Phukan: Home again

Guwahati, April 8: Few argue when Bhrigu Kumar Phukan says he is an ideologue. Ironically, there are very few takers of his ideology even in the party he had formed along with Prafulla Kumar Mahanta in 1985.

It was not without reason that when Phukan returned to his political roots on March 27 — to be subsequently nominated AGP candidate for the Guwahati seat— the question doing the rounds in the party headquarters was: “Will he stay?”

The doubt stems from Phukan’s track record of not being comfortable in any political party for too long.

He first left the AGP in 1990 along with several other leaders, including the present party president Brindaban Goswami, and floated the Natun Asom Gana Parishad. The arrangement was short as calls from both within and outside for merger with the parent body intensified. In 1994, he returned to the AGP only to leave it again in 1997.

Phukan, however, stoutly defends himself for being in and out of the party, saying he was a victim of his principled stand in the AGP. The reason for his leaving the party was personal, not “political opportunism”, he said.

Several of his former colleagues were pushed out of the party because of “our unwillingness to compromise with then party leader Prafulla Kumar Mahanta’s corruption”, he added.

Once out of the AGP for the second time, Phukan floated another regional party, the Jatiya Sanmilani, and contested the 2001 Assembly elections. However, after a brief stint with the sanmilani, Phukan jumped onto the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) bandwagon. It was a different matter that the student-leader-turned-politician calls himself a regionalist to the core.

Speculation on his political career started again when Goswami assumed the reins of the AGP after unseating Mahanta at the party’s triennial convention in Tezpur in January. The new AGP chief followed up his victory with a call to former colleagues to return to the party.

Trouble, in the meantime, was brewing for former Lok Sabha Speaker P.A. Sangma within the NCP. He lost the NCP to the Sharad Pawar group and quickly hitched his wagon to Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamul Congress to form the yet-to-be recognised Nationalist Trinamul Congress. Phukan packed his bags and returned to the AGP.

“The fact that Phukan responded to Goswami’s call almost immediately goes to show that his heart had always remained with the regional party,” said one of his close aides. “Phukan has not returned when the party was on a high. The situation actually is quite the opposite and its enough proof that he is not an opportunist,” he added.

With a new man at the helm of affairs, his bete noire Mahanta sidelined and the party not in the best of health, the second homecoming could be the final port of call for Phukan.