THE POWER COUPLE
In the early 1980s, they were two of the brightest stars of the Assam agitation. Her first novel, Abirata
Yatra, published in 1981 when she was in jail, won the prestigious Assam Sahitya Sabha award. Today, the two ex-Asom Jatiyatabadi Yuva Chatra Parishad members— Dr Rita Chowdhury and Chandra Mohan Patowary— are perhaps the most powerful couple in Assam.
Rita is now director of the National Book Trust while husband Chandra is the unofficial No. 2 in the BJP-led government in Assam, a close confidant of Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal. Rita, meanwhile, organised the first-ever Brahmaputra Literary Festival, the biggest literary show to happen in the Northeast.
A co-partner of this event was the Assam State Publication Board, under the education ministry headed by Himanta Biswa Sarma, chief architect of the BJP’s victory in Assam. The rivalry between Sarma, an ex-Congressman and Patowary, who had joined the AGP after the Assam agitation, is part of state folklore now. Yet, it took just a couple of phone calls from Rita to get Sarma onboard for the BLF.
Patowary is the unofficial no. 2 in the BJP-led government in Assam
“Himanta is the more popular leader with a hotline to the PMO and Amit Shah, but Patowary has Sonowal’s backing,” says political pundit Dileep Chandan. When the NDA government introduced The Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016, in Parliament to grant citizenship to Hindus and other minority community members from neighbouring countries, Patowary was the only Assam minister to convey his reservations to the central leadership. But he also defended the decision in the assembly, when alliance partner and former boss, AGP’s Prafulla Kumar Mahanta, attacked the state government on the issue.