Nagaon bypoll: Congress fights to hold seat as AIUDF's Ajmal enters the fray

Guwahati: The by-election to the Nagaon Lok Sabha constituency in central Assam is being held on Tuesday, with counting and results scheduled for October 9. Fifteen candidates are contesting, but the race is widely expected to narrow to a three-cornered fight involving the Congress, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF).

The bypoll was necessitated by the resignation of two-time Congress MP Pradyut Bordoloi, who left the party and joined the BJP ahead of the April 2026 Assembly election. Mr. Bordoloi had won the seat in 2019 and 2024, ending a BJP winning run in Nagaon that stretched from 1999 to 2014.

The Congress has fielded former MLA Sibamoni Bora. The BJP's candidate is Devasish Sharma, who served as Nagaon's District Commissioner and District Election Officer until he resigned from the civil service on September 3. The AIUDF, which had announced in August that former All Assam Minority Students' Union president Rejaul Karim Sarkar would be its candidate, later replaced him with party chief and sitting MLA Mohammed Badruddin Ajmal — a change the Congress says has complicated its calculations.

Assam Congress president Gaurav Gogoi described Mr. Ajmal's candidature as a BJP move aimed at splitting the Opposition vote. The claim has not been independently verified, and neither the BJP nor the AIUDF has responded publicly to that specific allegation. The Congress and the AIUDF have contested against each other in the past and do not share a formal alliance in the State.

For the Congress, the contest is being read as a test of its ability to retain a seat it has held for two consecutive terms while facing a possible division in opposition votes. The BJP's State unit has said a victory in Nagaon would build momentum for the National Democratic Alliance ahead of the 2031 Assembly election, in which it hopes to win all 126 seats.

The Nagaon parliamentary seat covers eight Assembly segments — five in Nagaon district and three in adjoining Morigaon district. Following the 2023 delimitation exercise, more than 55% of its roughly 19 lakh voters are Muslim, a demographic that has featured prominently in the campaign narratives of the major parties. The AIUDF draws much of its support from Bengali-speaking and Bengal-origin Muslim voters, though observers describe its influence in minority-dominated areas as having weakened in recent years.

Analysts caution against treating any religious or linguistic community as a single voting bloc. Electoral behaviour in Assam, as elsewhere, varies by locality, class, candidate and local concerns. Religious demography is one factor among several, alongside questions of development, employment, language and identity that shape outcomes.

Besides the three main contenders, twelve other candidates are in the fray, representing smaller parties and contesting as Independents.

By-elections are frequently treated as a mid-term signal of the standing of both the ruling party and the Opposition, and this one is no exception. They can also produce results that differ markedly from general election outcomes, because turnout, candidate profiles and local alliances often vary from one contest to the next.

For the AIUDF, the outcome will indicate whether its core support base remains intact or continues to erode, while for the BJP it will test the organisational strength of a State unit that has expanded its footprint in Assam over the past decade.

The result on October 9 will be watched closely in Guwahati and Delhi for what it reveals about the balance between the NDA and a fragmented Opposition in Assam, and about how voters in one of the State's most closely watched constituencies are weighing the competing claims made during the campaign.