Assam Jatiya Parishad (AJP) president Lurinjyoti Gogoi on Saturday termed Union home minister Amit Shah's recent Assam visit as “vain, frustrating and disappointing" for having "failed to respond" to any of the 11 questions raised by the Opposition regional party "on behalf" of the people of the state.
Gogoi said in Dibrugarh that the AJP had put forward 11 critical questions to Shah vis-à-vis promises made by the ruling BJP during the 2014, 2016, 2019, 2021 and 2024 elections.
"These were not the AJP’s questions — they were the questions of the people of Assam. Yet the Union home minister, despite addressing multiple public meetings in Guwahati, avoided answering a single one," Gogoi said in a statement released by the AJP on Saturday.
Shah, who attended a state BJP core committee meeting soon after his arrival in Guwahati on Thursday evening, attended the inauguration of the new Raj Bhavan wing and addressed the NDA Panchayat Pratinidhi Sammelan in Guwahati on Friday.
Shah had sounded the party's poll bugle for the 2026 Assembly polls in front of elected BJP representatives and leaders in the state. Shah had also endorsed the ongoing eviction drive in the state to free government and forest land, asserting every inch of encroached land will be freed.
The AJP, born out of the anti-CAA movement in 2019, also accused chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma of "committing treason by resettling alleged illegal migrants on Assam's soil after eviction drives".
Referring to Shah's backing of the BJP-led state government's claim of freeing 1,26,000 acres of land from alleged encroachers, who were dubbed by the chief minister as "infiltrators or unknown people", Gogoi said: "Instead of deporting those people according to the constitutional provisions, the chief minister resettled them within Assam using public money. This is nothing short of treason."
Over 5000 families, mostly Bengali-speaking Muslims, have been evicted in the ongoing drive.
Gogoi also alleged that thousands of indigenous and tribal families were also evicted from their land and "indirectly branded as illegal migrants".
