New Delhi: On Wednesday (March 26), Assam witnessed a rare occurrence. A sizable number of journalists hit the streets of Guwahati and some other towns in Upper Assam, wearing black badges and shouting slogans demanding press freedom and the right of a reporter to ask questions to the government of the day.
The immediate trigger for that street protest was the arrest of journalist Dilwar Hussain Mozumder, associated with a Guwahati-based news portal and YouTube channel, The CrossCurrent.
Mozumder is also the assistant general secretary of the Guwahati Press Club (GPC). Established around 1971-72 by a set of senior journalists, the GPC is today an active platform with a strength of over 1,000 members, most of whom are young, working journalists.
That an office-bearer of such a press body was thrown behind bars while carrying out his routine job was the spark for several journalists to join the protest.
Reflecting that sentiment, GPC president Susmita Goswami and general secretary Sanjay Ray issued a statement that if Mozumder was not released by the end of the day, the GPC would continue its protest.
Around noon on March 26, dozens of slogan-shouting reporters, who included several women, were joined by a number of senior editors of Assamese news outfits to form a human chain from the GPC premises in Guwahati’s Digali Pukhuri to march towards the Pan Bazar police station where Mozumder was kept since March 25 afternoon.
The hullabaloo coincided with the Indian Premier League match being held at the city’s Barsapara stadium, located just a few kilometres away from the spot where journalists were seen confronting Assam police personnel while being stopped from proceeding towards the police station.
Chief minister Sarma is also the state’s home minister.
By the time the sun set on March 26, news spread about Mozumder being granted bail by a local court simply because the Assam police failed to provide any supporting proof of a non-bailable offence it had mounted against the journalist. Cheers went up citing journalists’ unity.
By the time his family was to furnish the bail requirements, the court closed, prompting police to send Mozumder to the Guwahati jail for the night.
On March 27, when the situation eased up, the state police quietly re-arrested Mozumder, this time on the complaint filed by the Assam Co-operative Apex Bank’s managing director, Dambaru Saikia.
Mozumder’s story is far from over, but what one must note is also that the one-of-a-kind incident noted in Assam’s recent journalistic history throws up an unfolding political story. Rather, an unease, or a sense of insecurity, that chief minister Sarma is seen to be suffering from since early this year.
But before going there, let’s also contextualise which assignment Mozumder was covering for The CrossCurrent on the afternoon of March 25, the one because of which he ended up behind bars.
Also read: Press Bodies Raise Alarm at Detention and Arrest of Assam Journalist Who Questioned Bank Official
The immediate context
The Pan Bazar police station summoned Mozumder on the afternoon of March 25 while he was covering a protest held by the youth wing of an opposition party, the Assam Jatiya Parishad (AJP).
The protest was held in front of a government-affiliated cooperative bank of which chief minister Sarma is director.
AJP supporters were shouting slogans and raising banners alleging a multi-crore recruitment scam at the bank, and pointed fingers at its chairman and the managing director for alleged wrongdoing.
Who are the bank’s chairman and its managing director?
The BJP MLA for Sarupathar, Biswajit Phukan, is its chairman. Set up in the 1950s as part of Assam’s strong co-operative movement, the Assam Co-operative Apex Bank, with its headquarters located in the city’s prime Pan Bazar area, is considered an institution of note to have been set up locally.
Over the decades, the bank opened dozens of branches across the north-eastern state and helped strengthen several co-operative societies by financing them, also generating employment even in rural areas.
However, for the last couple of years, the bank has been in the news for several allegations of serious financial irregularities, including the current ones.
Phukan, a first time MLA, is seen as extremely close to Sarma. He was in the local news this past February for his wife, Prapti Thakur, being named principal of the government-owned Sarupathar College, which is within his assembly constituency, located in the state’s Golaghat district.
A NortheastNow report on her appointment to the post had then stated that “allegations of political influence and violation of appointment rules have sparked widespread criticism from student and youth bodies.”
The bank’s managing director is Dambaru Saikia, also widely seen in the state’s journalistic circles as ‘the chief minister’s man’.
Saikia’s association with the bank, though, is long.
Also from the Golaghat district, Saikia began his long innings at the bank from its rural department during the Congress era and climbed up the ranks to become managing director.
His association with Sarma goes back to the chief minister’s Congress days – when Sarma, as a Congress MLA, had tried unsuccessfully to elect himself as the bank’s director in the early 2000s.
Mozumder’s hours-long detention on March 25, followed by his arrest post-midnight on March 26, was at the behest of Saikia’s complaint to the Pan Bazar police station.
Though Saikia could be seen clearly in a video clip, released by The CrossCurrent, asking Mozumder to “come upstairs” to his office to record his statement on the allegations of financial irregularities at the bank, he later complained to the police that Mozumder not only trespassed into the premises but also tried to “steal” important files.
An additional complaint was filed against the journalist for allegedly hurting the sentiments of a security guard at the bank who belongs to the Bodo community. Police said he had filed the complaint online.
Late on March 25, Mozumder, who has also been reporting on the alleged scam for some time now, was arrested on the guard’s complaint, under the non-bailable Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.
Curiously, hours later, at the local court, the Assam police failed to provide any proof of that serious allegation made by the guard against the journalist, leading to his bail on the matter.
A political story
At the March 26 protest site, a senior Assamese editor openly spelt out something that the journalist fraternity in Assam, particularly during the Sarma era, are not quite known for.
The journalist, Pranay Bordoloi, a prominent name in Assamese electronic news media, told channels that he had heard that Mozumder had become the victim of an ongoing tussle between the recently-named BJP state president Dilip Saikia and Sarma.
Unlike Sarma, Saikia has come through the ranks of the BJP and its ideological fountainhead, the RSS. Photo: X/@DilipSaikia4BJP.
“If that is the case, it is unfortunate,” said Bordoloi.
Another senior journalist, Afrida Hussain, told a news channel that when she contacted the BJP president soon after Mozumder was detained on March 25, highlighting that the journalist was on duty covering an opposition-led protest, “He at once said that he could inform the concerned police commissioner so that the journalist could be released.”
Dilip Saikia was contacted by the woman journalist because of what he has been saying recently in public about press freedom.
On March 16, at a press meet in Jorhat, Saikia had told reporters that they must not shy away from making constructive criticism of his party and its government; he stated that the press is not an enemy of any political party. He also said the state’s media fraternity need not always speak in favour of the BJP.
His utterances came in contrast to what Sarma’s stated position about the press has been lately. Recently, the chief minister had not only told a local media outfit that it must only do positive stories on the BJP if it wants to get higher TRPs but also if it wants to be batted for in the assembly.
Earlier this month, Saikia for the first time also spoke exclusively to a reporter at The CrossCurrent, stating on camera that he watches the media outfit’s YouTube channel, which often questions his party and its government in its reports.
“At times, I feel bad about it, but it is also correct that the press must be able to question us … you are doing good work,” he said, smilingly.
It must also be mentioned here that on March 18, while delivering a forceful address in the Lok Sabha, Saikia had “raised serious concerns” over what he said was “the unchecked growth of low-standard digital and portal news channels”, accused them of “spreading misinformation, distorting facts and [undermining] democratic values”, and called for “immediate regulatory measures”.
Still, the recent considerate utterances towards media freedom in the Assamese press have raised Saikia’s stock among the state’s journalist fraternity; his mild and accommodative nature in public life is now often contrasted with Sarma’s increasingly aggressive, impertinent and intimidating tendencies towards journalists and media organisations.
Sarma’s attitude to the local press is also often juxtaposed with that of earlier chief ministers like Sarbanada Sonowal and Tarun Gogoi, who were never vindictive towards a reporter for posing a difficult question or for reporting against their government.
Who is Dilip Saikia?
Unlike Sarma, Saikia has come through the ranks within the BJP and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Since his student days, Saikia has been associated with the RSS’s youth wing, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad; has also served as a BJP state secretary.
In 2022, when J.P. Nadda took over as the party’s national president, Saikia was included in his team as national general secretary, replacing Ram Madhav, the party’s point man for the northeast until then.
When it was time for the 2019 general elections, Saikia was launched on the party ticket from Assam’s Mangaldoi parliamentary constituency. He turned out to be a giant-slayer, defeating, by a huge margin, Bhubaneswar Kalita, who was then a senior member of the Congress.
In 2024, after delimitation in Assam, Saikia shifted to the Darrang-Udalguri seat, which he won having replaced the BJP’s senior leader Ramen Deka from that area, who was soon dispatched to Chhattisgarh as governor.
Saikia’s importance in the party was raised by a few notches this January, when he was elected unopposed as the state’s party president.
Since then, Saikia has been in the news for reaching out to senior members of the BJP who have been peeved at Sarma’s style of functioning. This includes former minister of state for railways in the Modi government, Rajen Gohain, who had won the Nagaon parliamentary seat for the party four times in a row but was denied a ticket in 2024 – believed to be at Sarma’s behest.
The Nagaon seat ultimately went to the Congress, which some with the BJP claim was due to the intra-party fight.
Therefore, such a conciliatory outreach by Saikia is being read in the state’s political circles as an effort at placating those leaders who are particularly disappointed with the BJP’s central leadership for allowing a wide section of former Congress leaders seen close to Sarma to wrest the political space while “the real BJP leaders” have been pushed to the margins.
It is learnt that they have also raised concern over public response to news reports of alleged corruption and land-grabbing by Sarma and his immediate family.
The Wire, along with The CrossCurrent, had also filed a set of reports based on state government data.
Who could be better than Saikia, with his deep and long ideological connection to the RSS-BJP, to bridge the divide within the state BJP before Assam goes to polls in early 2026?
Sarma-Saikia tussle growing?
The primacy given to Saikia by the central leadership had led the opposition Congress, including the party’s deputy leader in the Lok Sabha Gaurav Gogoi, to ask openly whether Sarma would be replaced by Saikia as its next chief ministerial candidate.
Gogoi’s 2024 win from the Jorhat parliamentary constituency is viewed both within the Congress and the BJP as the biggest recent political defeat for Sarma and his cohort.
The Sarma camp failed to ensure Gogoi’s electoral loss which, in turn, has helped him emerge from the image of being his father’s son in Assam, to being a strong contender for the chief minister’s post in the coming future.
Meanwhile Sarma, having succeeded in cultivating the image of a generous maternal uncle (ma-ma) among Assamese voters since 2021, is embarking on fortifying it.
The result of it is: If he is seen chiding policemen for coming in between him and members of public somewhere, in some other places he is seen playing the modern Robin Hood, by delivering the long-pending demand of some women voters for certain facilities within hours. News about such express deliveries are often pushed on social media through an army of handles so that they go viral in the state.
Sarma seems to be banking upon this public image to take on the BJP state president too. Recently, a former Congress MLA brought to the BJP by Sarma was criticised widely across the Assamese media for behaving rudely with opposition leaders within the assembly and having rushed towards the opposition benches to physically attack an MLA.
On sensing the pulse of the Assamese voters, Rupjyoti Kurmi, the BJP MLA from Mariani, was immediately asked by Saikia to apologise to the public. However, what we saw next was Sarma coming to the aid of Kurmi, attempting to lighten his unparliamentary behaviour – which was noted in the Assam assembly perhaps for the first time – by placing him as a representative of the backward tea garden community.
While some from the community belong to the other backward classes (OBC), some fall under the Scheduled Tribe (ST) category.
In the process of presenting Kurmi as a representative of the tea tribe (Adivasi), Sarma, however, forgot that there are several better representatives of leaders from the community within his own party in terms of maintaining decorum in public life, including former minister of state in the Modi government, Rameshwar Teli.
That Sarma played the ST card in the Kurmi episode is a strange coincidence, not just with the recent charges mounted by his police force against journalist Dilwar Hussain Mozumder, but also in a case brought by a BJP leader seen close to him against Congress state spokesperson Reetam Singh. Singh is yet to get bail in that case.
This January, when Saikia took over the party’s mantle, Sarma on X congratulated ‘Dilip da’ (though he is younger to Sarma by some years). He also said that Saikia would not contest the 2026 assembly elections.
Now, upon looking back, that pronouncement of Sarma about Saikia being not a competitor to him seems quite interesting.
