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Assam health minister slams Congress for keeping Assam’s history away from the ‘national discourse’.

New Delhi: Two days after he sparked a controversy with his controversial comments about cancer, Assam health minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said he had wasted 23 years of his political life in the Congress.

Speaking at a book release event in the capital Friday, Sarma, a former Congress leader, said he was pleasantly surprised when he learnt that Assam was given high priority by the RSS and the BJP. “After knowing this, I felt like I wasted 23 years of my political life being in the Congress,” he added.

He also made a scathing attack on the grand old party for its “failure” to recognise the people of Assam. He alleged that Congress had deliberately kept the history of Assam out of the national discourse.

“If you ask Sonia Gandhi who is Gopinath Bordoloi — the former chief minister of Assam who was conferred with Bharat Ratna posthumously by the Vajpayee government — she won’t know. She only knows Badruddin Ajmal (of AIUDF),” Sarma said.

He also blamed the Congress for “diluting the nationalist fervour” in Assam and claimed this was that prompted him to join the BJP.

“In the 2006 Assam assembly election, there was a conscious decision taken by the Congress not to ally with AIUDF, the party led by Badruddin Ajmal,” he said.

“Digvijaya Singh was the in-charge of the state and it was decided to work on the nationalist agenda for Assam. That’s why you saw the party winning elections,” Sarma added.

Talking about the BJP victory in the state, he said the people have given the party a mandate to free Assam from foreigners.

“When we formed governments in Jammu & Kashmir and Assam and lost in Bihar, people said that we are winning on the periphery but losing in northern India, a stronghold of the BJP. That was actually the transformation of the BJP into a pan-Indian party,” Sarma said. “Now, you see we have won the biggest state —Uttar Pradesh.”

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