Silchar: Union home minister Amit Shah on Friday promised to make Assam “flood-free” within five years if BJP returns to power in the 2026 assembly electionsHe said this while addressing a rally at Natanpur in Cachar district after launching the Centre’s ₹6,839-crore Vibrant Villages Programme–II.
“In the first term, we curbed infiltration. In the second term, we reclaimed vast tracts of encroached land. In the next five years, we will work to make Assam flood-free,” Shah said, pitching floods as the next major focus for the party in the state.Shah launched a sharp attack on Congress, alleging that previous govts kept Assam’s borders open to enable illegal immigration. “Infiltrators usurped the jobs of Assam’s youth, the food grains meant for the poor and the land belonging to villages. Congress kept the borders open to infiltrators in a calculated move to change the state’s demographic structure,” he said.Praising the BJP-led state govt under chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, Shah said, “The work done by the Himanta Biswa Sarma govt to free lakhs of acres of land from encroachers is commendable,” and made an election-linked pledge on deportation. “Give our govt another term and I promise you we will detect and deport every single infiltrator from Assam,” he added.Claiming BJP had delivered in a decade what Congress could not in five decades, Shah cited infrastructure expansion as a key achievement. “In the last five years alone, under chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma’s leadership, 14 km of roads have been constructed every day in Assam — the highest rate of road construction in the country during that period. A total of 24,000 km of roads have been upgraded. Hundreds of bridges, including four major ones, have been built,” he said.Shah said Assam has become the healthcare hub of the the northeast, is seeing a new wave of industrialisation, and that insurgency has been effectively brought to an end under the BJP.Urging voters to back BJP in 2026, Shah reiterated the party’s focus on floods, a recurring crisis that affects lakhs of people across Assam each year.
