The Fortress and the Ballot: Pranab Doley's Fight for Bokakhat

An Activist Enters the Field

Assam heads into assembly elections in 2026, and in Bokakhat — the constituency wrapped around Kaziranga National Park, wedged between the Karbi Hills and the Brahmaputra river — the contest is being framed by its challenger as something more than a routine electoral fight. Pranab Doley, a land and conservation-rights activist who has spent more than a decade organising communities around the park, is standing again after losing the 2021 assembly election despite backing from the Congress-led alliance. Speaking to Asad Ashraf on the Nous Podcast, Doley described his campaign not as a bid for office in the conventional sense but as an attempt to give political voice to people he says have been left out of Assam's development story: tea-garden workers, flood-affected farmers, and families living on the margins of a national park whose fame has not translated into local prosperity.

Doley's central claim is that Bokakhat, despite sitting beside one of India's most celebrated conservation sites and a growing tourism economy, remains starved of basic infrastructure. He described a constituency split between a flood-prone half along the Brahmaputra and a tea-garden belt with a large Adivasi population, where he said roughly nine in ten residents live in conditions of extreme poverty, without adequate healthcare, agricultural support, roads or schools. He was also critical of the sitting MLA, Atul Bora — president of the Asom Gana Parishad, a partner in the ruling NDA alliance in Assam — accusing him of two terms in office with little to show for it and no meaningful relationship with the communities he represents.

A Contested Model of Conservation

Much of the conversation turned on Kaziranga itself, and on what Doley called the "fortress model" of conservation — a phrase he used to describe an approach that treats forest protection as requiring the removal of the people who live closest to it. He argued that the park's tiger and rhino protection regime has imported enforcement practices he likened to the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, restricting activities communities long relied on for their livelihoods and cultural life inside and around the reserve.

Pressed by Ashraf on whether this framing undersold Kaziranga's genuine record as one of India's foremost conservation successes — it holds the world's largest population of one-horned rhinoceroses — Doley did not dispute the achievement, but disputed who gets credit for it. He pointed to livestock herders whose cattle are periodically lost to tigers as an example of communities absorbing the cost of coexistence, and argued that this contribution has gone unrecognised even as authority over the landscape has shifted toward what he called a conservation lobby modelled on approaches he views as "pro-capital" and "anti-people." "There can be no Kaziranga" without the people who protect it, he told Ashraf, warning that the same fortress approach was being replicated elsewhere in India, citing the struggle of the Jenu Kuruba, a particularly vulnerable tribal group, for habitat rights inside Nagarhole Tiger Reserve in Karnataka.

Tourism, Big Capital, and Who Gets Displaced

Doley connected conservation policy to a second, newer pressure: a rapidly commercialising tourism economy around Kaziranga. He said that as recently as a decade ago, local communities held some stake in the tourism trade built around the park, but that this has been supplanted by large hospitality groups — he named Hyatt, the Taj group and Mahindra among companies now building properties in the area. That expansion, he argued, is happening on land that was previously used by farming and tea-garden communities, converting what could have been a locally rooted tourism economy into what he called a "one-way road" that extracts from local people and resources rather than benefiting them.

This is also where he located the sharpest rise in human-wildlife conflict. As agricultural land and what he described as animal corridors are absorbed by tourism infrastructure, he said pressure on both farmland and wildlife habitat has intensified, pushing conflict between people and animals to what he called record levels — with communities left to absorb the losses largely on their own, in the absence of any functioning compensation or rehabilitation framework.

Evictions, Land, and the Question of Who Is Blamed

Ashraf pressed Doley on an apparent tension in his position: he opposes the eviction of families the government describes as encroachers on forest land, while also acknowledging that communities living close to forests inevitably generate some degree of human-animal conflict. Doley rejected the framing itself. He argued that many of the people being evicted from land the state calls encroached are not degrading forest but cultivating it — growing crops, trees and horticultural produce on land they have occupied, often for generations, without formal title. "They are removing people who are growing forests," he said, arguing that the land freed up through such evictions is not being returned to wilderness but handed to corporations, naming Adani, Ambani, Vedanta and Ramdev's enterprises as beneficiaries of land transfers in the Karbi Anglong and Dima Hasao hill districts, the riverine tracts around Kaziranga, and the coal- and oil-bearing districts of Upper Assam.

He was direct about the communal dimension of eviction drives elsewhere in the state, telling Ashraf that Muslim communities have been disproportionately targeted in eviction campaigns across Assam, particularly in the state's lower districts, and that many of the families affected lost their original land to erosion from the Brahmaputra before resettling elsewhere. He described the state government's approach — mass demolitions he compared to the style associated with Uttar Pradesh's Yogi Adityanath — as a deliberate strategy by the Bharatiya Janata Party to polarise Assam's electorate along religious lines rather than resolve genuine questions of landlessness and citizenship. He invoked the constitutional right to life and livelihood under Article 21 as the standard such drives were failing to meet, while also acknowledging that landlessness itself was, in his telling, chiefly a failure of successive governments to provide affected families with formal settlement and land entitlement.

Tribal Rights, the Sixth Schedule, and the NRC

Doley also addressed the fragmented and sometimes competing character of Assam's tribal politics — a landscape that includes the Bodo and Karbi communities, among others, each with distinct territorial and political demands. He argued that despite these differences, constitutional protections such as the Sixth Schedule and the state's designated tribal belts and blocks are being eroded across communities alike, reduced, in his words, to symbolic status, and suggested this shared experience was drawing tribal groups together against the ruling party rather than pitting them against each other, notwithstanding what he described as efforts by BJP-aligned factions to stoke division.

On the National Register of Citizens, the exercise that produced a contested list of more than 1.9 million people excluded from Assam's citizenship rolls, Doley said his own constituency was among the least directly affected. But he called the exercise a political failure the state government has been unwilling to own, criticising the continued use of detention centres as inhumane and arguing that cross-border migration should be addressed through diplomacy with Bangladesh rather than what he characterised as the criminalisation of ordinary residents.

An Activist's Odds Against the Machine

Ashraf's closing questions turned to the durability of Doley's political project itself, noting that prominent activists-turned-candidates elsewhere in India — he cited Irom Sharmila and Medha Patkar — have struggled to convert movement credibility into electoral wins. Doley pointed to money as the central obstacle he expects to face, citing the Assam government's Orunodoi cash-transfer scheme, under which he said the state distributed sums as large as ₹25,000 to women shortly before the election, as a deliberate effort to consolidate votes through direct payments rather than governance. "We don't want to be a commodity in this democracy," he said, describing his campaign as one built on unpaid volunteers and village-level participation rather than the financial and organisational machinery available to established parties, and characterising the opposition alliance arrayed against him locally as a late, hollow arrangement rather than a genuine coalition.

Whether that argument translates into votes will be tested when Assam goes to the polls. But the conversation captured something broader than one constituency's race: a dispute over who Kaziranga's conservation success actually belongs to, and whether the economic and ecological order being built around it — hotel chains, tightened forest policing, and land reallocated to industry — is compatible with the communities whose daily presence, on Doley's account, has kept the park's wildlife alive in the first place.