opposition leaders and experts say this number has now come down to around 20.
Speaking to Al Jazeera, Suprakash Talukdar, state secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), said: “Hindu areas of far-flung Muslim-majority seats were merged into constituencies with mixed population, while Muslims of majority seats were dispersed into Hindu-majority areas.”
The Election Commission’s manual for delimitation states that the boundaries should be redrawn in such a way that no area of one constituency, being surrounded by another constituency, becomes cut off from the rest of that constituency. “Proximity, apart from geographical features, better connectivity, means of communication… should be taken into account and areas divided by rivers… forests or ravines… will not be kept in the same constituency,” the manual said.
But former Katigorah MLA Majumdar said this policy has been violated in Assam’s delimitation exercise.
“Across the Barak River, the Hindu areas of Badarpur were merged into Katigorah to make it a majority stronghold,” Majumdar said.
‘Crippled Muslim representation’
Experts and political leaders say the legislative constituency of Hailakandi district in the Muslim-dominated Barak Valley is an example of how the delimitation process has reshaped the landscape of Assam. Overall, the number of legislative seats in Barak Valley, home to more than 1.7 million Bengali-speaking Muslims, dropped from 15 to 13 after delimitation.
Before the 2023 delimitations, three seats in the region – Algapur, Hailakandi, and Katlicherra – were mostly represented by Muslim candidates from the Congress party or the AIUDF.
But now Hindu areas from Algapur and Catlichera were separated and merged into Hailakandi, making it a Hindu seat,” Barak Valley-based political researcher Ahmed Tohidas Zaman told Al Jazeera.
For the first three times, Muslim MLAs have been elected from Naoboicha seat of the state assembly. But under delimitation, its Muslim-majority areas have been “divided into four neighboring Hindu majority constituencies”, Azizur Rahman, who contested the constituency on an AIUDF ticket in 2021, told Al Jazeera.
Now, the Naboicha seat has been reserved for a Hindu candidate from a less privileged caste – many seats in the Parliament of India and state legislatures are traditionally reserved for members of disadvantaged castes and tribes.
Rahman is now contesting the 2026 assembly elections from the Muslim-dominated seat of North Assam. Speaking at a rally, Rehman said, “They (BJP) have crippled Muslim representation.”
Refuting these criticisms, Assam BJP spokesperson Kishore Kumar Upadhyay said on Facebook that the remapping process was not communal and the Election Commission was responsible for it.
Al Jazeera sent a detailed questionnaire to India’s Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, asking about allegations of manipulation in the redrawn limits, but did not receive a response.
‘No point trying for Mia’
In Barpeta constituency, Nabab Mezbahul Alam, a Muslim voter, says the BJP is also not hiding its efforts to reduce the political power of Muslims.
He cited the recent remarks of Assam Cabinet Minister Jayant Mallah Barua. “We have delimited the constituency in such a way that there is no point for a Miya (a derogatory term for Bengali-speaking Muslims) to try to win it this time,” Barua said while campaigning in Barpeta.
Muslims have been elected from Barpeta assembly seat four times before. Now with redrawn boundaries, it is a Hindu-majority constituency, reserved for a Hindu lower caste candidate. Explaining how Barpeta was turned into a Hindu-dominated seat, former Barpeta MLA Abdur Rahim Ahmed told Al Jazeera that Hindu voters from Muslim-dominated constituencies were added. “Muslim voters in Barpeta have now lost their voice,” said Alam, a lawyer. “Now no Muslim can represent us.”
The delimitation exercise was a poll promise for the BJP since the last assembly election in 2021. “Protecting the political rights” of the “indigenous people” – a reference to the Assamese speaking people – was a poll promise for the BJP since the last assembly election in 2021.
In Assam, Bengali-speaking Muslims are often labeled “foreigners” – the state even has special tribunals to hear cases involving people identified this way.
For decades, Assam politics has been shaped by the movement against alleged undocumented immigrants from Bangladesh. These concerns stem from historical migration waves during British rule, when Bengali-speaking Hindu and Muslim communities moved from East Bengal to work in the tea plantations and rice fields of Assam.
However, with the advent of Hindu majoritarianism under the BJP government, religion – rather than language or origin – has become the fundamental political mistake. “We have been politically weakened,” said Uddin, a retired teacher from Katigorah.
Barpeta’s lawyer Alam was more philosophical and metaphorical. “It seems as if you have given us arms, legs and heads to walk and see,” he said, “but you have suppressed our voices.”
