Sarbananda Sonowal

Sarbananda Sonowal (Assamese:সৰ্বানন্দ সোণোৱাল) (born:1962, at Dinjan, Dibrugarh) is an Indian politician who is currently the Union Minister for Sports & Youth Affairs. Recently he has been declared CM candidate for upcoming Assam State assembly election.

He is a Member of Parliament of the 16th Lok Sabha from the Bharatiya Janata Party(BJP) representing Lakhimpur Lok Sabha constituency in Assam, India. He has previously served as the president for BJP Assam Pradesh, and is also a National Executive Member of the party.

Sonowal was the president of the All Assam Students Union from 1992 to 1999. Until January 2011, he was a member of the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) political party but later joined the Bharatiya Janata Party. He is popularly known as a firebrand and dynamic youth politician, also regarded as a Jatiya Nayak of Assam, a title given by the AASU, the oldest student body of the state.

Biographical data

Sarbananda Sonowal resigned from all executive posts within AGP and left the party, due to dissatisfaction with and amongst the senior leadership of the party who were trying to forge an alliance with a party that was against the scrapping of the controversial IMDT Act. On 8 February 2011, Sonowal joined BJP in the presence of the then BJP National President Nitin Gadkari and senior leaders like Varun Gandhi, Vijay Goel, Bijoya Chakravarty and state BJP president Ranjit Dutta. He was immediately appointed as a member of the BJP National Executive and later on the State Spokesperson of the BJP unit, prior to his current assignment to head the state as the new president. On 28 January 2016, BJP Parliamentary Board announced Sarbananda Sonowal as BJP Chief Ministerial candidate of Assam.

People of Assam

The people of Assam inhabit a multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic and multi-religious society. They speak languages that belong to three main language groups: Indo-Aryan, Austroasiatic and Tibeto-Burman. The large number of ethnic and linguistic groups, the population composition and the peopling process in the state has led to it being called an "India in miniature".

Populating Assam and social formations

Geographically Assam contains fertile river valleys surrounded and interspersed by mountains and hills. It is accessible from Tibet in the north (via Bum La, Tse La, Tunga), across the Patkai in the Southeast (via Diphu, Kumjawng, Hpungan, Chaukam, Pangsau, More-Tamu) and from Burma across the Arakan Yoma (via An, Taungup). In the west both the Brahmaputra valley and the Barak valley open widely to the Gangetic plains. Assam has been populated via all these accessible points in the past. It has been estimated that there were eleven major waves and streams of ethnolinguistic migrations across these points over time.