GUWAHATI: Suspense continues to grow as the counting is still underway for the Bodoland Territorial Council, BTC election. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has till the fifth round of counting managed to lead in 8 seats. The BTC election was held in two phases on December 7 and December 10.
It is to be mentioned that in the 2015 BTC election, BJP had won only one seat but this time the saffron party has managed to gain a fair amount of success. The leads show an increase in the vote share of BJP and will help them wrest extra seats in the upcoming Assam Assembly Election 2021.
The BJP National General Secretary Dilip Saikia told News Live, “In 10 seats of Udalguri BJP is performing well and BPF won’t even get a single seat in Udalguri this time where they won 9 seats in the last election.”
“In first-round, BJP was not scoring good enough in all 5 constituencies, but in the second round, the game changed. In the 10 council seats of Udalguri, I think BJP will win at least 8 seats and UPPL will win the other 2 seats,” said Dilip Saikia.
On alliance with UPPL for the Assam Assembly Election 2021 the party National General Secretary said, “Our state committee will discuss the alliance with UPPL in later stage. But there are chances of coalition with the UPPL, we cannot deny that. On the other hand, there is no chance of an alliance with BPF,” Saikia added.
“We are focusing on winning 18 out of 26 seats in Kokrajhar, Chirang, Baksa and Udalguri,” Dilip Saikia further said.
In most of the seats, the BJP had a straight fight with the UPPL and the BPF. Mostly the fights are for the first and second position.
If we look at the current trend it seems that it might turn into a hung assembly in which case the BJP might support the UPPL on December 15.
Senior BJP leaders expressed their intentions that they are going to form the government even if they need to support a local party and in such case, the local party would be Pramod Boro led United Peoples’ Party Liberal(UPPL).
On the other hand, the Congress-AIUDF and Naba Kumar Sarania’s Gana Suraksha Party(GSP) are leading on one seat each.
The BTC election was scheduled for April 4, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic it got postponed indefinitely. In the first phase of voting that was held on December 7, over 77 percent polling was reported and in the second phase, 78.8 percent polling was reported. A total of 23,87,422 voters in the two phases exercised their franchise to elect their representatives for the local council.
