4 min readGuwahatiApr 4, 2026 03:27 PM IST First published on: Apr 4, 2026 at 03:22 PM ISTThe youngest candidate in the fray for the April 9 Assam Assembly polls, Kunki Chowdhury (27), has found herself engaged in a bitter spat with Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma.While campaigning in Dibrugarh on Thursday, Sarma targeted Chowdhury — who is contesting as a nominee of the Congress’s ally Assam Jatiya Parishad (AJP) from the Guwahati Central constituency — and her family. The CM told reporters that Chowdhury’s mother, Sujata Gurung Chowdhury, had allegedly shared “photos of eating beef” on social media. He even showed reporters one such purported photo. He also castigated the senior Chowdhury, who runs an online media portal and often criticises Sarma in her posts, for “openly supporting” Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam.AdvertisementSarma doubled down on his attack on the Chowdhury family on Friday after drawing flak from some quarters. “The girl’s parents not only eat beef, but they also show it to the public and eat. Are we not Hindus? In Assam, there is a law against publicly eating beef and eating beef in places where Hindu people stay. Despite such a strong law, how can her mother eat beef?… Cow is our mother,” he said.Chowdhury has rejected Sarma’s allegations as “baseless and unfounded”. Taking a break between her campaign programmes, she tells The Indian Express that she is surprised by this attention from the CM himself. “This shows that they (BJP) are a bit scared. I’ve been in politics for what? 15 days? And the kind of overwhelming love and support I’ve received has made them feel scared. Because they couldn’t find anything else to say, they went for this,” she says before leaving for a joint public meeting with Assam Congress president Gaurav Gogoi.Chowdhury belongs to a Guwahati family that runs a prominent trust operating several education institutions across Assam, with which she has been associated as a “strategy development partner”.AdvertisementShe says her discussions with the Lurinjyoti Gogoi-led AJP about entering politics began after her return to the state last September, following her master’s in Education Leadership from a London university. She says she was initially hesitant about taking the plunge into electoral politics.“To be honest, I was quite happy doing what I was already doing, being associated with my family’s non-profit society for the last six years. But when I came back after completing my master’s, discussions began between the party (AJP) and my family about contesting elections, and the party specifically wanted me to participate, saying that we need the younger generation to enter politics. I was not convinced at first, honestly. But I realised that the responsibility I had in the education society was very similar to what I would do if I worked here for the constituency on a larger scale,” she says.Chowdhury is the underdog in this high-profile fight from Guwahati Central, a constituency formed following the 2023 delimitation exercise. She is contesting from a party that has never won a seat to date. All four key seats in Guwahati city have been strongholds of the BJP-led NDA since the BJP’s rise to power in the state in 2016. Her BJP rival is 70-year-old Vijay Kumar Gupta, a businessman and long-time BJP organisation man.Yet she has drawn widespread attention as a young poll debutant with higher education degrees, and also because of an online discourse that has framed this face-off as a “contest between an Assamese and a non-Assamese” in a prime urban constituency.you may likeOn his part, Gupta brushes aside this discourse, saying, “My father came to Assam in 1925. I was born and worked here.” He exudes confidence that public support for the BJP will ensure his win.Chowdhury has also distanced herself from it, calling it a “public narrative” and noting she has never mentioned it in her campaign, which has mainly focused on solutions to local governance issues such as urban flooding and parking woes, among other things.On coming in the line of the CM’s attack, she says: “I never expected it. That’s a really low level of politics. Making a personal attack on someone and their family is not something that any respectable leader should do.”