Party Organisation and the Strategic Use of Federal Narratives in Electoral Campaigns: Evidence from Assam, India

In competitive multi-level democracies, how do political parties with different organisational structures construct and deploy representations of their relationship with the Centre during electoral campaigns? This paper addresses that question by shifting attention away from the institutional distribution of authority that has long dominated the study of federalism, and toward the campaign discourse through which federal relationships are actually interpreted, represented, and contested. It conceptualises federalism not as a fixed institutional arrangement but as a repertoire of rhetorical possibilities that parties invoke, reinterpret, or downplay in order to build electoral credibility, signal competence, and mobilise identity. The argument is developed through original fieldwork conducted during the 2024 Indian parliamentary elections in Assam, comparing four parties across two contrasting constituencies. Dhubri is a border constituency shaped by minority concentration, migration politics, and the legacy of the National Register of Citizens (NRC), while Guwahati is an urban, economically central seat defined by infrastructural concerns and bipolar competition. The four parties represent distinct organisational forms: the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a professionalised, centralised catch-all party; the Indian National Congress (INC), a national catch-all party with a mass-party inheritance; the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP), a coalition-dependent regional party; and the All-India United Democratic Front (AIUDF), a personalist, minority-focused formation. The analysis draws on semi-structured interviews with party officials and strategists, systematic analysis of campaign speeches and rallies, and examination of party documents and media coverage. The findings show that parties construct representations of their relationship with the Centre within campaign discourse. These vary systematically with organisational form and constituency context, particularly across settings shaped by citizenship anxieties and urban governance concerns. Across the four parties studied, the BJP presents federal authority as unified and embodied in leadership, the AGP frames it as a mediated resource accessed through coalition, the INC recalibrates between resource access and institutional critique across constituencies, and the AIUDF constructs it defensively around citizenship and minority protection. The paper argues that federalism functions as a conditional rhetorical resource, highlighting how party communication in multi-level systems is shaped by organisational capacity and local political conditions, with implications extending beyond Assam to other federal democracies.