New Guwahati is a general (unreserved) Assembly constituency in Kamrup Metropolitan district of Assam and forms one of the 10 segments of the Guwahati Lok Sabha constituency. Created in 2023 following the recommendations of the Delimitation Commission to redistribute voters more evenly across Assam’s 126 Assembly seats, the constituency was carved out by reorganising parts of Dispur and the earlier Guwahati East seats.
New Guwahati covers the central and eastern parts of Guwahati city, including residential colonies, commercial areas, and some surrounding villages. It has a predominantly urban character with a high density of voters typical of the state capital’s suburbs.
Being a new constituency, New Guwahati has no Assembly electoral history and will vote for the first time in its new identity in the 2026 Assembly elections. It participated, though, in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, in which the BJP led the Congress party by 28,758 votes. BJP’s candidate Bijuli Kalita Medhi polled 78,387 votes, compared to 49,629 votes cast in favour of Congress’s Mira Borthakur Goswami, out of a total of 129,863 valid votes cast in the New Guwahati constituency in that election.
The predecessor, Guwahati East, had a long history. Guwahati East, established in 1967, had voted in 12 Assembly elections. It was seen as a Congress stronghold, with victories in seven elections. The AGP and the BJP held the seat twice each, while the Janata Party won it once in 1978. Congress won the seat in 2006 and 2011, followed by the BJP winning in 2016 and retaining it in 2021.
New Guwahati constituency had 191,447 eligible voters on its final roll for the 2026 Assembly elections, witnessing a marginal reduction from 194,683 in 2024 of 3,236 following the SIR in 2025. The voter turnout was average at 67.93 per cent in 2024, a typical urban malaise across the country due to urban voter apathy towards elections.
Demographics, based on available data largely from the 2011 Census proportions adjusted for the area and delimitation changes, indicate Muslims forming about 18 per cent of the voters, with Hindus forming the significant majority at around 75 per cent overall, Scheduled Castes accounting for about 9 per cent and Scheduled Tribes around 1.5 per cent.
The New Guwahati constituency covers parts of the Kamrup Metropolitan district in the Brahmaputra Valley with flat alluvial plains and gentle undulations towards the south. The terrain supports small trade, services, and some horticulture, but is prone to seasonal flooding in low-lying areas. Livelihoods in New Guwahati depend mainly on government services, trade, small businesses, and the emerging IT and education sectors that have grown rapidly in the Guwahati urban area.
Infrastructure includes excellent road connectivity via National Highway 27, and basic amenities with ongoing developments in urban roads and drainage. Rail access is available at Guwahati Railway Station, which lies 4 km away in the neighbouring constituency of Guwahati Central.
The constituency lies entirely within Guwahati city. Key nearby areas within the city include Dispur (state capital complex) about 5-8 km to the south-east, Beltola about 4-6 km south, and Chandmari about 3-5 km north-west. Key nearby towns and villages outside the immediate urban core include Sonapur (a census town) about 12-15 km to the east and Khetri village area about 20-25 km east.
The New Guwahati constituency, being a high-profile urban seat, is set to witness a keenly watched contest in the 2026 Assam Assembly elections. The BJP has fielded its sitting Samaguri MLA Diplu Ranjan Sarmah as its candidate, while the Congress-led alliance has fielded debutant Santanu Borah, a general secretary of the Congress’s Assam state unit, as its candidate. New Guwahati constituency is all set to witness a multi-cornered election, in which, based on the voting patterns during the 2024 parliamentary election and a substantial lead for the BJP suggest that the BJP would go to the 2026 Assembly elections with a definite edge in this seat.
(Ajay Jha)
